A Tempest on a Tin Can

Anybody see the real estate section in Saturday’s Washington Post? There was an interesting article about the voyage of a Lustron house. Not familiar with Lustrons? They were porcelain enameled prefab houses pitched as the answer to the housing crisis after WWII. These little dynamos (average size 1,000 square feet) arrived in boxes on the back of a truck, and were billed as do-it-yourself assembly jobs. While that may or may not have been true for the average homeowner, the houses were fairly popular, and about 2,700 were built before the company went bankrupt. But I digress. The article discussed the fight to preserve a Lustron that originally stood on a very average street corner in Alexandria, Virginia. It was offered as a donation to the county, at which point the local community chimed in on whether or not the house was worth saving. (While the house was donated, its disassembly and storage would cost the county some $20,000.) And here’s where the story get’s really interesting. New York’s Museum of Modern Art wanted to put the building on display as part of its exhibit, “Home Delivery: Fabricating the Modern Dwelling,” but it would cost some $60,000 to ship the building from the Virginia storage facility where it was being housed to MoMA. Some interesting community dialogues ensued. My favorite quote comes from a local resident opposed to the project, who said, “I don’t think it’s that historic. In the grand scheme of things, Paul Revere never rode here, George Washington never slept here. There’s no ‘there’ there.” Hmmm, seems like a pretty alarming house-saving standard to me, but I wonder what you think. What makes a building worth saving? Is there a magic formula? Is it dependant on the architect, or the house’s age? Does a quirky, innovative 1949 design—where so few were manufactured to begin with—qualify? Read the Post’s story here
You can also find out more about Lustrons in my article, “The Lustron Labyrinth,” which appeared in the Mar/April 2007 OHJ.

Tags: Lustron house, The Washington Post, buildings worth saving, editor blogs

Comment by Phil on November 3, 2008 at 10:28pm: Demetra -this totally doesn't answer your question about what makes a house historically important for preservation, but here is a link to an article that shows a modern use for Lustron houses: environmental disorders
http://apnews.myway.com/article/20081020/D93UFL202.html
I have always found the Lustron concept interesting, and bookmarked this article recently when I stumbled on it.

Comment by Demetra on November 3, 2008 at 11:05pm: Thanks Phil, this is interesting. It makes perfect sense that a porcelain enameled steel house would be a haven for someone with environmental sensitivities. Maybe we can drum up a new marketing campaign for those old Lustrons!
Best -Demetra

Comment by John Rodgers on November 3, 2008 at 11:30pm: I think this comes up for discussion far too often...people seem to always see the historic integrity of buildings and communities elsewhere, but never within their own community. I think key architectural elements are worth saving, historically significant owners/visitors,historic gardens and grounds, etc etc.

The community I currently work with has over 200 years of the most incredible history I've seen--first african american mayor in the country, 2nd successful C-section in the world, more mafia per capita during brohibition than the city of Chicago, largest family-owned department store in the country (established 1867, stayed in business until 1984 when Wal-mart opened), site of one of the only night-time civil war battles, site of one of the first anti-walmart legal battles (which was one, and held walmart off for several years), etc etc.

The list goes on and on, yet when the topic comes up about whether a building is worth saving or tearing down, it's always the same answer--- "that old thing, that's just the old such and such grocery, or bakery, etc etc. Tear it down and build something nice there." I'm not sure what it is about us as humans that we can see the beauty and the history everywhere except where you grow up---its as if we become desensitized to the uniqueness and architectural integrity of these buildings.

It's sad that more often than not, 100+ years of history (withstanding wars, hurricanes, tornadoes,floods, etc) can be erased in a couple of hours by one narrow-minded idiot and a bulldozer.

Comment by jane on November 9, 2008 at 11:36am: What makes a building worth saving?
Its context --- not as a place where history happened, but as a living piece of how we built, how we lived, and what we dreamed, and maybe how we wish to live today.
The Lustron house is a fascinating piece of engineering, as well as emblematic of the spaces, public and private, we thought essential for a family, and the hopes we had for the new 'modern' technology. It shows us who we were without an interpreter between us and the house. A Lustron House, shiny, small, right on the ground, complete, is right there for us to see. Once we take it down, we can only imagine. It's not visceral.

The problem is that many people have no language for looking at a building. We tend to talk about architecture in terms of the people and events ("Washington slept here"), sometimes in terms of decoration or lack thereof ("gingerbread", "brutalism").
We don't talk about mass, form, proportion, balance - how they work, why, and to what end.
We are largely ignorant of how climate and technology shape our buildings. We don't notice how people actually use space.

If what I have written here is too academic, try the archive: sundaydrivemerrimackvalley.blogspot.com. It holds some of the columns I wrote on vernacular architecture from 1989 to1999.

Comment by Rob Tucher on November 13, 2008 at 11:54am: Technically speaking, historic is defined as a combination of an age of 50 years + and its relative rarity. I think it is a no-brainer. If only 2700 were made, and attrition would have to have taken some, then what's left is an extremely small sampling of one facet of our nation's housing stock. That makes it eligible for inclusion on the National Register of Historic Places as an historically significant architecture type and then worth saving. Who slept there is an entirely different and separate issue.

Comment by Jay on January 26, 2009 at 11:10pm: This sounds like a charming and ingenious way to approach housing problems. I wish I could have seen the exhibited Lustron.

You know, you can't learn from history if history is obliterated.