Art: Walling in the Outdoors

Since war’s end, the U.S. has learned to build houses with the same mass-production hustle with which it pops out cars and toasters. All the conditions were ripe for the postwar revolution in housing. There was the huge pent-up demand of the war, plus the requirements of more than twelve million marriages, 21 million babies in the last seven years. The money to build was also there; savings were at an alltime high and the Federal Government’s easy credit permitted an ex-G.I. to buy a $10,000 house with no down payment and 25 years to pay.

The Administration wisely avoided one big mistake: in 1946 it refused to go along with the plans of such bureaucrats as former Housing Chief Wilson Wyatt (see NATIONAL AFFAIRS) to 1) strait-jacket the housing industry with rigid controls and 2) put the Government into the housing business with a vast program for prefabricated houses. (Most prefabs. with or without Government support, have had small success.)

Mass Producers. Private industry jumped to do the enormous job. In seven years, 6,400,000 housing units went up, equaling the total of the preceding 18 years. Mass-production builders like Long Island’s William Levitt, Miami’s Tom Coogan and Los Angeles’ Fritz Burns raised whole new cities by working out new techniques, standardizing’ doors and windows and dozens of other parts, and putting them together on the site.

They were not the only innovators. The custom builders (i.e., the higher-priced contractors who tailor a house to the tastes of individual buyers) borrowed tricks from the mass builders. Instead of putting up only a handful of houses a year, as they had before the war, many put up scores at a time.

Mass Experimenters. The greatest architectural experimenters of all were the builders of modern houses. In the ’20s and ’30s, most modern houses were little more than white plastered blocks with flat roofs, glass-brick walls and skillfully built-in ugliness. Today, modern houses from Maine to Florida and California are built to please the eye. Comparatively, the number of such houses being built is small, only about 210,000 since war’s end and only about 10% of the 1,100,000 houses being built this year. Nevertheless, they have influenced the traditional styles of the mass builders, who followed the modernists in eliminating basements, installing wall-sized picture windows, boldly experimenting with interiors.

The modern houses shown on the following pages cost from $15,000 to $100,000. In a few years, barring inflation, similar houses may cost less. But so far as many architects are concerned, price is not quite as important as spaciousness and freedom. With its glass walls, the successful modern house “encloses” the whole outdoors. Said the owner of a glassy palace outside Portland, Ore.: “A rainstorm used to depress us. Now it’s a show.”