PS15 The Didactics of the North American Model Home

In April of 1931, Albert Frey and A. Lawrence Kocher’s Aluminaire House was installed at the Architectural and Allied Arts Exhibition. Sized precisely for the atrium of New York’s Grand Central Palace, the Aluminaire was so-named to convey the conceptual centrality of its primary material. Its place in the historiography of American architecture was ensured the following year, when it became one of just two single family houses by American architects to be exhibited in the Modern Architecture: International Exhibition held at the MoMA. Pictured for the exhibition as it had been reconstructed on Wallace K. Harrison’s Long Island estate—freestanding on a grassy expanse, looking much like a Corbusian villa—the Aluminaire was identified simply as the Harrison House and described tersely in the ex-post-facto catalog as “an experimental aluminum house.” In fact, the Aluminaire House was generated as part of a series of highly innovative and relatively unknown low-cost housing proposals made by Kocher and Frey between 1930 and 1935. The project was never intended to be understood in isolation, and the architects published numerous drawings showing dozens of Aluminaires, densely arrayed on small “near-urban” lots. Sponsored by ALCOA, the house was also the first of a series of industry partnerships for Frey and Kocher wherein they re-imagined construction systems in which materials such as cotton canvas, aluminum foil, and engineered wood were integral. This paper will look closely at the Aluminaire House, its reception, decoration, and detailing, but will also place it in a broader context of the intense search for novel low-cost construction systems in the midst of the early 1930s housing crisis. It will examine the architects’ ongoing collaborations with unexpected industry partners and argue that the reduction of this house to its mere style has led to unfortunate historical elisions.

This paper examines the ideals and contradictions of U.S. cultural assimilation for Native American Tribes through a series of model homes designed by Irving Gill in 1932. Throughout the nineteenth-century, Native assimilation was predicated on different modes of property ownership and pedagogy – first through reservations, then through allotment and schooling – with the architectural dimensions of assimilation largely undefined. As treaties were broken or ignored, Tribes had no recourse to federal housing assistance. Even after achieving U.S. citizenship in 1924, policymakers treated Indian housing on an ad-hoc basis; not until 1961 did it come under the purview of the National Housing Act. The origins of federal Native housing policy, however, began with the influential Meriam Report of 1928, which denounced Native living conditions and spurred reformers like John Collier (Commissioner of Indian Affairs, 1933-45) to mobilize the federal government to produce Tribal housing for the first time.

Gill’s 1932 project for the resettlement of the Capitan Grande Indian Reservation at Rancho Barona in San Diego, California, administered by the Mission Indian Agency (MIA), marked a major shift in federal policy. The Barona homes, designed and built for Native families displaced by the construction of El Capitan Dam, became an influential model for the Indian New Deal’s approach to housing via the Indian Relief & Rehabilitation Program (1936–41). Architectural historians have assessed Gill’s project as a synthesis of the Mission style and modernity. However, the MIA’s use of the Barona homes to legitimize federal funding suggests another dimension of the project, namely how modern architecture contributed to the material endurance of settler colonialism. This paper offers a critique of the Barona model homes’ canonization in the discourse of regionalist architectural historiography, proposing instead that they were a model for the assimilative function of design within settler-colonial state bureaucracies.

By the summer of 1950, the U. S. Department of State had well-formed plans for America’s contribution to the German International Industrial Exhibition in Berlin, then a politically divided city. The undisputed showcase was to be the George C. Marshall House, an impressive International Style public building that symbolized the European Recovery Program and America’s leading role in it. But shortly before the fair’s opening in October, that plan was augmented to include a small, prefabricated “Model American Home” in the display. The house, designed by architect Elizabeth Scheu Close for the Page & Hill Company of Minnesota, was shipped to Berlin shortly before the fair’s opening and constructed on-site in ten days. According to State Department documents, the goal of the six-room “Jubilaire” model house, which was outfitted with such domestic conveniences as a television, electric range, and thermostat-controlled furnace, was to “graphically represent the high living standard of the American wage earner,” and to make that point behind the Iron Curtain. As authorities anticipated, many of the 43,000 war-weary visitors who toured the house during the fair’s two-week run, were awestruck by its comfort and modernity, and the state-of-the-art amenities the average American homeowner could afford.

Although the house played an extraordinary role in a high-profile, international exercise in Cold War propaganda, it was not designed as an exhibition house. Rather, it was one of hundreds of similar houses marketed by scores of US companies at the time, all of which were aimed at a new generation of postwar suburban homeowners. It was only through the State Department’s selection of the “Jubilaire”––and calculated efforts to promote it as a symbol of the good life under American democracy––that the house was elevated from an ordinary residence to a historically important one. 

On April 1, 1959, St. Petersburg builder James Rosati debuted the “Horizon Home.” Planned originally for adults with physical disabilities, Rosati developed the model home with the assistance of notable rehabilitation expert and New York University physician, Howard Rusk. Despite the modestly compact floor plan, one-story height, and generically modern design, Rosati’s dwelling was indeed a “special house.” Interior doors had no thresholds; door openings measured 36 (versus the standard 30) inches. Shelves in closets and the kitchen were waist high; outlets stood 18 inches from the ground. At the opening, Dr. Rusk hailed house as a “weapon in the struggle for international democracy.” In a febrile Cold War climate, the innovation of a wheelchair-accessible home acquired lofty political significance. 

While Rosati and Rusk planned the horizon home for the physically disabled, the design’s flexibility ultimately enabled its use far beyond this target audience. Shortly after its debut, Rusk praised the home’s adaptability to any population desiring “easier living,” and began promoting its use among cardiac patients and the elderly. Rosati, taking profitable advantage of the publicity, immediately marketed the Horizon Home as one of the available models in his large retirement developments, including Skyview (where the model home was erected), and Florida Retirement Village. 

This paper traces the Horizon Home from concept to realization and, ultimately, its adoption in Rosati’s retirement communities. The transformation from therapeutic laboratory (as Rusk intended it) to mass-market consumption (as Rosati used it) prompts recognition of the multiple parties involved in conceiving a model home and how makers and marketplace affect its adoption.

In 1972, Buckminster Fuller visited and gave the name “Ecol” to a model home built by students of McGill University’s Minimum Cost Housing Group (MCHG) on the university’s MacDonald campus. Ecol was part of the MCHG’s ongoing research program—The Ecol Operation—that blended a countercultural sensibility, appropriate technology research and ambitions to bolster international development efforts. The house showcased the fruits of the group’s work on low-cost, ecologically attuned materials and self-sufficient domestic utilities. It was roofed with asbestos cement channels cut from industrial drainage pipes, its floors were paved with interlocking blocks made from recycled waste sulphur, and a rainwater tank fed the Bucky-inspired misting shower. MCHG student-researcher Arthur Acheson and his wife Elizabeth tested and demonstrated the dwelling’s systems by living in it for nine months, and an account of the project was subsequently published as a book: The ECOL operation; ecology + building + common sense.

The Ecol Operation absorbed the possibilities of what had become – in the post-war period – the familiar device of the model home. The house was the material projection of tactics to alleviate impoverished housing conditions in Third World countries; its exhibitionary qualities were particularly guided by the experience of MCHG director Alvaro Ortega with the demonstration projects of the United Nations’ Center for Human Settlements. However, the Ecol House was never deployed in its intended “Third World” context and was far more influential amongst the 1970s North American ecological design movement. This paper will explore the life of the Ecol House, considering its place among a broader set of projects in which students and educators similarly built and occupied model homes via an improvised laboratory practice—performing architecture as a vehicle for dynamic engagement with technology, culture and politics.