“it is recognized that a plastic material capable of being economically molded or pressed into structural and finished parts of houses would be the ideal type of material for the mass-production of houses and could conceivably displace all existing methods of house construction.” Keiser Industries report 1944

“The long range solution to the American housing problem lies in prefabrication. No other country is so ready to provide both quality and quantity with mass production.” Henry Dreyfuss, idustrial designer 1943

WWII was a period of tremendous material innovation, with the advent of new laminated plywood’s, lightweight composite metals and high strength plastics coming out of the airplane and shipbuilding industries. But even during the war, ideas were being pursued for finding a market for these products after the war ended.

In 1944, the Henry J. Keiser Company, one of the largest wartime shipbuilders, conducted a study into a prototype plastic house where all sections of the house could be fabricated in a plant and shipped to the site for erection. There was a strong belief that industrial efficiency and specialization, and fordist production methods would improve quality and cheapen cost, making prefabrication the preferred method for housing construction in the future.

Keiser approached the problem of construction by documenting a series of design objectives and goals that would make the plastic house superior to conventional construction, including:
1. Creating a lightweight unit containing within its own dimensions structural elements sufficient to take the normal stresses to which a house is subjected.
2. Can be readily stored and transported.
3. Can be easily handled at the time or erection.
4. Can be cut, sawed and nailed.
5. Provides complete heat insulation.
6. Provides essential acoustical values.
7. Is vermin proof and termite proof?
8. Is fireproof.
9. Provides a bonding surface for gypsum plaster or plastite cement or any finished plaster.
10. Is waterproof.
11. Is inexpensive.

For the house design, a modern streamlined form was imagined. The shape of the house was dictated by shapes, which could be easily mass-produced, simplicity was key. For economy, the mechanical spaces, including the kitchen a bathroom were grouped. The walls of the home were designed on a modular system and were constructed using 10" x 3" tongue and groove units extending the full height of the wall, each weighing approximately 80pounds. Finishes on the house were conventional with the specification that after erecting, the walls and exterior be enclosed by plaster cement. It was also imagined that the kitchen and bathroom should consist of prefabricated mechanical cores, also to be developed by the Keiser Company.

Shipping for the plastic home to the site was seen as a financial hurdle, so the house was designed to reduce weight and be knocked down to a compact flat shape for shipping. It was estimated the house including all structural, mechanical and finish equipment would not exceed 35 tons, which would permit the transportation of a single house in its entirety on a single flat bed tractor trailer.

The only drawback contained in the Keiser report, was the relative high cost of plastic compared to wood, but they were confident that further experiments would produce a low cost plastic capable of use in construction.





In the end the plastic house never went into production, its failure on the open market was due mostly to the low profit margin in low income housing, which made the high cost of industrial plant tooling and fabrication uneconomical.

Given that prefabrication has never realized a large share of the housing market, it would be easy to speculate that perhaps there is something inherent to housing that makes it resistant to factory production. I believe this assumption is wrong, given the homogenous nature of today’s tract developments and the success of factory built mobile homes, prefabrication could hardly be conceived of as an aesthetic or cultural barrier. Rather, as new innovations in Flexible mass production (the highly adaptive system of fabrication used in the automobile industry) lowers the cost of production, prefabrication can again be seen as a viable and economic alternative to home construction. These new methods allow for Rapid retooling and the allowance for extremely complex formaking, and could allow prefabrication to overcome the econmic barrior of factory production as well as allow for quickly respond to new designs, just as the car is manufactured today.


All information and drawings are taken from a report entitled: PREFABRICATED PLASTIC HOUSE. obtained from the Henry J. Keiser Archives at the Bancoft library, University of California, Berkeley.

© polar inertia 2003