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!