Home in Cellophane

Three months ago General Electric Co. invited every architect, engineer, draftsman and designer in the U. S. to submit plans for two types of houses in a $21,000 prize contest. Result: The greatest single collection of architects' drawings (2,100) assembled since Depression logjammed the housing industry. Last week the drawings, suspended from wires like baby's diapers on a laundry line, were put on display for a jury in General Electric's Manhattan building.

The jury of eleven (architects, an engineer, a realtor, and a professional woman) inspected each plan for a small house ($6,000 to $7,500) for a family of three, a medium-sized house ($10,000 to $20,000) for a family of four. They awarded the grand prize ($2,500) in the first group to a drawing of a modern, flat-roofed home by Hays & Simpson of Cleveland, the grand prize in the second group to a California ranch-type house by Paul Schweikher and Theodore Warren Lamb of Chicago. General Electric plans to turn these drawings and ten other prize-winners over to real estate dealers to build 400 houses, for which G. E. will presumably supply electrical equipment.

Meanwhile four blocks from the General Electric Building there was being proudly displayed last week a squat, flat-roofed prefabricated house which may eventually put the builders of General Electric's prize houses out of business. Since mid-February as many as a thousand persons a day have crowded into the ninth floor corridors of Grand Central Palace to view this latest stepchild of U.S. mass production.

After six years of experiment and expansion, American Houses, Inc. was ready to put its prefabricated house into limited production April 1, when a $5,000 unit wrapped in Cellophane and tied with a red ribbon will go on display at John Wanamaker's store. The company was promising its first customers delivery by June 1. National Houses, Inc., a competitor, announced that it hoped to have 10,000 prefabricated houses to sell during the next twelvemonth. Though it will be months, perhaps years, before U. S. travelers begin to see prefabricated houses springing up in any numbers along the roadsides, the design and equipment of such houses was by last week sufficiently complete to give the public some idea of what its grandchildren may live in.

American Houses, Inc. describes its product as "a machine in which to live." The four-room unit on display cost $3,800 complete, including erection within 100 miles of New York. Shipped by truck from the company's distributing depot, the parts are put together in two weeks under the expert eye of a company superintendent. A local building crew sinks a shallow concrete foundation (there is no cellar), erects a steel frame. Then the walls, consisting of 4-ft.-by-10-ft. panels, are bolted together with long strips of aluminum which give a modernistic effect to the exterior. The panels, 2 1/4in. thick, consist of two layers of mixed cement and asbestos. Between the layers is an insulating substance which looks like burnt cork and is termite-proof, fireproof. The outside of the house is a light grey, needs no paint. Extra rooms can be added from time to time by "unbuttoning" one outside wall.

The house is entered through the living room (16 ft. by 12 ft.). The walls are papered in parchment, stenciled over with oil paint which can be washed with soap & water. Set in the wall is an electric clock and beneath it a radio. Off the living room are two bedrooms, small but well planned, with comparatively ample closet space. All rooms are air-conditioned. The bathroom is equipped with wall-hung toilet and wash basin which simplify housecleaning. The basin is big enough to bathe a baby in. Over the toilet is a cabinet with such books as Getting the Most out of Life in this House.

Housewives will like the kitchen, a rectangular room free of sharp projections, handles, gadgets. Down one side runs a Monel-Metal topped counter in which is set the stove (gas or electric), the refrigerator, the sink. Above the counter are enameled metal cabinets stored with canned and packaged goods which come with the house. "We want you to have two days' food when you move in." says the company. Next to the kitchen, neatly embedded in a thick column, are the furnace (coal, gas, oil or electric), the plumbing inlets and outlets, the air-conditioner.

The prefabricated house is by no means the cheapest on the market. The famed wood-frame Hodgson house, originated 43 years ago by Boston's E. F. Hodgson, can be bought for considerably less. Sears, Roebuck & Co. will put a bungalow together for $2,500. But the prefabricated house builders hope to meet this competition by making their product twice as good as the cheapest house. They offer at least three things which Hodgson and Sears, Roebuck do not: termite-proof steel frames, airconditioning, fireproof materials. The prefabricated house is also earthquake-proof, can be blown over only by a 135-mi. gale.

Designer of American Houses' prefabricated unit is also its board chairman. Architect Robert W. McLaughlin Jr. had already achieved fashionable success as a designer of rich men's homes when he built his first prefabricated house for Jeddo-Highland Coal Co. at Hazelton, Pa. in 1932. When Depression pointed up the need for low-cost housing, he persuaded some of his Princeton classmates to help him set up a company. Meantime Architect Howard T. Fisher of Chicago, son of President Taft's Secretary of the Interior, was putting together General Houses, Inc. And three months ago Architect William Van Alen, who designed Manhattan's Chrysler Building, had become sufficiently interested in prefabricated houses to accept a directorship in a third venture, National Houses, Inc.

Two things becloud the future of these companies: 1) sales resistance to machine-made homes, 2) opposition from organized labor. The powerful building trades' unions glower darkly at houses that can be put up with fewer plasterers, carpenters, roofers, painters and plumbers. Probable result: prefabricated houses will be pushed and developed from outside the building trades by big electrical corporations, plumbing, steel, cement, and wallboard companies who see a fat, new market for their wares.

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