Throughout architectural history, exhibit houses have showcased and shaped new visions, optimistically making them accessible to everyone. Modernism, inspired by industrial development, united corporations, architects and entrepreneurs seeking a new domestic architecture, its production and its distribution. After the great wars, new materials, construction methods and products flooded the market offering innovative conveniences and an architecture based not on local vernacular but on what had become architects’ global pursuit, in the west, an international style based on modernist dogma.
Prefabrication while remaining marginally applied became a tool for representing this new post-war domesticity in the USA coalescing European modernism with North American values promoting the single family dwelling as a tool for personal freedom and emancipation. A tract house developed by architect Roger Lee, well-known for his application of modern principles, for the East Bay Homebuilders Association’s entry at the 1952 California International Home Show displayed this conceptual union through its modern tenants: the modular grid, horizontal continuity between indoor and infinite outdoor space. A trade association, an architect and a builder assembled to form a formidable team to put forward an essay on housing.
The tract house was a modest timber structure based on a 4-foot grid widely regarded, at the time, as a way of attaining efficient modular coordination based on material and product manufacturing dimensions. The plan was divided clearly into served and service spaces, another link to modernism, and the prototype included a fully equipped kitchen and bathroom with all modern conveniences. Brick walls and concrete floors anchored the house to its generic site while horizontal brickwork composed the fireplace wall as the focal point of a completely open relationship between kitchen and living area. A covered courtyard adjacent to the kitchen delineated by deep roof overhangs protected a children’s play area.
The house offered a glimpse into what the modern house could look like including its simple straightforward lines, new building materials and technological components. The house would become a streamlined production from design to assembly; a commodity that would benefit from industrialization as other products had. Time has shown us that although popular with a progressives the modern house seemed strangely unfamiliar and marginalized by a relatively conservative marketplace.
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| plan and photograph from House and Home - may 1952 |
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