Prefab + Solar at Midcentury

In April 1945 the New York Times announced: “Tomorrow, if it’s a nice dayin Rockford, Ill., a new house will go up…. It will combine two principleswidely acclaimed as inevitable for post-war home building—prefabricatedconstruction and solar planning.”As the Times indicated, prefabrication and solar heating were the two issuesthat would have interested any progressive architect in the mid-1940s. Yetthe two movements rarely intersected. For the most part, architects interestedin prefabrication did not pursue solar heating. And vice-versa, solararchitects almost exclusively designed one-off custom site-built projects.This historical paper examines those rare instances of intersection, plus thewider affinities and contradictions between prefab and solar at midcentury.

Volume Editors
John Quale, Rashida Ng & Ryan E. Smith

ISBN
978-0-935502-85-5