Homes of the Future

The Review of Massachusetts Institute of Technology, contemplating U. S. housing, last week pictured the "houses of the future." Previewer was John Ely Burchard 2nd, of Boston, professional investigator of new methods and materials for building. He finds "the home of the poor man ... an economic paradox," pays no attention to the home of the rich man "who can afford to remodel anything to his personal desire."

Left is the house of "Mr. John Q. Averageman who comes to the city to work every day, who, around his detached house, has a little land on which he grows a tomato and a nasturtium and who faithfully keeps up with the nearly latest model of refrigerator, radio, and Buick."

During the next 25 or 50 years, Mr. Averageman's house, according to Mr. Burchard, will lose its front porch which will become an enclosed sun parlor secluded at the back of the house with other living rooms. On the noisy street side of the house will be the kitchen and other service rooms.

The dining room is currently "the most inefficient room in the house and its space is used only about 12% of the day." Mr. Burchard suggests it as a good place to keep the radio.

Baths, wash basins and toilets should be in separate rooms, thus multiplying the effective uses of their services. And "we have to do something soon about the slipperiness of our bath tubs which are a thousand times as dangerous to life & limb per entry as railroad travel and two hundred times as dangerous as going around in airplanes."

Use of coal, gas or oil for furnace fuel will depend on costs. But where coal furnaces persist, the coal must be kept in dustproof bins and fed into the furnace by mechanical stokers. Household heat from a community central heating system is remote, except for new, custom-built towns. Each house will have its own incinerator for waste paper.

Lighting "is as obsolete as it well can be. ... There is scarcely a lamp fixture in your house that is not designed as though it were made to hold a candle. We are going to take gas-filled tubes and arrange them all around our rooms in rows of three or four at the cornice level and regulate intensity by the number of tubes we turn on."

The kitchen "is the most modern room in the houses today and the best developed." But stoves must be cooler to work with, and provided with ventilator hoods. It is "entirely conceivable that we will have a calidator along with our refrigerator and that the grocery boy will bring-hot meals every day packed in the hot equivalent of dry ice. Our eggs, canned soups, coffee, and other minor additions we can make on the little electric devices."

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