Prefabrication experiments - 208 - master industrialists - 09 - «Up from the potato fields» Time Magazine – July 3,1950 – William J Levitt

The American congress declared a national housing emergency in 1946. Five million housing units were needed to serve accumulating domestic demand, migrations and returning GIs. Through the Gi Bill and the Federal Housing Authority, policymakers encouraged home ownership and private builders by providing guaranteed loans for up to 95% of a home’s value, 100% for returning war veterans. As a result, a greater number of housing units were produced in the two years that immediately followed the war than in the two decades that preceded it. The support and collaboration with private industry fuelled experimentation and many prefab icons were established in this context. Gropius and Wachsmann’s General Panel Packaged House, inventor Carlo Strandlund’s Lustron houses and even Fuller’s Wichita house promoted the idea of industrialization to increase housing production. While many argued for architectural or material innovation, some building promoters turned to more traditional models and employed mass production as an aggressive tract housing development tool.  

William J. Levitt, a name often tied to suburbia in the USA, adopted onsite assembly lines to sprout small, affordable and standardized dwellings. The strategy famously applied at Levittown near Hicksville Long Island produced a 1200 bedroom community. The process was simple: bundles of normalized materials were delivered to the site of each house where tradesmen and machines reproduced the 25 by 32 ft houses in an operatic process. Task division and repetition supplied houses at a rate of one house every 45 minutes. 10 600 were built over a period of three years. In an article published in Time, July 3, 1950 the author flaunted the partnership between industry and government. The government, through guaranteed loans, had spent little or no money to get the houses built. Contrary to the government owned factories in the USSR, private promoters in the USA harbored all the risk. Levitt and Sons inc branded the small homes as containing all the modern conveniences marketing a dwelling as well as a lifestyle and the democratized goal of home ownership. Applying the principles of mass production, Levitt was able to offer a consistent unit for 7900$. A returning GI could become a homeowner without the burden of debt while paying reasonable installments and forgetting the horrors of war. 

Onsite assembly line and normalized production