Prefabrication's Chance

Prefabrication, the unwanted and long-ailing stepchild of the housing industry, had been adopted by his Uncle Sam last week and handed a fattening diet of Government funds ($135,789,730 in orders since Jan. 20 alone). The infant is now one of the lustiest war babies, may grow so big on war profits that it will be able to go on thriving after the war.

For ten years, prefabrication's No. 1 need has been a mass market in which to demonstrate the housing economies of mass-production factory methods. Now the Government is shoveling out millions which will create just such a market, expects the first six months of 1942 to see 42,000 prefabs built-four times as many as in the whole decade of the '30s. This year 20% of all new houses may be prefabs-against less than 1% in the 1930-40 period, 3 1/2% last year. Close to 100 factories, from Revere, Mass, to Fresno, Calif.", are now busy turning out floor, wall and roof panels on their assembly lines. At Norfolk, Va. a single plant will turn out 5,000 houses at an expected rate of 60 a day.

Said the ARCHITECTURAL FORUM : "The parallel between what is happening to the infant prefab industry in 1942 and what happened to the infant automobile industry in 1916, '17 and '18 is inescapable. World War I created a mass demand for cars and trucks which made possible the economics of mass production that, in turn, created a mass market for postwar sales. World War II is repeating the first part of this process with housing, may bring the second as surely as the chicken follows the egg."

Washington housing planners are minimizing the word "prefabricated" in talking about the 45,708 units they have ordered since Jan. 20. Instead they are playing up the word "demountable," explaining that after the war boom these houses can be taken down and moved away. If all of them continue to be such eyesores as the hivelike 977-unit colony completed last fall at Vallejo, Calif, (see cut], they never will be missed.

Now that the war has supplied a mass market, prefabrication faces a brand-new problem in whether it can ever live down the drabness of its first mass production.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.