[NAEP] [Fwd: The Adaptable Architecture of the Quonset]

[Dawn Wiseman]

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Subject: 	The Adaptable Architecture of the Quonset
Date: 	Sat, 03 Dec 2005 17:43:31 -0900
From: 	M. Pamela Bumsted, Ph.D. <hlthenvt at mochamail.com>
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  From Battlefield to Bungalow
The Adaptable Architecture of the Quonset
http://www.neh.fed.us/news/humanities/2005-11/quonset.html
By Anne Fredrickson

"Draw a picture of a house," the big sister instructed the younger one, and 
the little girl's sketch was remarkably accurate. Her drawing was not the 
predictable A-frame with requisite chimney and smoke, but a squat, domed 
structure with striped siding. It was Alaska in the 1960s, and the girl was 
drawing her idea of the typical family home: a Quonset hut. This story, 
along with oral histories, essays, artifacts, and photographs, has been 
collected in Quonset: Metal Living for a Modern Age. In addition to the 
book, the NEH-supported project includes a Web site and an exhibition now 
on display at the Anchorage Museum of History and Art.

During the housing crunch of the late 1940s, thousands of people across the 
nation converted these surplus military huts into unconventional homes, 
churches, and restaurants. Today, the Quonset has largely vanished from 
most of the American landscape--and most people's memory.

Chris Chiei, director of the Alaska Design Forum, is not alarmed by the 
disappearance. Quonsets were "designed to be temporary," he says. But 
Chiei, project director and coauthor of the book, was taken aback when he 
learned that nothing had been done to document the hut's brief but crucial 
role in American history. To change that, Chiei spent eight years searching 
through archives, museums, and Google to study the building.

Chiei hopes that his work on Quonsets will "properly put them in a context 
of architectural history and culture, U.S. history and culture." The story 
is a complex one, weaving together art, architecture, and anthropology and 
reaching into many different ways of life.

In March 1941, faced with sending a large number of troops abroad, the U.S. 
Navy commissioned an engineering team at Quonset Point, Rhode Island, to 
design light, portable, and inexpensive barracks. By October, the designs 
for the Quonset, which means "long place" in the language of the 
Narrangansett tribe, were finalized. Based roughly on the British Nissen 
hut, the popular temporary shelter used in World War I, the Quonset 
capitalized on pre-fabrication--all of its parts were manufactured prior to 
shipping--and the development of a lightweight, residential steel.

At times described as "a half piece of pipe chopped off at convenient 
lengths" and "a pop can lying on its side," the huts consist of a curved 
steel frame over which corrugated metal sheets are laid. What was 
especially revolutionary about the building was the simplicity of its 
design. With eight men, none of whom needed special expertise, the Quonset 
could be put up or taken down in one day.

When U.S. troops deployed after the attack on Pearl Harbor, the demand for 
Quonsets grew quickly. By 1945, Chiei reports, 120,000 units had been 
shipped to almost every corner of the world. More than a quarter of them 
went to Alaska, which became an important operations center for the fight 
in the Pacific.

The federal government poured $3 million into Alaska during World War II, 
writes cultural historian Steven Haycox, who contributed to Quonset. New 
funding attracted soldiers and civilian workers. It also changed the 
Alaskan skyline, which was soon dotted with Quonsets meant to house the new 
arrivals temporarily.

By the end of the war, housing shortages were acute throughout the country. 
Although Stan-Steel, the company that manufactured the Quonset, had been 
promoting the hut's "flexibility for the industries of tomorrow" as early 
as 1943, it was only after the war that Quonsets became widely seen as a 
housing option. Tom Vanderbilt, a collaborator on Quonset, reports that 
when a New York military base announced the public sale of eight hundred 
and eleven surplus Quonset huts in July 1946, thousands camped outside the 
site for days beforehand in order to secure one of the units for $295.

Housing sales like these sprung more from desperation than veneration. 
Despite Stan-Steel's barrage of promotional Quonset advertising, most 
Americans never saw the building as anything but a stopgap solution on the 
way to a "real" home. Unable to shake its wartime associations, the 
Quonset, says architectural historian Jeffrey Cook, was "one of the most . 
. . hated prefab systems of the twentieth century." And as prefabrication 
techniques spread to the production lines of traditional-looking housing, 
Quonsets were largely abandoned for homes that more closely modeled the 
American dream.

But Alaska took to Quonsets; the huts became common buildings for homes, 
restaurants, chapels, and even schools. Chiei says that the Quonset seemed 
to embody the resourceful character of Alaska, a place where "what we get, 
we tend to hang on to." Although housing kits did replace the Quonset as 
the preferred prefab structure, it was a gradual transition. Many families 
still lived in Quonsets in the 1960s and 1970s, and a small number of 
Alaskans continue to use the hut as a space for life and work. One such 
enthusiast is Rose Cobis, who has lived in her Quonset hut on Kodiak Island 
for more than thirty years. "There is something mystical about living in a 
round house," she told the Anchorage Daily News.

Fans like Cobis notwithstanding, it was the shape of the building, says 
Chiei, that caused the majority of Quonset-dwellers to find new lodgings. 
"Because of its strong geometric form, it does somewhat dictate the way 
that you live," he says.

Its simple lines, open space, and self-supporting structure brought the 
Quonset acceptance within the Modernist architectural movement, attracting 
the attention of architects Bruce Goff and Charles Eames. Goff expanded 
upon the Quonset form in the 1947 Ruth Ford House, which has a large 
central dome, obviously inspired by the Quonset, as the main living space 
for the house.

Though Goff's incorporation of the Quonset into his designs was considered 
avant-garde, the hut, along with other wartime prefab structures, has since 
had great conceptual influence. "There's such an interest in prefabricated 
architecture right now," says Chiei. Festo Corporate Design in Germany has 
developed a house supported by inflated air chambers that can be deflated 
and packed into a forty-foot box. The Austrian architect Oskar Leo Kaufman 
recently unveiled FRED, a block-like home that can be constructed in two hours.

So was the Quonset ahead of its time? Perhaps, says Chiei. The book and 
exhibition make an elegy for the little hut, a respectful acknowledgment of 
its service in times of need. After all, says Chiei, with a temporary 
building like the Quonset, "part of the design is letting it go."

Anne Fredrickson, a junior at Swarthmore College, was an intern at NEH.

The Quonset project received $215,774 in NEH consultation and 
implementation grants. The implementation grant is part of the We the 
People initiative, which supports projects in U.S. history and culture. 
"Quonset: Metal Living for a Modern Age" closes in Anchorage on December 
24. Its Web site is www.quonsethuts.org.

Humanities, November/December 2005, Volume 26/Number 6