Architects for Defense

After a year of bench-warming, some of the U.S.'s star architects were finally at work last week on defense housing. In Pittsburgh's suburb of New Kensington, not far from Aluminum Co. of America's sprawling plant, builders got started on a set of emergency houses designed by famed Architect Walter Gropius of Harvard and his co-Bauhaeusler Marcel Breuer. They differed as much from the first crop of Government houses for defense workers as a Frank Lloyd Wright design does from a suburban contractor's.

Gropius and Breuer got the assignment this month, spent 36 hours of uninterrupted frenzy at the drafting board. Their 250 family are uncrowded, fresh in design, improved and begadgeted like many a more expensive house. (Defense houses may not cost more than an average of $3,500.) They are grouped around open lawns, safely separate from streets and highways, and partitioned to privacy by walled-in porches.

In the two-storied houses the architects have made the upper walls almost solidly of glass. All have horizontal slats extending from the roof, shrewdly angled to let in the sun in Janary but exclude it in July.

Gropius' New Kensington project is only the most notable of a flock of new defense houses being built by the country's best architects. Already complete and occupied are the sombrero-eaved cottages which Los Angeles' Richard J. Neutra designed for Avion Village, near Dallas. Cranbrook's Eliel Saarinen is working on designs for 200 defense units in Detroit; George Howe has an assignment at Middletown, Pa. On the next largest project of all is San Francisco's able William W. Wurster, who drew up the site plan for 1,692 units for Mare Island (Calif.) naval-base workers. Builders got started on Wurster's houses last month.

Many of these big-name projects are frankly experimental. Each architect was encouraged to cut fancy figures with 15 to 25 of his houses, and Washington housers hoped to find some gold-medal ideas among them; but most of the houses were designed on more conventional lines. Government officials were leary of prefabrication which got little chance to show its merits in defense housing's inept first year. But they have finally realized that speed and low cost are persuasive claims, and from 10 to 20% of defense housing is now prefabricated.

In defense housing's first year, FWA (in charge of building) turned over almost all assignments to the Public Building Administration (PBA), which had its own architects ready to hand, left independent architects out in the cold. Cried famed Modern Architect William Lescaze: "Experts are winning this war. Architects are experts. ... At the present moment a great number of architects . . . are made to feel that their usefulness to their country is infinitely smaller than that of an 18-year-old apprentice in a flying school."

PBA's experts knew more about post offices and customs houses than small dwellings. PBA was slow, clumsy, encrusted with prejudices. In twelve months it built 7,063 of the 32,681 houses assigned it. (In the same period the Navy, building its own emergency houses, nearly finished a $50 million, 15,352-unit program.) Prodded for such failures, FWAdministrator John M. Carmody finally revamped his housing program, and to the noisy joy of the profession, began calling in private architects for help.

There was still plenty for them to do, for defense housing had just begun. By Aug. 1, only 25,954 dwelling units had been completed, 52,511 others contracted for. In addition, the President has called on Congress for $300 million to build 125,000 more units in the coming year.

Despite their slow start, defense-housing officials hope to finish their program with a plan. Said Vice President Wallace at a housing conference in June: "The better the job our housing agencies do now . . . the greater will be their opportunities to do the socially right kind of housing job for the nation in the post-defense period."

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