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July 18, 1996

Unusual ceramic houses result in off-beat study for UPB professor

Vincent Kohler, chair of the humanities department at Pitt's Bradford campus (UPB), firmly believes in keeping an open mind when it comes to research projects.

The idea for Kohler's first research project came to him about 20 years ago when he was a faculty member at Pitt's Johnstown campus and a colleague, David Ward, told him about a book, "Payne Hollow," that had recently been published about the American painter Harlan Hubbard.

Kohler and Ward became so interested in Hubbard's work that they decided to visit the painter at his home in Kentucky. While they were there, Hubbard brought out a stack of journals he had been keeping since the 1920s. The pair looked over the journals, envisioned a book and seven years later published "The Journals of Harlan Hubbard, 1929-1944." The idea for Kohler's most recent research project came from an even less likely source. It reached out and grabbed the UPB faculty member one day when he was riding his bicycle around Bradford and noticed several strange little houses. In talking with an owner of one of the homes, Kohler learned that the houses were made of steel-clad porcelain enamel. The idea of a house made out of a material usually reserved for pots immediately intrigued Kohler and he was on his way to a study of Lustron, once touted as a way to solve America's post World War II housing shortage.

Steel and porcelain-enamel houses first appeared on the American scene at Chicago's Century of Progress Exposition in 1933, according to "Yesterday's House of Tomorrow" by H. Ward Jandl, John Burns and Michael Auer. Both the Insulated Steel Construction Co. and the Stran-Steel Corp. introduced houses at the exposition that featured walls constructed of enameled metal panels that were bolted or screwed together.

The possibility of building houses out of a steel-clad porcelain, however, did not attract much attention until 1946, when Carl Strandlund, vice president and general manager of the Chicago Vitreous Enamel Products Co., traveled to Washington, D.C., in search of steel to build gas stations. Although the war was over, steel remained a scarce commodity; its distribution was closely regulated by the federal government.

Strandlund soon discovered that the Truman administration was not interested in providing steel for gas stations, but was eager to reduce the housing shortage caused by GIs returning from Europe and the Pacific.

Since the mid-1930s, Chicago Vitreous had been manufacturing porcelain-enameled steel panels for gas stations in the Midwest, including some for Standard Oil of Indiana. Strandlund was quick to grasp the possibilities and presented federal Housing Administrator Wilson Wyatt and Secretary of Housing Henry Wallace with preliminary sketches for a steel-and-enamel house.

When Strandlund further promised full production of 100 houses per day within nine months at a cost of $7,000 per house, Wyatt and Wallace were sold.

According to Kohler, Chicago Vitreous' new Lustron Corporation originally was going to share a former Dodge aircraft engine plant in Chicago with the Tucker Motor Co. featured in Francis Ford Coppola's movie "Tucker." "In the movie they got it backwards," says Kohler. "It was Strandlund, not Tucker, who actually decided he couldn't share a factory and wanted to get his own factory. It was a Curtiss- Wright aircraft factory in Columbus, Ohio, where they finally started to manufacture the Lustron houses." Except for the sash, everything inside and outside the Lustron house was porcelain-enamel steel. Even the kitchen cupboards, bookcases, roof and master bedroom vanity were porcelain-enamel. Pictures were hung on the walls with magnets and the homes contained a unique dishwasher/clothes washer combination. Home-owners only needed to change the drum to switch from one job to the other.

Heat for the homes radiated down from steel ceiling panels, one of the houses' few shortcomings. In northern regions like Bradford, where Kohler found five of the houses, thick carpeting was required to keep the ceramic tile floors warm. The problem was compounded by the fact that the homes were built on concrete slabs.

Lustron homes were delivered on a truck that was specially manufactured for the purpose by Fruehauf Trailers near Uniontown.

When the Lustron system was working correctly, according to Kohler, a crew of four could erect a house in five days.

The first Lustron houses, produced in 1949, were slightly more than 1,000 square feet and contained two bedrooms, a living room, dining room and kitchen. Eventually four models, including two larger versions with three bedrooms, were offered by the company. According to a company promotional brochure, Lustron homes were available in pink, surf blue, dove gray, desert tan, maize yellow, blue-green, green and white. Although Strandlund had claimed he could produce and sell a home for $7,000, the final price was closer to $9,000, depending upon where it was delivered. But that was still a very competitive price, according to Kohler, especially when maintenance costs were figured in to the equation.

"They were rust proof. They were moth proof. They were termite proof," Kohler points out. "In fact, the early ads made an awful lot to do with the fact that they were absolutely maintenance free." Kohler says he has examined the maintenance records of one house from 1950 to 1955 and found that the owner spent a total of $60 on maintenance during the five-year period.

"They were extremely durable and very, very low maintenance houses," he says. "Although folks now, after the passage of almost 50 years, have to make sure the roofs are taken care of and there are probably other minor deteriorations." That Lustron homes held up so well is extremely fortunate, Kohler adds, because they won't hold paint and porcelain enamel is difficult to repair. Aside from the roofs, homes in Bradford show wear only around the edges, usually where the porcelain enamel was chipped by some minor accident.

Properly manufacturing the porcelain-enamel steel panels out of which the homes are constructed was one of the most difficult problems facing Lustron, according to Kohler. The company had to find an economical way to manufacture the sections so that they wouldn't warp or pop. It settled on a then new technology that allowed powdered porcelain enamel to be fired at low temperatures, which both preserved the strength of the steel and cost less than baking with a traditional porcelain mix.

Strandlund's ultimate goal was to create a house like a car, Kohler says, the model of which would change from year to year. Lustron expected people to trade up, much the same as they did with cars.

"One of the selling points was that a couple would buy it and as they had more children [would] buy a bigger Lustron," Kohler explains. "They were planning to develop almost a model line, very similar to the philosophy behind automobile lines." The company so wanted to emulate the auto industry that when the first cars with electric windows came out in the late 1940s, Lustron had an architect design a house with electric windows and planned to offer one with patio doors that opened electrically. "It was almost like Hollywood," Kohler says.

But it was not to last. In 1950, with Lustron's capital drying up, a nervous federal Reconstruction Finance Corp. (RFC) breathing down its neck and a Congressional subcommittee uncovering lax financial records, the RFC filed a foreclosure action against Lustron.

Before the company shut its doors, though, it built more than 2,400 porcelain-enamel steel homes in the East and Midwest, as well as a few in Alaska and Venezuela. One house went to Cornell University, where it was used to do time and motion studies, according to Kohler.

The largest remaining collection of Lustron houses today, about 60, is on the Marine base at Quantico, Va., where they are used for family housing. Two Lustrons also can be found at the Indiana Dunes National Lakeshore and a series of them make up the Top of the Mark Motel in Canton, Ohio, which was built with Lustron components after the company went into bankruptcy.

Although Kohler was drawn to the houses from the moment he noticed them almost 15 years ago, he originally tried to interest his students in researching the houses. When no students showed any interest, he decided to tackle the project himself.

"I became fascinated because they are an example of what is called industrialized housing," he says. "And they are one of the few metal houses." Lustron's rounded corners also mark the end of 1930s streamlining design. Kohler believes the homes are "the last application of streamlining to houses." In the course of researching the homes, Kohler came in contact with Tom Fetters, a Chicago businessman, who also was fascinated by the houses, and Alan Lathrop, an architectural historian from Minnesota. Together, the three men have produced a book on Lustron, "The American Dream in Enamel," that they have submitted to a New York publisher.

"It was really for me a labor of love because it's a fascinating thing," Kohler says. "It's just a fascinating effort at mass produced housing."

–Mike Sajna


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