unions keep people poor and tek old and mass produced housing dream

Mass production is a good fit for housing woes
April 26, 2008|By Arrol Gellner

*
o
o

*
o
o
o

A century ago, Henry Ford's canny use of mass production put the automobile - a former plaything of the wealthy - within reach of the average American.

Since then, mass production has made complex products from clocks to computers affordable to pretty much everyone.

In the same 100 years, however, the way we build houses has hardly changed at all. In fact, if you set aside niceties like electricity, telephones and central heating, basic building techniques have actually changed very little in a millennium. Whether we assemble houses with oaken pegs or pneumatic nails, they're still largely handmade from laboriously cut and fitted individual pieces, and put together one at a time.
Sponsored Links

* Low Cost Bail Bondsmen Get Fast, Cheap Bail - Search here (yellowpages.com)
* index mutual funds New Motley Fool Report - How ETF's have Revolutionized stock trading. (www.Fool.com/ETF)
* Proven Anti Aging Proven effective anti aging via uninhibited DNA replication. (digestaqure.com/Drreferralantiaging)

advertisement | your ad here

During the course of the 20th century, there were many attempts to bring mass-production methods to the building industry. The Aladdin Co. began selling precut houses in 1906, and two years later, retail giant Sears Roebuck began offering houses by mail order.

Each Sears Modern Home came in a 25-ton kit consisting of precut lumber and virtually all the other materials required to complete the building. Prices ranged from $650 to $2,500, and 22 styles were offered. Precutting the lumber not only made the houses cheaper, but also reduced on-site construction time by 40 percent. More than 70,000 Sears Modern Homes were sold before the program ended in 1940, a victim of the Depression economy and vexing differences in local building codes.

Inventor Buckminster Fuller began pondering the concept of mass-produced housing in 1927, and by the close of World War II, he'd arrived at his Dymaxion House, a futuristic circular structure slung from a central pylon. The house used aircraft-style aluminum skin construction, allowing it to be mass-produced in aircraft plants left idle by the war's end. It also incorporated a slew of visionary conservation features we've yet to see in today's homes.

Yet only two Dymaxion houses were actually built in prototype form before the venture's commercial failure.