The Mail-Order House

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Sears said it sold more than 100,000 homes. Aladdin has other claims, possibly more or less. There are few archives nowadays, so we’ll never know exactly many houses were sold. But if you look at government statistics, it’s not a huge portion. Magazine coverage and ads made it seem huge, but the carpenter-built house was predominant.

What forced these businesses to close?

Aladdin didn’t stop operations until the 1970s, actually. Sears ended its modern home division in 1936, because they got into the mortgage business and the Depression caught them in a big way. However, they leased their factories to other developers who began to build these Levittown-type communities using the Sears name. The company’s appliances came with every house sold—the lure of those houses was the modern equipment.

Despite this early, positive history, prefab did have a bad name for itself in the latter half of the 20th century. At what point did our understanding of prefab change?

Well, the word “prefabricated” itself didn’t come around until the 1940s with the rise of industrial housing. Aladdin and Sears had separate divisions that provided industrial housing—shed-like buildings—to different corporations. Sears worked with Standard Oil, and Aladdin had a connection with Dupont, building towns for their gunpowder plants. These divisions continued to configure after the war effort, and ultimately materials and focus shifted.

What about today? How is the promise of the modernist prefab different?

Architects are offering the same thing: The newest manufacturing methods, modern style, a new way of living. Today that means, say, eco-friendly interiors. But declarations of “up-to-the-minute construction efficiency” come straight from an Aladdin catalog.

So does that mean our present crop of architect-entrepreneurs are bound to make the same mistakes as their mail-order predecessors?

Even if they’re advertising these homes as affordable, they become more expensive with delivery and with actual construction. That’s just like the past. I’ll bet a lot of architects don’t know that this early prefab movement even existed. I think they would be absolutely amazed to read the literature and make the connections.

If early-20th-century prefab was a short-live phenomenon, are you implying that history could repeat itself today?

I do see an outlet for these architects’ work, and we do need more affordable housing. It’s surprising to see the faces of the people living on the edge; in today’s world, those faces belong to you and me. I would say that while most architects have done the great design work, they’ve done it without understanding who they’re really doing it for and how affordability can be accomplished. We need wider support for their vision, government support, to make that leap.

Provided by Architectural Record—The Resource for Architecture and Architects