Prefab Past

An early and successful example of prefabrication was the House by Mail kit sold by Sears, Roebuck & Co. from 1908 to 1940. Offering a wide variety of traditional styles, Sears was able to position the home as another product in its catalogue, eventually selling about 100,000 units. The modern prefab house, however, has been an object of fascination for architects since World War I. As a logical extension of other massproduced forms, the house of the future appeared destined for such an approach. Designs such as Buckminster Fuller’s Dymaxion House (1927)—a futuristic, round metal structure whose parts shipped inside its central mast—represented one extreme of rethinking the traditional home, while General Houses Corporation offered a more conventional-looking but all-steel house in 1932. And during World War II, more than 150,000 Quonset huts, semicylindrical structures formed by a ribbed metal roof, were built to house American military troops.