Skip to main content
SpringerLink
Log in

After the War: Quonset Huts and Their Integration Into Daily American Life

  • Chapter
Quonset Hut

  • 404 Accesses

Abstract

In a Coca-Cola advertisement from 1943, a group of soldiers are depicted enjoying an impromptu baseball game at a remote Alaskan military encampment. Several are shown cheerfully hoisting Cokes, rendered instantly legible by its iconically ribbed, green glass bottle. “From Atlanta to the Seven Seas,” declares the ad text, “Coca-Cola has become the high sign between kindly minded strangers, the symbol of a friendlier way of living.” Coke, the ad implied, was home in a bottle. “The pause that refreshes works as well in the Yukon as it does in Youngstown.”

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this chapter

Log in via an institution

Institutional subscriptions

Preview

Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.

Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.

Chapter 4 After the War: Quonset Huts and Their Integration Into Daily American Life Tom Vanderbilt

  1. Charles Cutler, Tracks That Speak (New York: Houghton Mifflin Co., 2002).

    Google Scholar 

  2. Donald Albrecht, World War II and the American Dream: How War Time Buildings Changed a Nation (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995), xvi.

    Google Scholar 

  3. Great Lakes Steel Corporations, Stran-Steel Division advertisement, New Pencil Points, September 1943.

    Google Scholar 

  4. Great Lakes Steel Corporations, Stran-Steel Division advertisement, New Pencil Points, September 1943.

    Google Scholar 

  5. Thomas Hine, “The Search for the Postwar House,” in Blueprints for Modern Living: History and Legacy of the Case Study Houses (Los Angeles: Museum of Contemporary Art; Cambridge: MIT Press, 1989), 169.

    Google Scholar 

  6. J. B. Jackson, Discovering the Vernacular Landscape (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986), 135.

    Google Scholar 

  7. Great Lakes Steel Corporations, Stran-Steel Division advertisement, Architectural Record, February 1944.

    Google Scholar 

  8. Great Lakes Steel Corporations, Stran-Steel Division advertisement, Architectural Record, September 1944.

    Google Scholar 

  9. Paulette Goddard, “The Great Housing Shortage,” Life 19, no. 25 (17 December 1945): 30.

    Google Scholar 

  10. “U.S. Needs 16,100,000 New Homes in Ten Years,” Life 19, no. 25 (17 December 1945): 33.

    Google Scholar 

  11. Ibid.

    Google Scholar 

  12. Ibid.

    Google Scholar 

  13. Paulette Goddard, “The Great Housing Shortage,” Life 19, no. 25 (17 December 1945): 33.

    Google Scholar 

  14. Harley E. Howe, “Stop Gap Housing,” Popular Science, March 1946, 66–71.

    Google Scholar 

  15. Ibid., 68.

    Google Scholar 

  16. Gwendolyn Wright, Building the Dream: A Social History of Housing in America (New York: Pantheon Books, 1981), 253.

    Google Scholar 

  17. Albrecht, World War II and the American Dream, 253.

    Google Scholar 

  18. Hine, Blueprints for Modern Living, 169.

    Google Scholar 

  19. Sheldon Cheney and Martha Candler Cheney, Art and the Machine: An Account of Industrial Design in 20th-century America (1936; New York: Acanthus Press, 1992), 160.

    Google Scholar 

  20. Arthur J. Pulos, The American Design Adventure, 1940–1975 (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press), 31.

    Google Scholar 

  21. Quoted in Dana Cuff, The Provisional City: Los Angeles Stories of Architecture and Urbanism (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000), 182.

    Google Scholar 

  22. Rodger Young was a slain serviceman after whom the Rodger Young Village was named. The village was, then, a rare instance of a new ethnically mixed American community. Dana Cuff, The Provisional City: Los Angeles Stories of Architecture and Urbanism (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 2000).

    Google Scholar 

  23. “Big Rodger Young Village Vanishing,” Los Angeles Times, 4 April 1954, part 2, 1–2.

    Google Scholar 

  24. Cuff, The Provisional City, 186.

    Google Scholar 

  25. Ibid., 178.

    Google Scholar 

  26. Grace Simons, “Project Eviction Attacked,” California Eagle 72, no. 45 (February 7, 1952): 1.

    Google Scholar 

  27. Mark Pandanell, “Texas City Firefighters 1259,” http://www.local1259iaff.org/disaster.html.

    Google Scholar 

  28. Great Lakes Steel Corporations, Stran-Steel Division advertisement, Saturday Evening Post, 15 May 1948.

    Google Scholar 

  29. “Converted Quonset,” Art and Architecture, December 1946, 34–35.

    Google Scholar 

  30. P. J. McKenna, “Planting for the Temporary Home, The New York Times, 6 April 1947.

    Google Scholar 

  31. Helen Weigel Brown, “A Home from a Quonset Hut,” House Beautiful, September 1946, 120–2.

    Google Scholar 

  32. Helen Weigel Brown, “How to Convert a Quonset to an Emergency Home,” House Beautiful, September 1946, 140–41.

    Google Scholar 

  33. Great Lakes Steel Corporations, Stran-Steel Division advertisement, Saturday Evening Post, 14 June 1947.

    Google Scholar 

  34. Quonsets: The Story of a Building that Gave America a New Standard of Quality Building Values (Detroit: Great Lakes Steel Corporation, Stran-Steel Division, n.d.).

    Google Scholar 

  35. Los Angeles Times, September 6, 1991.

    Google Scholar 

  36. Thomas Hine, Populuxe (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1986).

    Google Scholar 

  37. The Talk of the Town, The New Yorker, March 1946.

    Google Scholar 

  38. John J. Bertin and Michel L. Smith, Aerodynamics for Engineers, 2nd ed. (New Jersey, Prentice Hall, 1989), 95, 114, 115.

    Google Scholar 

  39. Tim Clark, “Living in a Quonset Hut is Like Eating Spam,” Yankee Magazine 44, No. 1, (November 1985): 120.

    Google Scholar 

  40. Abigail McCarthy, “The Can-Do Quonset,” Commonweal, November 8, 1991, 634.

    Google Scholar 

  41. Lewis Lapham, “The Boys Next Door,” Harper’s Magazine, July 2001, 11.

    Google Scholar 

  42. Amber Ridington, “History Worth Preserving—The Quonset Auditorium,” Landmark Report, (Bowling Green, KY: Landmark Association of Bowling Green-Warren County, February 2002), 1.

    Google Scholar 

  43. Ibid.

    Google Scholar 

  44. Tom Quinlan, “The Stat-up Culture,” http://www.siliconvalley.com/mid/siliconvalley/living/2765031.htm (posted 28 February 2002).

    Google Scholar 

  45. Alastair Gordon, Weekend Utopia (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2001), 49.

    Google Scholar 

  46. Ibid., 50.

    Google Scholar 

  47. “Hillside House,” Architectural Forum, August 1950, 95.

    Google Scholar 

  48. Quote from Sheldon Cheney and Martha Candler Cheney, Art and the Machine: An Account of Industrial Design in 20th-century America (1936; New York: Acanthus Press, 1992), 1.

    Google Scholar 

  49. Ruth Ford, letter to Bruce Goff, October 18, 1948, folder 4.14, box 4, series II, Goff Archives, Ryerson and Burnham Archives, Art Institute of Chicago, Illinois.

    Google Scholar 

  50. Jeffrey Cook, The Architecture of Bruce Goff (London: Harper and Row, 1978), 24.

    Google Scholar 

  51. The Provisional City, 194.

    Google Scholar 

  52. Great Lakes Steel Corp., Stran-Steel Division advertisement text, Architectural Record, June 1947.

    Google Scholar 

  53. Jan Cohn, The Palace or the Poorhouse: The American House as a Cultural Symbol (East Lansing, MI: Michigan State University Press, 1979), 238.

    Google Scholar 

  54. Alan Dunn, The Last Lath (New York: Architectural Record and F. W. Dodge Corporation, 1947).

    Google Scholar 

  55. The Los Angeles Times, September 6, 1991.

    Google Scholar 

  56. The Los Angeles Times, September 6, 1991.

    Google Scholar 

  57. Christopher Reynolds, “An Ode to the Forgotten Quonset Anniversary: The corrugated metal hut turned 50 this summer. But the ‘fabulous example of American ingenuity’ will go unfeted” Los Angeles Times, Sep 6, 1991, 16, Orange County edition.

    Google Scholar 

  58. The Los Angeles Times, September 6, 1991.

    Google Scholar 

  59. The Sacramento Bee, April 4, 2003.

    Google Scholar 

  60. “Brief History,” http://www.xmission.com/~hta/history.html

    Google Scholar 

  61. “Postwar homes are latest preservation territory,” St. Petersburg Times, May 25, 2002.

    Google Scholar 

  62. The Journal News, March 5, 2001.

    Google Scholar 

  63. Fred Williamson quoted in Tim Clark, “Living in a Quonset Hut is Like Eating Spam,” 122.

    Google Scholar 

  64. T. Luke Young, The Unassuming Quonset: Survival of Semi-Circular Significance, no. 4 (Washington, DC: Cultural Resource Management, U.S. Department of the Interior, National Park Service, 1996), 9.

    Google Scholar 

  65. Joe Marshall, letter to the editor, “City Handling of Huts Distasteful Troubling!” Daily News Bowling Green Kentucky, November 10, 2003, http://bgdailynews.com/.

    Google Scholar 

  66. Quentin Wagenfield, “From Sheds to Sanctuaries,” Your Church. January/February 2003, 54.

    Google Scholar 

Download references

Authors
  1. Tom Vanderbilt
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Editor information

Julie Decker Chris Chiei

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

Copyright information

© 2005 Princeton Architectural Press

About this chapter

Cite this chapter

Vanderbilt, T. (2005). After the War: Quonset Huts and Their Integration Into Daily American Life. In: Decker, J., Chiei, C. (eds) Quonset Hut. Princeton Archit.Press. https://doi.org/10.1007/1-56898-654-8_4

Download citation

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/1-56898-654-8_4

  • Publisher Name: Princeton Archit.Press

  • Print ISBN: 978-1-56898-519-0

  • Online ISBN: 978-1-56898-654-8

  • eBook Packages: Architecture and DesignEngineering (R0)

Publish with us

Policies and ethics

Search

Navigation