![]() ![]() Selected media: Unique Des Moines homes: Lustron history (Axios Des Moines, 2023) * Why people thought steel houses were a good idea (VOX, 2022) * A father & daughter's obsession with a series of peculiar houses (WGN Chicago, 2022) * Lustron homes were a thing of the future, but became a part of the past (WOI Local 5, 2021) * The Lustron Home: One of the most ambitious attempts at large-scale housing production (Construction Physics, 2021) * Guides: How to Site a New Lustron * How to Put a Lustron Together * How to Take a Lustron Apart Still unaccounted for in North Carolina: according to Lustron expert Tom Fetters, there is a third Lustron in Nashville NC, #2127 four more Lustrons in Wilmington. Two of the houses are still preserved on the Base, 23 were destroyed in 2006, one was moved, and remaining 34 were destroyed in 2007.Īccording to Lustron Corporation documents prepared in late 1949, thirty-nine Lustron Homes were sold within the state of North Carolina. Info on the largest concentration of Lustrons in America, now gone. ![]() Photo of a Lustron house with all the parts laid out. Lustrons came on a truck as a kit and local builders put them together. The first house for public sale was #18 in St. Demonstration House #1 was built in New York City (at 56th street, now destroyed) and house #2 in Milwaukee WI. ![]() Lustrons were given individual serial numbers. Seldom, surely, has a good idea come so close to realization, and been so decisively slugged." Lustron also made a smaller Newport model in both two- and three-bedroom versions. Seldom has there occurred a like mixture of idealism, greed, efficiency, stupidity, potential social good, and political evil. Koch later reflected, "When I leaf back through the records-plans, brochures, contracts, the transcript of Congressional autopsies-I admit to the confusion of feelings between the way we regarded it then. Strandland hired architect and MIT professor Carl Koch, later of TechBuilt fame to design the next generation of Lustrons. There was a three-bedroom model along with the two-bedroom Westchester. Other companies producing factory housing at the time. ![]() A few years and only about 3,000 Lustrons later, the company was repossessed by the RFC in February of 1950 and declared bankruptcy a number of months later. Strandland went back to the government for two more loans totaling another $25 million. To manufacture the ten tons of steel that went into each two-bedroom Lustron, Strandland bought a 25-acre factory lot in Columbus OH which had been used during WWII to build fighter planes. Strandland was not an architect, but his idea that metal neighborhoods could be prefabricated and swiftly built persuaded the President's Commission into signing the loan 15 minutes before its emergency powers expired, and the "Lustron" was born. Lustron Map 2016 crowdsourced through Yahoo and Facebook groups Angie Boesch's comprehensive list and Steven Kinney, creator ofįuture Input: You - a fan of these quirky structures!Ĭarl Strandland, above, asked President Truman's Reconstruction Finance Committee (RFC) in the summer of 1946 for $15 million worth of emergency loans to build small houses for GIs returning from the war effort. and co-author with Tom Fetters of a revised The Lustron Home (forthcoming).Īdditional input: Charles Mintz, photographer and documentarian of Prefabricated Housing Experiment (2001, 2006 paperback) Jean Fetters Connor, creator of Preservation Durham Tom Fetters, author of the seminal The Lustron Home: The History of a Postwar * anything else related to Lustron? Let us know!ĭistinctively Lustron is a project initiated by NC/USModernist and: Preservation North Carolina View Lustron Map in a larger window (last updated: September 2023)Ģ025 = LUSTRONS AT 75 AND GOING FOR MORE!Ī Nationwide Commemoration of the Court-Ordered Bankruptcy Filing in 1950ĭo you have information about your local preservation group's: ![]()
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