Track 10 MODERNISM, Presentation 3
Serial Concrete Houses, from the U.S. to France via World War I
Etien Santiago
Assistant Professor, Indiana University, Bloomington
etsant@iu.edu
World War I allowed a uniquely American invention, the serially-produced concrete house, to continue developing in 1920s France. Using newly-uncovered primary sources, this presentation will trace the emergence of the first mass-produced concrete housing systems in the U.S., from 1907 onwards, before analyzing how architects and engineers imported such systems into France with the hope that they might remedy the widespread, war-caused destruction of towns there. Piecing this story together fills a gap in historical accounts of how reinforced concrete construction techniques evolved and spread at the start of the twentieth century, a gap evident in the often-referenced Early Reinforced Concrete edited by Frank Newby (2001).
Historians such as Peter Collins (Concrete: The Vision of a New Architecture, 1959), Robert Courland (Concrete Planet, 2011), and Andrew Rabeneck (“The Transformation of Construction by Concrete,” 2012) have rightly identified the American inventor Thomas Edison as the first influential proponent of mass-produced concrete houses. They also note that he quickly cut short his own efforts to make such houses. Yet these and other historians have tended to overlook a set of his business partners and protégés, including George E. Small, Henry J. Harms, Frank D. Lambie, and C. H. Ingersoll, who carried on Edison’s project by erecting numerous standardized concrete houses in the U.S. between 1911 and 1917. United by a shared vision, these men concocted construction techniques that nonetheless differed significantly in their use of formwork and reinforcing as well as in the concrete pouring process. They also adapted these techniques over time after evaluating their results on real projects. During the same years, the American architects Grosvenor Atterbury and Milton Dana Morrill also used actual commissions on the East Coast to each develop competing systems for the rapid realization of cost-effective concrete houses.
Although World War I disrupted the growth of mass-produced concrete housing in the U.S., it also brought that chain of experimentation to France. When America officially joined the Allies in 1917 to fight against Germany, house construction in the U.S. plummeted as the government blocked all building projects not related to the war effort. Moreover, several American advocates of serially-produced concrete houses were swept up in the wave of U.S. citizens headed to France to serve in aid organizations or the American Expeditionary Forces. In France, these advocates found promising conditions for their cutting-edge ideas about how to mass manufacture concrete residences. The war had triggered a shortage of skilled workers as well as traditional materials such as wood and brick. Concrete building techniques offered a way around these obstacles. Americans such as Morrill therefore pitched updated versions of their concrete house-building systems to the French as a solution for rebuilding the thousands of dwellings destroyed during the war. The return of peace in late 1918 allowed some of these proposals to move forward. Backed by the French government, Morrill built demonstration houses in the former war zone throughout 1919, while Harms and Small further improved their patented system of modular iron formwork for cast-in-place reinforced concrete by realizing dozens of industrial housing complexes in France.
As I will argue in the presentation, the surprising story of how early mass-produced American concrete housing systems sprouted in the U.S. before passing over to France as a result of World War I not only completes the historical record, but also reveals the close interrelation at the time between emerging construction technologies and international geopolitics.
Etien Santiago is an assistant professor in the J. Irwin Miller Architecture Program at Indiana University. He holds degrees in architectural history and architecture from Harvard University and Rice University. In 2021, he won the Society of Architectural Historians Founders’ Award for an article, “Notre-Dame du Raincy and the Great War,” that he published in the December 2019 issue of JSAH.
