This is Part 3 of a long, rambling series on innovative efforts to house people...Part 4 if you count the post on Bowlus and Airstream trailers* that kicked off the whole thing. Those early streamlined trailers appeared during the Great Depression and were inspired by the forms of modern aircraft, but after World War II, architects and planners looked instead to the industrial production lines that made thousands of aircraft (and tanks and jeeps) for the war effort. They reasoned that the same efficiencies and standardized parts could be applied to providing housing for the returning millions of US military veterans who had served overseas in the war.
Early after the war, this focus on using industrial processes and standardized parts took a couple of different directions. In one, architects reasoned that houses reflecting the latest thinking on space and materials could be made of largely standard parts, but in a way that permitted a wide variety of different designs. The modern preference for plans provided open living space with few internal divisions, as well as large glass areas opening onto the great outdoors, led to an architecture with floor-to-ceiling glazing, and long spans supported by steel trusses or beams...
This was the approach taken by Charles and Ray Eames, a husband and wife team of industrial designers, in their LA house and studio. Their project was one of around two dozen houses featured in the Case Study program organized in the mid-Forties by publisher John Entenza and featured in his magazine, Arts & Architecture. Also known as Case Study #8, the Eames house was one of five Case Study projects that were eventually sited on a bluff in the Pacific Palisades neighborhood. The glassy, steel-framed rectangles of the elevations reflect the open simplicity of the plan, and the use of black framing to set off primary colors against larger zones of white plaster recalls the pre-war paintings of Piet Mondrian.
The interior view shows how the designers dissolved the visual barrier between the outdoors and interior space, and how they made use of low-cost commercial steel trusses and metal decking to support the roof. Along with the use of "off-the-shelf" steel parts, the house provided a place to test the Eames duo's ideas about using new materials in furniture, including the molded plywood chairs that appeared the same year as their house and studio, 1949. Their house and studio design appeared in the May 1949 issue of Arts & Architecture, and Charles and Ray moved in that December.
The carport view below on the Bailey's north side shows how the house opens to the front and rear, with floor to ceiling glass and nearly transparent living space. In this view the reflecting pool is filled, and provides emphasis to the adjacent entry path. Despite the original goal of the Case Study program to provide affordable modernity to young families, the houses are now treated as prized artifacts with prices to match; one recently sold for over $3 million. In 2013, ten of the houses in the Case Study series were listed in the National Register of Historic Places.
The era of these Case Study houses coincided with the explosive growth of Los Angeles and the phenomenon of suburban sprawl across the USA. In what was understood at the time as an effort to provide a piece of the American Dream to Everyman on a small plot of land, developers took over agricultural land around major cities, and highways moved out to serve new "bedroom communities" (most with more bedrooms than community), along with gas stations and what would soon be called shopping centers. Fast food entered our language not long after it entered our diets. Few took time to ponder what the implications might be for energy consumption, wild land, or wildlife. The surge of postwar optimism was reflected in the Interstate Highway System, begun in 1956 when President Eisenhower signed the Federal Aid Highway Act, and was echoed (not without a bit of irony) in artist Ed Ruscha's paintings of gas stations in the next decade...
The enameled steel panels that formed many of those gas stations had first appeared in the 1930s during the Streamline Moderne period, and in the Midwest, Carl Strandlund had developed a prefabricated version before the war that he thought might provide a format for housing after the war ended...
He hired two Chicago architects, Roy Burton Blass and Morris Beckman, and they came up with 3 models of small ranch house designs with up to 3 bedrooms. The houses were structured in steel, with prefabricated steel stud walls that were shipped to construction sites on special trucks. Interior as well as exterior wall finishes were enameled metal; with enameled metal tile roofs the new houses would be fireproof and largely maintenance free. Strandlund obtained a $12.5 million loan from a Federal agency, the Reconstruction Finance Corp., and his Lustron Corporation began production of the houses in 1948 at a repurposed Curtiss-Wright aircraft factory in Columbus, Ohio.
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Lustron houses featured lots of built-in features like storage shelves and cabinets, easily-cleaned enameled metal bathroom surfaces, and radiant heating at the ceiling level. The latter might have worked a bit better as a floor-mounted system. Also, because Lustron began production before insulated glazing had become widely available, there were some complaints about window performance. Those who took delivery of a Lustron were generally happy, though...
The angled, truss-shaped porch support shown below was a distinctive Lustron feature, and included a built-in downspout for drainage...
The houses sold for $8,500 to $9,500, and though they were a bit more pricey than conventional construction, orders piled up at the 234 franchised Lustron dealers. Strandlund had aimed to manufacture 100 houses per day, and identified the break-even point at 50 houses. Production peaked, however, at just 26 houses a day, and at that rate Lustron was losing money, customers were facing long waits for deliveries, and Reconstruction Finance was getting nervous about repayment of that big loan...
Because of the lag in getting production up to speed, and also because of pressure placed on politicians by the building interests and unions representing conventional construction, the government moved quickly to foreclose on Lustron's loan, and the company folded after a year in manufacturing. In that time, though, Lustron produced and delivered 2,680 houses, of which about 1,000 remain in use. In the realm of all-steel construction, only multi-family efforts delivered more housing, and not so soon after the war. During this same period, French architect Jean Prouvé traveled an intriguingly similar path, producing a prototype prefab gas station design...
These early initiatives might have had more success had society framed the shortage of housing as the kind of crisis that it now presents in many 21st century American cities, and adopted the same level of commitment and dedication that the US applied to winning World War II. As it turned out, the Case Study and Lustron projects, and their French equivalents by Jean Prouvé, attracted attention to the housing problem, but ran into obstacles presented by business as usual, politics as usual, and a kind of "not invented here" mindset...
*Footnotes: We found an informative essay on the Lustron housing effort, in "Lustron, The All Steel House" with photos and drawings, from Sept. 4, 2015, at www.handeyesupply.com.
Part 3 of this series, entitled "Kit Houses: A Solution to Overpriced Housing?", appeared here on Jan. 15, 2023, with a look at a 1920s Sears kit house and some modern Scandinavian equivalents. For Part 2 of this long-interrupted series on mobile, modular, prefabricated and kit houses, see "Mobile vs. Prefab: If It Can't Go Anywhere Can It At Least Look Like Home?", in our archives for August 3, 2017. In that post, we visited modular and prefab housing exhibits in Chicago and New York, reported on an innovative reconfiguring of a mobile home by CU students here in Boulder, and also showed a factory-built house in Finland. And we looked at mobile homes in "When Mobile Homes Were Really Mobile: Bowlus and Airstream", posted July 30, 2017.
Photo Credits
Top photo, plan drawings + 2nd & 4th photo: eamesfoundation.org
3rd photo: Wikimedia
5th photo (Case Study #21): Niels Wouter
6th photo: Wikimedia
Standard Station: Artist: Ed Ruscha; featured on Los Angles County Museum of Art website
Gulf Station Photo: pinterest.com
9th photo thru 12th (Lustron houses in Iowa): Dr. Marcus Nashelsky.
13th (Prouvé gas station): Wikimedia
14th & 15th (Prouvé house:): wikiarquitectura.com
Bottom (Lustron house in Kansas): Dr. Marcus Nashelsky; we want to thank him for his Lustron research.
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