Lustron: House of the Future
There was a great documentary on PBS a few weeks ago called Lustron: The House America’s Been Waiting For. The Lustron home was supposed to be the ideal home of the future in the wake of a post-WWII housing shortage. The bright idea of engineer Carl Strandlund, the homes were to be all metal with a baked-on porcelain finish. The idea was to build a prefabricated maintenance free home that could be cleaned by simply hosing the thing down with a gardening hose. Demand for the homes skyrocketed, but a series of bad loans and poor management led the company to go bankrupt before they could blanket the world in baked porcelain. Only a few thousand homes were built. They are spread out all over America. It just so happens that in my neighborhood, on the 5000 block of Nicollet Avenue, there stand seven of these relics all lined up in a nice row. Only a few of them (like the one pictured above) maintain their original old school metal tile facade. Others have tried to hide and compromise their Lustron with stucco and bad limestone brick work. Mike Dust has a nice photo collection of all the Lustron homes on Nicollet. He’s also got a good collection of Lustron links.