Why people thought steel houses were a good idea

Video Statistics and Information

Video
Captions Word Cloud
Reddit Comments

that's so cool! Man the research the developers did is amazing.

👍︎︎ 6 👤︎︎ u/wutsthuhdeal 📅︎︎ Apr 21 2022 🗫︎ replies

This is so cool!

👍︎︎ 3 👤︎︎ u/Vasilissa93 📅︎︎ Apr 21 2022 🗫︎ replies

Really really cool! I have so many questions though, like:

  • How well insulated are they, and how do they stand up to very cold winters or very hot summers?
  • How much would an all-steel construction (and all the friggin magnets used to hang up pictures and clocks etc) affect our modern-day electronics?
  • How does their structural integrity compare to wooden-framed houses?
👍︎︎ 2 👤︎︎ u/Vijidalicia 📅︎︎ Apr 21 2022 🗫︎ replies

Interesting video. There's a few of those around Des Moines, IA.

👍︎︎ 1 👤︎︎ u/Crack_Mansion_Butler 📅︎︎ Apr 21 2022 🗫︎ replies

Fuck i know it was a failed idea at the time, but now it could be the re-invent the wheel thing that gets houses to people who can’t afford it. BUT, I bet that if someone wants to get it going, people are going to complain and protest.

👍︎︎ 1 👤︎︎ u/TheCrimsonChariot 📅︎︎ Apr 21 2022 🗫︎ replies

That was fascinating, although I have to wonder how well heating coming from the ceiling would work.

Seems to me like putting it under the floor like steam heat would make much more sense.

👍︎︎ 1 👤︎︎ u/PugnaciousPangolin 📅︎︎ Apr 21 2022 🗫︎ replies

They all look the same. It's weird because I thought the devs made it all up but they were at some point planning on becoming the norm for real.

👍︎︎ 1 👤︎︎ u/boyfriend_tree 📅︎︎ Jun 10 2022 🗫︎ replies
Captions
In June 1947, Architectural Forum chose a unique cover star. The Lustron was a steel frame home with steel panels and a steel roof. And a lot of them are still around today. It was a new idea of home for post-World War II America. It was the future of housing, homes made in a factory and sent around the country with an instruction manual for every single piece. Steel on the outside. Steel on the inside. And they made house after house after house until 1950, when, just 3 years after that cover shot the future of housing became a footnote. But the failure of this house isn’t just an oddity in homebuilding. It’s a story of post-war optimism, the limits of technology and a testing ground for how the government and private industry could or couldn't work together. In 1940, a typical house would have had a wood frame and wood and plaster walls. A lot do today. When you change that to a steel frame and steel panels things get weird. Cool! What? Most panels in a Lustron home are porcelain enamel-covered steel. When we started treating the house more like a car than a house, things went better. The finish on that is different than the finish on this and the same is true of some other parts of the house. This is the durable kind of thing that's held the test of time. And then that is... I think those tend to get scruffy. Imagine a steel panel. In the factory they melted glass and fused it to the steel creating porcelain enamel, a surprisingly durable, creamy surface that showed up in Lustron homes and could be tinted colors: maize yellow, surf blue, desert tan, and dove gray. Though it was meant to look like Spanish tile the roof was porcelain enameled steel too. It covered a ceiling-mounted radiant heating system. Lustron printed instructions for, and made, all the plumbing too. Oh cool... oh look! What, what, what? Look, it says Lustron corporation on there. Oh, oh! That's awesome. I should get my cell phone and have you take a picture for me because I can't— I'm not tall enough. Lustron Corporation, Columbus, Ohio. Local Union number 189. Oh my gosh. Built ins were also a required feature. Like this passthrough between the kitchen and dining room. So the house is about a thousand square feet which is small, by modern standards. But in all the houses that were built in the emerging suburbs in the 50s and 60s were generally about this size and one bathroom typically. This house is the Westchester 2 bedroom plan But there were other configurations as well. When Life Magazine published a pre-production Lustron ad in 1948 thousands of people clipped the coupon in the lower right corner to get a free booklet. Why was this the house America has been waiting for? And what went wrong? In 1947, Lustron was perfectly situated between two larger trends. After World War II, millions of returning GIs needed housing due to the Great Depression and construction restrictions during the war. In 1946, Congress declared housing a national emergency. That intersected with funding trends, private venture capital wouldn’t become mainstream until the late 1940s and 1950s. But a post-Depression agency, the Reconstruction Finance Corporation existed to fund depressed sectors of the economy. The “RFC” had already experimented with funding weird prefabricated home ideas Like this concrete building. An inventor and builder named Carl Strandlund who’d previously worked with porcelain enamel on buildings like gas stations and restaurants saw his opening in the timeline. By 1947, he’d snagged a $12,500,000 loan to build out the Lustron factory in Columbus Ohio a building that today is a designer shoe warehouse. Warehouse. Designer shoe warehouse warehouse. Yeah. Life published that hit ad with the coupon and Popular Mechanics was soon cooing over “how porcelain skin protects prefab.” But by 1948, the house that America was talking about was running into problems. The most obvious impediment, the steel, wasn’t the only factor. Yes, steel is heavy. A Lustron home needed 12 tons. That weight did prevent Lustrons from being shipped West of the Rockies but custom trailers like this one helped move the steel. Lustron also benefited by getting the lion’s share of the government allocation of steel for prefab homes. However, by 1948, Time Magazine was asking the obvious question: Did people want to live in steel houses? Especially ones with rigid floorplans that were hard to modify. Controlling every element of production also contributed to price hikes and delays. The Lustron factory made nearly every part of the house. For one example, they bought a really expensive press to make bathtubs. But theirs was 5 feet and a half inch long instead of the standard 5 feet. So they couldn't buy their own tubs or sell to others. That half inch was an expensive mistake that never paid off. All this not only increased prices, but made those prices non-standard. By January 1949, Carl Strandlund was in Life Magazine promoting the home as a revolution but prices had ballooned up to $10,000. That was thousands more than the early ambition and a lot of money for GIs. That didn’t stack up well against other new homes that were larger and more traditional. Prices also varied from place to place. Look at the costs in Indiana, North Carolina, and Pennsylvania. Localization made it tougher in other ways too. Some local codes made it impossible to even build a steel home, like in Chicago. Mass developments like this one, in Quantico, in Virginia, were part of the plan, but they ended up being rare. Even Lustron’s funding became a hindrance. As further funding requests ticked up to between $35 million and $40 million Lustron attracted press attention quickly for failing to hit goals and requiring Government money. The 1947 cover model was suddenly in question by May of 1949. Scandals that later came to light, like a paid-for advertorial by Senator Joseph McCarthy, didn’t help. But just having the public eye on the company’s performance was probably the greatest challenge. By 1950, Lustron’s funding was recalled and the company entered bankruptcy. Over just 2 years, they never sold more than 300 homes a month. 2.1 miles, or about 3.37 kilometers from the Designer Shoe Warehouse Warehouse is the Whitehall Historical Society's headquarters which was moved there in 2003 on the site of a former volleyball court. Half of it is set up as a home and the other half is set up as meeting and display space. This garage contains our restroom and a kitchen. And then the front half of it is workshop and storage. We don't have a lot of resources. So when it came time for us to try to find a headquarters I knew that the house was for sale on eBay. I was convinced that we could do this but I just decided that it was something we could handle by taking it apart and putting it back together again. So I approached the owner of the house and asked if they would donate it to us which they did. This house, it was in London, Ohio. These are pictures of us taking the house apart over in London. as we progressed here, it was just getting to be a big open space inside. We had a dedication day where we had a groundbreaking ceremony and we had a special cake with the Lustron emblem on it. This is the manual. Let me bring this over here. And we used it for both assembling and disassembling the house. Lustron had delivered 2,600 homes around the country but fell far short of their ambitions. They had failed. But they aren't forgotten. Thanks for visiting with me in this Lustron home. There were a couple of books that were indispensable to the research for this project. So, if you want to nerd out more about these homes, check those out. I'll put links to them in the description. Also, I really want to thank the commenter who came up with the idea for this video. Yea, it was just a comment saying that Lustron homes were interesting and everybody at Vox agreed. So yea, thanks for that and if there are any other pieces of interesting or forgotten architecture that you think we should cover in a future video let us know!
Info
Channel: Vox
Views: 2,345,100
Rating: undefined out of 5
Keywords: Vox.com, architectural history, architecture, explain, explainer, fabrication, vox, Architecture, history, lustron, prefab, prefabricated homes, interior design, steel, strandlund, tiny homes, steel house, steel homes, national housing emergency, housing shortage, pre-fabricated homes, prefabricated construction, architecture design, lustron homes, lustron house, lustron home repair, lustron company ohio, pre-fabricated sheds
Id: jnxjRXwC1no
Channel Id: undefined
Length: 10min 54sec (654 seconds)
Published: Tue Mar 29 2022
Related Videos
Note
Please note that this website is currently a work in progress! Lots of interesting data and statistics to come.