1948 – 1950: Lustron Homes Post-War America Experiments With Pre-Fab Housing

John Kaay has left a new comment on your post “Demolition of 187 Low-cost Prefabs in UK Slated“:
This reminds me very much of the Lustron home my family lived in around 1950 – 1955, in Evergreen Park, Illinois. Prefabricated, everything made of steel in a factory. Even the closets and cabinets were built in steel. Here’s a link: https://architecture.about.com/od/periodsstyles/ig/House-Styles/Lustron-Homes.htm

About Lloyd Kahn

Lloyd Kahn started building his own home in the early '60s and went on to publish books showing homeowners how they could build their own homes with their own hands. He got his start in publishing by working as the shelter editor of the Whole Earth Catalog with Stewart Brand in the late '60s. He has since authored six highly-graphic books on homemade building, all of which are interrelated. The books, "The Shelter Library Of Building Books," include Shelter, Shelter II (1978), Home Work (2004), Builders of the Pacific Coast (2008), Tiny Homes (2012), and Tiny Homes on the Move (2014). Lloyd operates from Northern California studio built of recycled lumber, set in the midst of a vegetable garden, and hooked into the world via five Mac computers. You can check out videos (one with over 450,000 views) on Lloyd by doing a search on YouTube:

5 Responses to 1948 – 1950: Lustron Homes Post-War America Experiments With Pre-Fab Housing

  1. Hi guys,I live in Fort Wayne IN,And as far as i know there are at least two
    of these houses in my city,could be more,But the ones close to me are well kept.

  2. We have two Lustron here in Fairfield, CT. I wrote an article in 1998 about the history of them. One is as it was erected and the other has an addition that the owner, an architect ,had done to look like the original, only it had to be in wood. She would have preferred metal, but that presented too many difficulties.

    There are still some on a Marine military base in the South. I read somewhere that someone referred to them as a cross between a VW bug and a refridgerator

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