HOUSE OF THE WEEK: Keck and Atwood's experimental steel houses

House of Tomorrow, Chicago (1933) Crystal House, Chicago (1934)

In this week’s House of the Week we discover a pair of prototype houses from the 1930s. Designed by George Fred Keck and Leland Atwood, these two designs explored the structural and aesthetic possibilities of steel at a time when innovative and cheap methods of house production were needed in the United States. The first house, House of Tomorrow, was designed for the Chicago Century of Progress Exposition in 1933 and was a two-tiered duo-decagonal structure with similarities to Buckminster Fuller’s Dymaxion House. Designed in two months, the frame was put together in 48 hours. Its steel floors were supported radially from a central core and its walls fully glazed. Interior features also included green rubber floor tiles, lipstick-red curtains and ultramarine ceilings.

The exhibition was such a financial success that it was run again the following year and Crystal House was entered as a design that lent itself to mass production. This design is a simple but technically advanced lightweight box with three-by-two bays and framed externally by steel lattice beams and floor-to-ceiling glazing. It was not such a financial success, and while many Americans would have liked a Modernist house, there was only one mortgage company in the country willing to fund them. The prototype was eventually disassembled and the components sold for their scrap value to cover the loss. Its influence on architecture since, however, has been much more profound, and the features of Crystal House can be found in, for example, the early buildings of Norman Foster.

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