Allegheny Riverfront Park: Source Books in Landscape Architecture

Published by Princeton Architectural Press 37 East Seventh Street New York, New York 10003 For a free catalog of books, call 1.800.722.6657. Visit our web site at www.papress.com. © 2005 Princeton Architectural Press All rights reserved Printed and bound in China 09 08 07 06 05 5 4 3 2 1 First edition No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner without written permission from the publisher, except in the context of reviews. Every reasonable attempt has been made to identify owners of copyright. Errors or omissions will be corrected in subsequent editions. Publication of this book is supported by the Anchorage Museum of History and Art, the Anchorage Museum Association, the Alaska Design Forum, and their grantors, sponsors, and volunteers. Editing: Linda Lee Design: Deb Wood Special thanks to: Nettie Aljian, Dorothy Ball, Nicola Bednarek, Janet Behning, Megan Carey, Penny (Yuen Pik) Chu, Russell Fernandez, Jan Haux, Clare Jacobson, John King, Mark Lamster, Nancy Eklund Later, Katharine Myers, Lauren Nelson, Jane Sheinman, Scott Tennent, Jennifer Thompson, Paul Wagner, Joseph Weston, and Deb Wood of Princeton Architectural Press —Kevin C. Lippert, publisher

Library of Congress Cataloging-inPublication Data Quonset hut : metal living for a modern age / Julie Decker and Chris Chiei, editors. p. cm. “The Anchorage Museum of History and Art in association with the Anchorage Museum Association and the Alaska Design Forum”—CIP t.p. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 1-56898-519-3 (hardcover : alk. paper) 1. Quonset huts. 2. Buildings, Prefabricated. 3. Architectural metal-work. 4. Temporary housing. 5. Dwellings—Alaska—History—20th century. I. Decker, Julie. II. Chiei, Chris. III. Anchorage Museum of History and Art. IV. Anchorage Museum Association. V. Alaska Design Forum. NA8480.Q66 2005 720'.48—dc22 2004024738

Quonset Hut Metal Living for a Modern Age

Julie Decker and Chris Chiei, editors

The Anchorage Museum of History and Art in association with the Anchorage Museum Association and the Alaska Design Forum, Alaska Princeton Architectural Press, New York

Preface Julie Decker x Acknowledgments xii

Introduction

The Hut That Shaped a Nation Julie Decker and Chris Chiei xv

Chapter 1

How the Hut Came to Be Chris Chiei 1

Chapter 2

Quonsets, Alaska, and World War II Steven Haycox 31

Chapter 3

War, Design, and Weapons of Mass Construction Brian Carter 47

Chapter 4

After the War: Quonset Huts and Their Integration into Daily American Life Tom Vanderbilt

Chapter 5

63

The Huts That Wouldn’t Go Away: Alaska Adopts the Hut Chris Chiei 105

Chapter 6

Quonsets Today: Concluding Thoughts Julie Decker and Chris Chiei 133 Appendix: Hut Types Notes 150 Image Credits 156 Index 161 Contributors 165

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Preface

Julie Decker Quonset Hut: Metal Living for a Modern Age is a project that began half a decade ago when architect Chris Chiei took note of the presence of Quonset huts throughout Alaska—more than half a century after the huts were sent around the world as temporary shelters for World-War-II soldiers, forming a major part of the infrastructure of war. Until now, the impact of Quonset huts in post–World War II life has not been documented in a comprehensive way. Quonset huts are referenced in a variety of publications, and everyone seems to be able to conjure up an image of a semicircle when they hear the word “Quonset,” but its story has not yet been told. While the subject of Quonset huts can be serious––wartime and postwar housing shortages are not lighthearted topics––it is also one that can claim a certain levity. Quonset huts have entered into many love-hate relationships with their dwellers who both embraced and resisted the simple geometry of the form. Quonset huts have staked their claim on the built environment throughout the world––and the unbuilt world in the case of such remote places as Alaska, Hawaii, Guam, and the South Pacific. Just as Alaskans claim duct tape and bunny boots as their own, they also claim the Quonset hut, since Alaskans, throughout their relatively short history, have recognized the temporary and durable nature of the hut, tolerated its industrial nature, and chuckled at their unexpected permanence––a proud, though aging, part of the everyday landscape. Mention Quonset huts to almost any Alaskan you run into and they will have a personal story about living in, working in, or just seeing one. Although not entirely an endangered species of

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Alaska’s, or other far-flung places’, built environment, the number of existing Quonset huts has dwindled to the point that most children and newcomers to these strategic World War II places are completely unaware of the dense Quonset camps that once stood at the center of their own communities. Contributing writers to this publication look at the Quonset hut in a variety of ways, from its inception in World War II, its pivotal position during the war, its brief attempt to solve the postwar housing shortage, and its role as an inspiration for leading postwar architects. Quonset is a project of the Alaska Design Forum, a nonprofit organization of architects, artists, and designers formed to broaden the range of discussion about the design of the built environment. Quonset will also be a traveling exhibition organized by the Anchorage Museum of History and Art, which will open in Anchorage in October 2005. The goal of the project is to recognize the Quonset hut as an important invention to come out of World War II and to identify the inventiveness it inspired in those who occupied them or lived near them during and after the war. The Quonset hut has long been tolerated, at times ignored. This project aims to give the Quonset hut a pat on its rounded back for being the best building it could be. If nothing else, it was persistent. Quonset was born out of the work of numerous volunteers. Without their generous donation of time and energy, this project could not have been realized. They, too, should be recognized for their persistence.

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Acknowledgments This project would not have been possible without a number of individuals, businesses and organizations. Thank you to the following:

Photographers Clark James Mishler, David Gellotte, Patrick J. Endres, Kevin G. Smith, Bruce Binder

Publication Research Sponsors National Endowment for the Arts National Endowment for the Humanities Alaska Humanities Forum Alaska Association for Historic Preservation American Institute of Architects, Alaska Chapter Koonce Pfeffer Bettis Architects The Graham Foundation Anchorage Historic Properties Anchorage Museum of History and Art Alaska Design Forum

The Staff at the following Archives Anchorage Museum of History and Art (Dianne Brenner, Mina Jacobs, Walter Van Horn), National Archives—Pacific Alaska Region, University of Alaska Anchorage Consortium Library, Z. J. Loussac Public Library (Bruce Merrell), University of Alaska Fairbanks Elmer E. Rasmuson Library (Rose Speranza), Alaska Film Archives at Elmer E. Rasmuson Library (Dirk Tordoff), Alaska State Archives (Larry Hibpshman), Alaska State Museum, Alaska State Library, Tongass Historical Museum, Kodiak Historical Society (Marian Johnson), National Archives II, (Sandy Smith), National Archives I, The Library of Congress, The Ben Moreell Library (Deborah Gunia), Navy Art Collection (Gale Munro), U.S. Army Center of Military History (Renee Klish), Yukon Archives, National Archives of Canada, Canadian War Museum (Maggie Arbour-Doucette), National Gallery of Canada, The Art Institute of Chicago (Kate Butterly, Lori Boyer, Mary Woolever), Rhode Island Historical Society (Rick Sattler, Dana Signe K. Munroe), Phillips Memorial Library, The History Factory (Alexandra Brisen), Quonset Point Seabee Museum (Jack Sprengel), Masonite Corporation (Pasty Myric), Butler Manufacturing Co. (Andrea Hanson)

Research and Project Development Volunteers Ron Bateman, Catherine Williams, Julie Decker, Chris Chiei, John Pearce, Clark Yerrington, Leone Chiei, Lewis Santoro, Charles Mobley, Seth Brandenberger, Robert Brandenberger, Bruce Merrell, Sharon Ferguson, John Biggs, Erica White, Amy Tomson, Leslie Marsh, Isobel Roy, Laura Winckler, Patty Peirsol, Buck Walsky, Chris Cole, Jesse Flores, Ric Martinez, Duke Russell, David Mollett, Karen Larsen, Matt Johnson, Amber Ridington, Howard Brown, Petra Sattler-Smith, John Weir, David Hayden, Evelyn Rousso, David Porter, Susan Elliott, Mary Richards, Don Decker, Michelle Decker, Michael Morris, Joe Senungetuk, Don Mohr, Sheila Wyne, Wendy Ernst Croskrey, Mike Croskrey, KN Goodrich, Don Henry, Ted Herlinger, Carol Crump Bryner, Chris Arend, Marie Ringwald, Elaine Williamson, Kristofer Gills Project Consultants Trevor Boddy, Donald Albrecht, Mike Dunning, Steve Haycox

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Special Thanks to: Barnes Architecture, Alaska Private Lodging, Charles Bettisworth & Co., McCool, Carlson Green, Architects, The Center for Visual Art of Alaska, Mayer Sattler-Smith, Northern Land Use Research

Introduction The Hut That Shaped a Nation

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Portable architecture was the first fully manmade and inhabited form of architecture. Over millions of years, it has evolved and has also often been rejected in favor of permanent buildings. Today architecture and permanence are treated as synonyms. The Great Pyramids of Giza are listed as one of the Seven Wonders; medieval cathedrals are celebrated in art history books. These structures are admired because they are grand, and because of their longevity. The first forms of architecture responded to temporality and, often, portability, serving the mobility of nomadic peoples. Man’s earliest ancestors sought protection from the elements and predators in natural shelters such as caves and rock overhangs. Gradually, they learned to improve their caves with inlaid stone floors, walls at the entrances, and fireplaces. But man was a hunter-gatherer and needed to follow his food. So man invented the hut—a small, humble dwelling of simple construction with a simple roof. Evidence of a wooden hut was found at Terra Amata near Nice in France, dating back to the Mindel Glaciation between 450,000 and 380,000 BCE. The hut included a hearth and fireplace and was made by bracing upright branches within a circle of large and small stones. Multiplefamily huts from the Stone Age (ca. 10,000 BCE) have also been discovered. Two huts at the Kostienki site near Alexandrova in the Ukraine accommodated the entire extended

family, one of them measuring more than a hundred feet in length and containing ten small hearths in a row. The basic hut then remained virtually unchanged for a million years. In the 1600s huts were still used all around the world. The sheepherders of the Sahara Desert built new homes every time their animals moved to a new place. Native Americans in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were experts at building structures from readily available materials that provided sophisticated, and sometimes moveable, shelter. Some nomadic Native Americans who inhabited the Great Plains lived in portable coneshaped structures called tipis, from ti, which means “dwelling,” and pi, meaning “used for,” in the Sioux language. The dwellings were built by stretching tanned buffalo hides around a frame, which was made of long, vertical poles that leaned inward and joined at the top. When the buffalo migrated, the tribes, following their food source, took down the tipis; domesticated dogs dragged the tipi poles and the skin coverings to the next location—not an easy task. The Iroquois tribes in central New York state, along the St. Lawrence River and the northern shore of Lake Ontario in the sixteenth century and beyond, called themselves Haudenosaunee (“People building a longhouse”). Several families lived in a longhouse with separate family units connected by a continuous passageway. Over time,

Bomber pilots receiving instruction from Col. W. O. Eareckson, Umnak Island, AK, August 20, 1942

longhouses could be extended as needed, with new family sections added at each end. Some excavations of former Iroquoian town sites have revealed longhouses measuring as long as four hundred feet. Longhouses were built of saplings—large ones served as posts, flexible ones formed the rounded roof. From the end of the last Ice Age to the early nineteenth century, when lumber and metal were favored for most structures, the best-known temporary house type of the Arctic region was the igloo, derived from the Inuit word igdlu meaning “house,” a winter house built of the area’s most common material: snow. Snow is packed and cut into blocks for stacking in rows in an upward spiral. The spiral slopes inward toward the top and is capped by a single block. Entry is through a short tunnel made of snow blocks with a rounded roof. Of all the native dwellings of North America, wooden plank houses of the northwest coast most closely resembled Western architecture, combining aesthetic considerations in addition to functional ones. Built in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries of long boards of cedar, the plank houses had a rectangular shape with a sloping roof and faced the sea or river. The direction of the facade was a typological requirement for the dwellers because they wanted to face the water, which was a source of life—providing food and other basic needs—for them. But even plank houses were temporary, used only from fall to spring. In summer, when communities moved into the forests for fishing and berry gathering, people removed the planks and carried them inland to make temporary shelters there.

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In the 1860s the Hudson Bay Company built a chain of retail stores in British Columbia and Alaska to serve miners during the Gold Rush. In doing so, they invented a building form. The Hudson Bay Company building was a log structure called the Red-river Frame, which adopted the log cabin design that, rather than post-on-sill construction, used logs with dove-tail corners that ran the full length of the wall. The walls were generally twelve to fifteen rounds high, which, combined with a steep-pitch roof, allowed for a spacious attic, often used for the storage of furs and as sleeping quarters for the clerk. These buildings were designed to be erected in remote places. In 1851, British engineers produced a building called the Crystal Palace, which was designed around prefabricated and demountable modules. The Crystal Palace structure was relocated from the site of the 1851 Great Exhibition in central London to Sydenham in Kent, where it was located until its destruction by fire in 1936. Designed by gardener Joseph Paxton, the Crystal Palace has been called “proto-modern architecture” and was widely imitated in Europe and the U.S. Though not unanimously celebrated in its own time—it was nicknamed the “glass monster”—it made pioneering use of cast-iron structure, prefabricated units, and an antecedent glass curtain wall. It covered nineteen acres of ground and was erected in just nine months, a feat that would have been unthinkable just a decade before. Even after one hundred and fifty years, this achievement has not been duplicated. Britain also innovated a smaller-scale portable building in the nineteenth century.

The Manning Portable Colonial Cottage was the first example of a mass-market, demountable building. It was prefabricated, modular, relatively easy to ship, and easy to erect. These buildings were transported all over Britain and into North America, and were also converted into prefabricated churches, hospitals, banks, and other facilities. North America didn’t keep the Cottages for long— the model was abandoned in favor of designs developed and sold via the Sears mail-order catalog, such as the Rudolph house plans (1930–32). Then came the Quonset hut, a key player in the chronology of portable, demountable architecture. The Quonset hut is not unlike its predecessors: for example, it resembled a longhouse, except that Quonsets were metal-clad. But the Quonset hut was not considered architecture. They were created to service the military and the war effort. Particularly after the stress of war, Americans wanted permanence and distance from reminders of the war. They wanted some guarantees. Sure, a Quonset hut provided needed shelter, but few people named it as their first choice for housing. The Quonset hut and its postwar cohort the mobile home were economic solutions. They were less than the Dream. While the world’s remaining nomadic societies still live in portable structures— Bedouin tents, Mongolian yurts (which only take an hour to erect or dismantle), Tuareg mat huts, and Cambodian “houseboats”— Americans do not embrace the concept. Motor homes, perhaps, but only if one can return to bricks and mortar after the drive. While a quarter of all new homes in the U.S.

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are mobile homes, Americans have always wanted to see these types of structures, like the Quonset hut, as temporary fixes until something better came along. To keep them would mean failure. After all, you can paint a picket fence on the side of a Quonset hut, but it still looks like a pop can lying on its side. Today, however, it appears there might be a revival of appreciation for portable architecture. A wide range of forms and sizes are being used in mobile buildings. There are structures that can seat ten thousand people and be erected and dismantled in days. There are tiny structures that celebrate design at the same time that they celebrate simplicity and mobility. Although relatively few industry-produced portable buildings have been designed for a dedicated user with specific needs in mind, and fewer make use of design precedents (like the Quonset hut), recent advances in materials technology and construction techniques have refashioned and repopularized portable architecture. And with the demand for lower-cost alternatives to escalating housing prices in the U.S., many contemporary architects have responded favorably to this trend. The Quonset hut is the portable building that has dominated the twentieth century in the U.S. It may even be said that the Quonset hut is making a comeback, albeit with a facelift. As leading designers today have increasingly incorporated new, lowtech, prefabricated, and portable structures into their architectural vocabulary, it is not preposterous to suggest that, if invented today, the Quonset hut would be given a degree of seriousness, respect, and permanence absent during its initial appearance.

Chapter 1 How the Hut Came to Be

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Chris Chiei

In 1937, President Franklin D. Roosevelt, despite the isolationist sentiment within the population at large, began to prepare the United States for war. Congress authorized an increase in naval appropriation in anticipation, and the Naval Board, in response, recommended the development of twenty-five additional air bases, both in the U.S. and overseas. Included in that list was the shore-based aviation facility at Quonset Point, Rhode Island. The Navy’s Bureau of Yards and Docks began construction on the facility on July 16, 1940. The contract for this work, NOy-4175, was awarded to two organizations—the George A. Fuller and Company and the Merritt-Chapman and Scott Corporation.1 George A. Fuller and Company (hereinafter referred to as Fuller) was one of the largest construction contractors in the U.S. Founded in Chicago in 1882, Fuller led the construction of some of the most important buildings of the twentieth century, such as the Flatiron Building (1902) in New York, an icon of early steel-framed high-rise structures, which served as their headquarters. Fuller also lead the construction of a number of significant Washington landmarks, including the Lincoln Memorial (1918) and the U.S. Supreme Court Building (1933). Fuller’s portfolio also includes significant modern icons such as SOM’s Lever House (1952), Meis van de Rohe’s Seagram Building (1957), and Harrison, Abramovitz & Harris’s United Nations Building (1953).2 The Merritt-Chapman and Scott Corporation (hereinafter referred to as Scott) grew from the mergers of three small salvage operations, the Coastal Wrecking Company

(later reorganized as Merritt’s Wrecking Organization), the Chapman Derrick & Wrecking Company, and T. A. Scott Company. Headquartered in New York City, they established themselves early on as leaders in marine salvage and wrecking operations.3 Following the war, they were involved in such projects as the Throgs Neck Bridge (1961), the Chesapeake Bay Bridge and Tunnel in Virginia (1964), and the Glenn Canyon Dam (1966).4 Together, Fuller and Scott took on the responsibility for the construction of the base at Quonset Point—their first joint-venture project. This 1,192-acre air station eventually included all necessary facilities for two aircraft-carrier groups and two long-range air-patrol squadrons, as well as facilities for complete plane and engine maintenance. Normally, such a project was given two years for completion, but due to the urgent need for additional shore-based naval aviation

Isometric drawing of T-Rib Quonset hut, May 10, 1941

Pamphlet from Quonset Point U.S. Naval Air Station, ca. 1945

facilities, the project was finished in less than one year.5 While the base was being raised at Quonset Point, the British Royal Navy was losing a large number of supply vessels to German U-boats. Convoys carrying supplies from North America to Britain desperately needed antisubmarine escorts, but Royal Navy vessels were in short supply. In a bold step to further break America from its isolationist position, President Roosevelt acted on his own authority to negotiate the Destroyers for Bases Agreement with Britain (1940). The agreement included the transfer of fifty overage U.S. World War I destroyers in exchange for 99-year leases on British naval and air facilities in the Bahamas, Jamaica, St. Lucia, Trinidad, Antigua, and British Guiana. Bases at Newfoundland and the islands of Bermuda were included as gifts. The President justified his actions to Congress, stating: “It is an epochal and far-reaching act of preparation for continental defense in the face of grave danger.”6 Fuller and Scott were informed that construction of the base at Argentia, Newfoundland, and provision of equipment to other bases named in the Destroyers for Bases Agreement would be added to the contract already in place for the construction of Quonset Point. The added value of work would essentially double the original contract sum, reaching a projected cost of over $52 million.7 By March of 1941, the Allies were reaching financial crisis on all fronts. England declared that by June they would no longer be able to purchase supplies and

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Chris Chiei

arms provided by the U.S. Bound by the Neutrality Act of 1939, the U.S. was not permitted to release arms to any warring country except on “cash and carry” terms. Circumventing this legislation would prove critical to sustaining U.S. allies and would be necessary for continued preparation for what appeared to be the inevitable involvement of the U.S. in World War II. President Roosevelt crafted the Lend Lease Act, a bill empowering the president to “sell, transfer title to, lend, lease or otherwise dispose of [articles of defense to] the government of any country whose defense the President deems vital to the defense of the United States.”8 The bill also empowered the President to set the terms of repayment as “in kind or property, or any other direct or indirect benefit which the President deems satisfactory.”9 With little resistance from Congress, the bill passed on March 11, 1941. Seven billion dollars were appropriated for its initial funding. Soon thereafter, Great Britain transferred ownership of properties at Gareloch and Stanraer, in Scotland, and Londonderry and Enniskillen, in Northern Ireland, to be used by the U.S. as forward bases (FOB).10 Since material resources and local labor were all but drained from the British Empire, the U.S. military had no other choice than to supply prefabricated building systems shipped from the U.S. to house their troops. Quonset Point was selected as the assembly port for all supplies and materials required for the construction of these bases.11 At that time, the base at Quonset Point was nearly complete and Fuller and Scott’s work on supplies for Argentia was

moving forward.12 Admiral Ben Moreell, chief of the Bureau of Yards and Docks, called a meeting with representatives of Fuller and Scott and Captain R. V. Miller, officer-incharge of construction at Quonset, and revealed the Navy’s desire to develop and produce a new prefabricated hut system to shelter troops abroad.13 These buildings would need to be designed for mass production, able to be portable, erected and knocked down quickly and easily, adaptable to any climate and geography, and provide soldiers with the most protection and comfort possible.14 The mass production of these units and delivery of all other equipment to these advanced bases (AOB),15 were added to the NOy-4175 contract, now under the title of Temporary Aviation Facilities (TAF). The project, now estimated at $20.5 million, was officially set in motion, and the first shipment of huts and supplies needed to be ready by June 1.16

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How the Hut Came to Be

Fully aware of the deadline at hand, the contractors and the Navy moved quickly to discuss possible locations for the mass production and shipment of building units. It appeared that there were no facilities at Quonset Point that could handle or house such a large operation. With the pier at Quonset Point nearing completion and the railroad spur linking the pier to West Davisville, Rhode Island, now complete, the logical solution was to place the factory outside the existing base at a point along the tracks. This would allow raw materials to arrive via the adjacent New Haven railroad line and the completed units to be shipped across land by rail and overseas by barge. Designing the Hut On March 30, 1941, the Navy gave the official go-ahead to proceed with work on TAF. With an 85-acre tract of land purchased in

View from above: the factory at West Davisville, ca. 1942

ABOVE: Otto Brandenberger, ca. 1963; OPPOSITE: Otto Brandenberger’s resume, ca. 1953

West Davisville, Fuller’s Engineering team dove into the design of a one-story factory building. According to Fuller the “plans were quickly created, construction gangs were organized, production lines laid out, and storage areas developed. Within forty-eight hours both equipment and material were rolling into the site. Nine days later the first portion of the plant was put into operation.”17 While factory walls were rising at West Davisville, Fuller was assembling an architectural design team to work specifically on the hut design. Otto Brandenberger, the only licensed architect in the group, was selected as the team leader. The other three men, Robert McDonnell, Tomasino Secondino, and Dominic Urgo, would be design and production support.18 Brandenberger was, by all accounts, a leader. Born on March 9, 1894, he was the second of nine children born to Otto Brandenberger, Sr., a police officer, and Louise Knecht. He studied architecture at the Zurich Technical Institute (several of his relatives had been architects) and, following his older cousin Ernest Strassle, also an architect, immigrated to the U.S. in 1913.19 In 1917 Brandenberger enlisted in the U.S. Army in Philadelphia; he reenlisted three years later and eventually attained the rank of sergeant. During the Depression years, he worked for the Works Progress Administration (WPA), generating and reviewing architectural plans of historic New Jersey buildings and the Empire State Building, respectively. He also designed a few residential and small-business buildings in New Jersey before going to work for Fuller.

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McDonnell described Brandenberger and the Quonset design team as “a close knit group and each . . . was equally talented.”20 The four members of the team worked on nearly every phase together. McDonnell described Brandenberger as the team’s true leader: “We did what he told us to do. If anybody gets the credit, it should be Otto Brandenberger.”21 The team was directed to use the British Nissen hut as the starting point for their design. Invented by Lt. Col. Peter Norman Nissen (1871–1930) of the British Royal Engineers, the Nissen hut represented a more suitable alternative to the tent in World War I as it could be used for a variety of functions and was a bit more impervious to weather. Though simple in concept, its construction was more labor intensive than was practical at times. The genesis of Nissen’s semicircular hut system is said to have been in 1916, while he was a soldier at a military camp in Ypres, Belgium. Inspired by a similar structure that enclosed a hockey rink at Queen’s College in Ontario, he drew a series of sketches showing how the principles of that edifice could apply to a military hut. Upon approval of his ideas by his superior officer, Nissen was transferred to the Twenty-ninth Company Royal Engineers’ general headquarters where he began work on his design. After three major prototypes, input from his superiors, and modifications made after field use, a 16' x 27’, semicircular, steel-arched structure with corrugated metal cladding inside and out was finalized. This hut became known as the Nissen Bow Hut.

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How the Hut Came to Be

Nissen also created a 20' x 60' hut known as the Nissen Hospital Hut. More than a hundred thousand Nissen Bow Huts and ten thousand Hospital Huts were fabricated to support British troops during World War I.22 In some circles, these huts are believed to be the first complete, mass-produced building.23 The Nissen hut was considered the leader of hut technology used by either side in World War I and was so successful that it became the only hut mass-produced by the British government toward the end of the war. Nissen was given full credit for his design by the British Army and, as policy permitted, he patented the hut in numerous countries including Great Britain, the U.S., Australia, Canada, New Zealand, Russia, Argentina, South Africa, Belgium, and France. However, in the years that followed, disputes arose over the small royalties offered by the British Government, who later sold these huts to other countries without the consent of, or compensation to, Nissen.24 Brandenberger’s team used the Nissen hut as their starting point. The Navy had instructed them to comply with only two LEFT: Men in Ireland erect a Nissen hut, March 25, 1942; RIGHT: U.S. Troops march by Nissen huts, Ireland, February 1942

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conditions: the new huts had to be arch shaped, for strength and deflection of shell fragments, and able to be quickly and simply assembled.25 While factory walls were rising to house the production of the new huts, the team worked around the clock on the development of the original version of the Quonset hut, later identified as the T-Rib Quonset. According to Fuller and McDonnell, the team analyzed Nissen’s design and immediately abandoned all but its general shape. Fuller claimed, “The British had been on the right track but too many gadgets slowed erection; and with no insulation between inner and outer metal shells the Nissen huts were hot in the summer and cold in the winter.”26 Fuller’s assessment was correct, but Fuller and McDonnell’s claim of an almost complete redesign of the hut is slightly exaggerated; there were striking similarities in the structural system and materials used in both. Where Brandenberger’s team truly advanced beyond the Nissen hut was in the design of the hut’s interior. Both systems were built from the inside out—first laying the interior wall against the inner flange of

the T-Rib arch and then working out to the corrugated metal exterior. The last version of Nissen’s design utilized an interior wall surface of corrugated metal panels with ribs oriented horizontally. The panels were strapped tight to the arch flange by metal cables run radially over the top. Corrugated metal strips, nicknamed “the slide,” were also used to join and seal one panel to the next. This assembly was deemed overly complicated by Brandenberger’s team. Furthermore, the insulating qualities of Nissen’s hut depended solely on the air space remaining between the inner and outer metal sheet. This may have been an acceptable solution for a war fought in the temperate climates of central Europe, but it would not adapt itself well to the arctic cold of Newfoundland or the desert heat of the Sahara. Brandenberger’s team proposed a thin, lightweight pressed-wood lining of 3/16-inch Masonite held to the rib flange with a attachment clip, and then overlaid with a one-inch-thick layer of wading paper insulation. According to Fuller, the “new designs were worked out and experimental huts were made by hand, erected, tested, revised, and improved until, by the time the first section of the plant was ready, a light, easily crated and easily erected assembly had been perfected.”27 The first known construction drawings for the T-Rib Quonset were submitted by Brandenberger’s team on April 4, 1941.28 Although the official drawing title read “16' x 36' Hut,” the contract correspondence accompanying the drawing described the enclosure as a “Nissen type hut for Temporary Aviation Facilities.”29

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How the Hut Came to Be

On April 10, 1941, the Bureau of Yards and Docks, in the Partial Summary of Equipment, officially authorized an order of 2,488 “Nissen” huts for the Scotland and Northern Ireland bases.30 Not long after, Lieutenant Commander E. S. Huntington increased the order to 4,000 huts, then again to 8,000 huts. In order to keep pace with the growing requests for huts and the shorter turnaround time allowed to produce them, Fuller placed large quantities of building components on order while design refinements were still being tested and approved. One production detail of particular concern was the corrugated-metal siding of the hut exterior. The team wanted to orient the ribs of the corrugation parallel to the radius of the building as in the Nissen hut. This was a logical decision for shedding water, but a problematic one for production. At that time, techniques for bending sheet metal in one direction, as in the case of the corrugated sheet, was commonplace. To bend that same material, once again, at an angle perpendicular to the first, required a level of controlled deformation that proved difficult to execute. The problem was finally solved by a Fuller subcontractor, the Anderson Sheet Metal Company of Providence, who proposed a system in which the sheet metal was passed through large rollers multiple times. Although the solution was a success, the sound generated from the process resulted in one of the least desirable work environments on the production line. McDonnell recalled, “The noise it made! All kinds of tortured squealing! You’d go bananas if you didn’t keep you ears plugged.”31

CLOCKWISE FROM LEFT: Corrugated metal is run through rollers at the factory for use on T-Rib Quonset huts, Davisville, RI, ca. 1941; Factory workers and engineers test build a T-Rib Quonset hut, West Davisville, RI, ca. 1941; Quonset huts ready to ship out by barge from Quonset Point, ca. 1941; Contract correspondence increasing the order for Quonset huts (note continued use of the term “Nissen Hut”), June 21, 1941

A final set of construction drawings was submitted by Brandenberger’s team on May 15, 1941. All drawings were examined, approved by Captain Miller, and returned a week later with signatures affixed, ready to release for fabrication.32 These approvals seem to have been a formality considering that the production line was already up and running. On June 11, 1941, the vessel Empire Gull docked at the Quonset Point pier. A total of 450,000 cubic yards of materials and supplies, of an estimated value of almost $1.2 million, was prepared for loading. Included were a number of crates containing the first run of huts to leave the assembly line. In less than one month’s time, Fuller had created a fully operational, mass-production facility generating huts on a scale that represented an annual output of $22 million per year.33 Specialty Huts Brandenberger’s team subsequently adapted the T-Rib Quonset huts to specialized functions. Each specialized hut plan indicated the building modifications necessary to make the conversion and the location of equipment necessary for that particular design. Included were provisions for interior partitions, dormer windows, and concrete floors. Adjustments were made for huts sent to tropical climates in the form of increased venting, watercollection troughs, and overhangs created by inset bulkheads. In the tropical unit, the oil heater and vent stack were replaced by a third ventilator. Additional components for specialized huts were crated separately and shipped along with standardized units as

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How the Hut Came to Be

required. In total, forty-one design variations, including a dispensary/surgical hut, a laboratory, laundry facility, pharmacy, dental facility, hospital ward, barbershop, morgue, guard house, and tailor shop, served a multitude of needs for the military’s forward bases. Each hut cost between $800 and $1,100 to produce.34 In addition to specialized designs, numerous field modifications were commonly made to Quonset huts once they arrived at their destination. In Alaska, residual framing lumber was often used to create arctic entries, separate enclosed entrances that trapped the cold air from entering the Quonset hut itself, while in the tropics, numerous configurations for venting and shading were adapted as necessary. Although the huts were conceived as structures requiring no foundation, foundations were sometimes added, varying greatly depending on the slope of the site, the conditions of soils, the availability of local materials, and the urgency of construction. When built as part of larger facilities, huts were used in part, in whole, or in multiple units. Earlier versions rolled off the assembly line unpainted; later versions would include a factory-applied coat of olive-drab paint. To reduce the chance of being spotted from the air, most all were painted or repainted onsite to blend with the local landscape.35 Design Refinements On May 23, 1941, Admiral Moreell forwarded six full sets of construction drawings of the T-Rib Quonset, under the heading “Nissen Huts,” to the commanding general of the

Specialized hut design for a Tailor Shop, October 15, 1941; PREVIOUS SPREAD: Isometric drawing of T-Rib Quonset hut, May 10, 1941.

U.S. Marine Barracks at Quantico, Virginia.36 The Office of the Quartermaster was quick to reply with a request that 279 of these huts be fabricated and shipped to various Marine Corps bases throughout the country.37 Twenty of these huts were requested as 16' x 20' “Nissen” huts; the remainder were 16' x 36'.38 While that first shipment of huts was sailing East across the Atlantic, huts fabricated for the U.S. Marines were already being erected at Quantico and Parris Island, South Carolina. Feedback from the field, such as the memorandum issued by Major D. W. Hopkins at the Training Center for the Marine Barracks at Quantico that commented on various aspects of the erection of the huts like the ideal number of builders (ten) and the storage needs of the materials, coupled with lessons learned on the production line prompted continued improvements in the detailing, fabricating, and crating of T-Rib Quonset huts.39 The original crating process, for example, required twelve crates, which, even without the contents, weighed 3,212 pounds. In a letter issued on August 8, 1941 to Admiral

Moreell, a new crating process was revealed— now utilizing bailing wire for rigid components and a waterproof paper wrap for insulation. The revised process eliminated all but three of the original twelve crates.40 A Hut Gets A Name The soon-to-be armada of these huts, assembled throughout the world, did not yet have an official name. Although Brandenberger’s drawings were only titled “Standard Hut,” for the original 16' x 36' and the 16' x 20' Quonset designs, numerous contract correspondences continued to refer to Brandenberger’s design as “Nissen hut.” Because of the similarities of the designs and common misuse of the Nissen name, on July 18, 1941, Lieutenant Commander E. S. Huntington issued a short memo on behalf of Admiral Moreell. His letter officially embraced and enforced the name “Quonset hut”: “In order to avoid possible difficulties, which might arise over the continued use of the designation ‘Nissen’ Huts, in view of existing patents, it is requested that in the future the hut be referred to as the Quonset Hut on all drawings, in correspondence and in

LEFT: Tropical version of Stran-Steel Quonset with additional adaptations of a wood-stilt foundation and side entry door, November 1945; RIGHT: Quonset huts at Casco Cove with arctic entries, Attu Island, AK, January 10, 1944

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How the Hut Came to Be

Planning Instructions for Quonset Camp PART I A 16' x 36' standard hut provides quarters for 10 enlisted men or 5–7 officers. The approximate total for all types of huts for a complete encampment is found by dividing the number of men to be accommodated by 4.

ADAPTING TO THE TROPICS In tropical regions it may be desirable to omit the embankments and support the hut on blocks thereby permitting circulation of air beneath the hut, preventing flooding, and reducing termite damage.

PART II The huts should be grouped in units according to the master plan for advanced bases. Increasing the distance between units or slightly rearranging the theoretical layout plan to suit the site is permissible. The essential feature of scattering units to prevent more than one possible hit in a single pass of a plane should however be adhered to.

PROTECTING AGAINST THE COLD In cold climates, it may be found desirable to prevent heat loss and dampness caused by lack of a perfect fit of the floor panels. A suggested method is to place a layer of building or tarred paper over the floor panels and cover with any standard flooring material. This may be done during or after construction of the hut.43

PROTECTION AGAINST BOMBING Protection from bomb blasts and splinters may be provided by banking earth over part of the shelter. The covering should be carried to a height of 3'–6" above the floor level and sloped back at about 15 degrees (1 to 4 slope) angle to ground level. Men in bunks are thereby protected against the effect of bursts at a distance but not against direct hits or near misses. A similar covering is desirable at the rear bulkhead. The entrance may be protected by a wall, embankment, or by having the entrance somewhat below ground.

Aerial view of Amchitka Island, Alaska, December 22, 1943

Contract correspondence giving the Quonset hut its official name, July 18, 1941

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How the Hut Came to Be

conversations.”41 There were approximately 8,200 T-Rib Quonset huts produced by Fuller before the end of 1941.42 Guidelines—a few points from which are outlined on page 14—were established by the Navy for the proper planning of a Quonset hut camp. Giants in the Building Industry A number of giants in the building industry were called into service in the production of all versions of the Quonset. Among them were Carnegie-Illinois Steel Corporation and

LEFT: Kimsul logo, ca. 1945; RIGHT: Western Union telegram from Rear Admiral Ben Morrell to KimberlyClark Corporation expressing appreciation for the performance of Kimsul insulation supplied for Quonset huts

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Bethlehem Steel Company, suppliers of steelarched tees; Masonite Corporation, provider of tempered presswood; Kimberly-Clark Corporation, developer of an insulation product named Kimsul; and Libby Owen Ford, outfitter of shatter-proof panes for bulkhead windows used at each end of the T-Rib Quonset. Quonset Redesign Fuller’s team continued to generate additional designs for specialized T-Rib Quonsets. While doing so it became apparent

that equipment placed along curving walls would result in a loss of valuable floor space. Since the arch of the Quonset extended to the floor, furniture such beds, sinks, and washing machines had to be moved inward until they abutted the curve at the top edge of the unit. Even tall cabinets designed for field construction were not significantly adapted to the Quonset’s shape. Reclaiming this space would necessitate changing the overall form of the building. Exactly when the Navy and/or Fuller made the decision to redesign the T-Rib Quonset is unclear. A correspondence issued on September 23, 1941 by the Chief of the Bureau of Yards and Docks includes purchases to be made for 2,000 Stran-Steel hut frames, with the option to increase the order to 4,000.44 This is the first record found indicating a completely new direction in design. At that time, Stran-Steel framing was already being specified for building extensions added to T-Rib Quonsets.45 It is possible this was done to test the efficiency of the material before embracing it as a central component in a redesign. Stran-Steel’s framing system is essentially two lightweight steel channels that are tack welded back to back to form an Ishaped member. The gap between channels served as their patented nailing groove, serpentine in shape, into which nails were driven and deformed until clinched by friction. Revolutionary in concept, the system eliminated the need for the numerous bolted connections typically associated with steel framing of the era. Lighter in weight and faster to erect, Stran-Steel quickly outperformed the T-Rib frame when field tested.

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How the Hut Came to Be

The company, Stran-Steel, a subsidiary of the Great Lakes Steel Corporation, had established itself in the market of lightweight steel framing prior to World War II. Intended for residential applications, this product made its international debut at the Chicago World Fair in 1933. In the Homes of Tomorrow exhibit, the Good Housekeeping– Stran-Steel House served as testimony that a lightweight steel framing system “could be more flexible than wood, lighter, and twice as strong.”46 As a premium-priced material, it found limited acceptance in the construction of high-end homes. Although a number of residential clients could afford the advantages of this dimensionally stable, fireproof system, the runs of material were too small to take advantage of greater efficiencies accomplished by mass production. Expansion of their market to include multiple housing projects increased their total production numbers, which, in turn, led to a more affordable product. When fully embraced as

Detail of Stran-Steel Rib, 1941

the central component of the redesign, StranSteel would shift its market almost entirely to the military. A single drawing of the redesign, simply titled “Redesign of 16' x 36' Quonset Hut,”47 was approved in late October of 1941. In the title block, the initials O. B.—assumed to be those of the team leader, Otto Brandenberger—appear as both the designer and draftsman. This new version utilizing Stran-Steel framing clearly illustrated a ground-up revised design that would advance the Quonset hut beyond the shadow of its Nissen predecessor. The basic strategy kept the 16' x 36' footprint of the T-Rib design but introduced a segmented arch with four-

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How the Hut Came to Be

foot vertical sidewalls. The new arch, assembled in two sections instead of three, reduced erection time, weighed less, and required fewer fasteners. Exactly when the T-Rib Quonset was phased out, and the Redesign introduced, is not clear. According to the Navy, details for the new design were tested by erecting units near the factory. At some point in the closing months of 1941, the new system must have been accepted and a leap of faith made for full-blown mass production. This version of the Quonset hut cost just more than $1,300 to produce. A larger variation of the Redesign, 24' wide with varying lengths, was also produced.

Front-page headline of Fairbanks Daily NewsMiner, December 7, 1941; OPPOSITE: Stran-Steel advertisement

Construction drawing of 16' x 36' Quonset hut Redesign, approved October 21, 1941

Erection of Quonset Redesign, Nome, AK, ca. 1944; BOTTOM RIGHT: Newly completed Quonset Redesign, Ladd Field (Ft. Wainwright), Fairbanks, AK, ca. 1942

War On the morning of December 7, 1941, the Japanese military led an unprovoked attack on Pearl Harbor and nearly destroyed the Hawaiian base. Four battleships were sunk, fifteen others were severely damaged, and 2,403 people were dead. The following day the U.S. officially declared war on Japan; three days later Germany declared war on the U.S. After three days passed, Admiral Moreell authorized an account of $10 million to insure uninterrupted purchase of materials for advanced bases. The Passive Defense Quonset (PDQ) account would place funds at

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How the Hut Came to Be

the discretion of the officer-in-charge of construction.48 With new funds available, demands soon followed. By mid-January requests for Quonset huts, made by Admiral Moreell, increased from forty units to onehundred-fifty units per day.49 Expecting production to continue through June, leaders authorized the purchase of materials to expand the operation: the first plant was enlarged and a second plant was erected at West Davisville. According to Fuller, new production demands were met within a week. Had the first Redesign huts rolled off the assembly line in that third week in January, it is conceivable that 23,850 huts could have

Enlisted men erecting a 20' x 48' Stran-Steel Quonset hut, Bell’s Flats, Kodiak, Alaska, ca. 1944

been fabricated by June 30, 1942. The military estimates that 25,000 of the Redesign were produced in total.50 In early 1942, TAF and Quonset Point were struggling to meet demands for materials and trained personnel for advanced bases. The production of huts alone far exceeded the capacity the Navy wished to or could handle internally. A new program, Advanced Base Depot (ABD), was established on February 27, 1942, absorbing the facility at West Davisville and expanding the operation north and west of Naval Air Station (NAS), Quonset Point. New emphasis was placed on the purchasing, storing, and shipping of materials and equipment for the construction of advanced bases; also emphasized was training and outfitting men for construction battalions. The role of manufacturing would be phased out altogether at Quonset Point.51 The manufacturing of Quonset huts was dispersed to factories throughout the nation. For example, a purchase order, dated July 24, 1942, relating to procurement of complete Quonset units, indicates a source other than the factory at West Davisville. Outlined on Fuller/Scott’s order form is a four-page specification for the New Arched Rib Tropical Stran-Steel Hut, the 20' x 48' version of the Quonset to follow the Redesign, to be designed and manufactured by the StranSteel Division of the Great Lakes Steel Corporation.52 It is no surprise that Stran-Steel was awarded the contract to take over production of the Quonset hut. By the beginning of 1942, their steel had established itself as an inseparable component of the design, and they,

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How the Hut Came to Be

unlike Fuller and Scott, were fully immersed in the business of mass production. By subcontracting the hut, Fuller and Scott could now focus on the construction of bases at ABD and general contracting supplies for forward bases. And, freed from the business of manufacturing, the Navy could dedicate that energy toward military duties and procure huts the same way they would any other piece of equipment. Fuller produced a total of 32,352 Quonset huts (both the T-Rib and the Redesign) at the West Davisville factory before turning the reins over to Stran-Steel. At its peak, Fuller’s factory employed 3,000 men, most recruited from building trades at Quonset Point.53 According to Fuller, “improvements in production methods were made constantly and costs were steadily reduced. After fifteen months, the initial cost was reduced sixty percent, and the shipping weight about thirty-five percent.”54 By the end of 1942, the knowledge and experience in Quonset hut construction acquired by Fuller were fully handed over to Stran-Steel, and the factory was reclaimed as a warehouse. The new Stran-Steel design, now called New Arch Rib Stran-Steel Hut (also the SSAR Hut), continued to be identified as “Quonset hut.” In addition to its expanded footprint, the most visible difference between the Stran-Steel hut and its predecessor, the Redesign, was the shape of the arch—the Stran-Steel hut reverted back to the fullarched rib present in the T-Rib Quonset. Although some usable floor space was compromised, the ease of fabrication and erection, its small size when crated (270–325

OPPOSITE TOP: Homoja Village served as quarters for married naval personnel and was built to accommodate one hundred families, Annapolis, MD, ca. 1944; OPPOSITE BOTTOM: Wash day at the Driscoll Home; Mrs. Frank Driscoll, wife of RM 3/c Frank Driscoll, formerly of Newark, NJ, hangs clothes on the line alongside her hut. Eugene, age three, hides his head on his mother’s skirt, November 12, 1945.

cubic feet versus the 450 cubic feet required for the Redesign), and lighter shipping weight (Stran-Steel’s structural system was pushed to reduce the overall steel weight from four tons to three tons) justified the larger size.55 Like the T-Rib Quonset, the StranSteel hut was clad with curved corrugated metal applied vertically to the arch. A new cladding system was shortly introduced using the factory-curved panel at the ridge but with sheets oriented horizontally along the remaining sidewalls. Although not an ideal solution for shedding water and snow, these flat, corrugated sheets could be acquired from stock, cut, and, without factory modification, shipped to a site in small bundles. Finally perfected, the military now had a structure in the Stran-Steel hut that could be put up in one day by ten men and was able to be erected with hand tools; it required no special skills to construct, and when crated, it was lighter and took up less shipping space than canvas tents with wooden floors and frames that housed an equal number of soldiers.56 By the end of World War II, approximately 120,000 Stran-Steel huts had been produced and shipped to almost every corner of the globe. Designed to serve eighty-six official uses, and applied to many more, these huts represented a refinement in thinking that spanned two world wars. When counted with Brandenberger’s T-Rib Quonset and the Quonset Redesign, there were more than 153,000 lightweight, prefabricated units of the Quonset deployed and erected in support American troops in World War II.57

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Chris Chiei

Quonsets on the Home Front During the war, the separation of soldiers from their families while on leave from combat resulted in a significant morale problem for the Navy. After the attack on Pearl Harbor, the U.S. government shifted its housing priority to civilian workers relocated to defense production facilities. During this period, naval ships periodically returned to the U.S. for repair, but military personnel were often assigned to full-time advanced training—the second, specialized stage of military training within a chosen Military Occupational Specialty (MOS)—making it impossible for them to travel to see their families. The men who had family visit them at the base quickly realized that available housing was often substandard and always expensive. The Navy acknowledged the need to provide family housing for these soldiers and for returning soldiers who were assigned to shore duty or in need of rehabilitation.58 In response to this situation, the Secretary of the Navy approved the construction of the first thousand family units of the Navy’s Homoja housing program on September 27, 1943.59 The Quonset hut was selected as the standard single-family building unit for the program. In order to accommodate transient naval personnel and their families, each hut was converted into a fully furnished two-bedroom home complete with kitchen, toilet facility, and bath. Huts were erected in communities on naval bases throughout the U.S. Most were built on the West Coast where the need was the greatest. From September 1943 until V-J Day, August 6, 1945, the Navy completed 6,285 Homoja huts at a total cost of over $21 million,

Postcard of Seabees erecting a Quonset hut at Camp Endicott, RI,

averaging $3,350 per family unit, including utilities, temporary walks and roads, and furniture.60

ca. 1942

We Build, We Fight: The Seabees Prior to World War II, the Navy depended almost solely upon civilian contractors to build and supply military installations in places outside of the U.S. This became problematic as bases were erected in locations where civilians had the potential to be harmed. Not only were these men unarmed and inexperienced in military action, as civilians they were forbidden to take up arms by international law. If they were captured while contributing to the defense of a military facility, they were likely to be treated as guerrillas and executed. This, unfortunately,

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occurred at Wake Island in the North Pacific, Cavite Island in the Philippines, and Guam.61 Following the passage of the Destroyers for Bases Act in 1940, a significant amount of advanced-base construction was soon underway. With the Japanese Imperial Army advancing on the Pacific and the German Army moving through Europe, it was clearly unwise to continue with civilian labor at installations abroad.62 On December 28, 1941, Admiral Moreell wrote a letter to the Navy’s Bureau of Navigations requesting the authority to recruit men from various building trades to form a naval construction battalion. These men would be trained for military action as well as in specialized skills necessary for the construction of advanced bases.

Authorization was granted.63 These men, at the request of Admiral Moreell, were given the name Seabees, a phonetic pronunciation of the initials of Construction Battalion (CB). Their insignia, an angry fighting bee wielding tools and weapons, was designed by Frank J. Iafrate, an engineering clerk at Camp Endicott, Davisville. Their official motto was Construimus Batuimus, Latin for “We Build, We Fight.” The Seabees recruited men between the ages of 17 to 38, of all trades.64 It was the Navy Seabees that acquired responsibility for building Quonset huts throughout the world. A simple erection manual was part of each Quonset shipment, and each Seabee was trained in proper erection procedure. In January of 1942, the construction battalion BOBCAT became the first Seabee unit to be trained in Quonset hut fabrication procedures at Quonset Point. Immediately following training, they were shipped to Bora-Bora to construct a fueling station.65 Huts on the Go The Seabees, much like other construction groups, developed their own methods of erecting, transporting, and adapting huts to various climates and conditions. The Ninetieth Seabees, for instance, developed a time-saving method of pouring concrete slabs at one location, erecting hut frames at another, and then hand carrying huts to their foundation; the Ninetieth Seabees successfully used this method at Pearl Harbor66 and Iwo Jima.67 In Alaska, a civilian contractor for the Navy developed a sled system to help transport fully erected Quonset huts to

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How the Hut Came to Be

remote drilling sites near the Naval Arctic Research Laboratory in Barrow. A series of sled runners was bolted through the hut’s floor to a temporary truss that spanned and supported its full length. Once dragged to the final location, the runners and truss were removed, returned, and reused.68 When huts remained on sled runners as mobile camps, they were referred to as “wannigans.” Some of these systems incorporated empty oil drums as pontoons for crossing streams. The Marines also had to be clever in solving problems related to the transportation of Quonset huts. In 1948 at Camp Pendelton, California, orders were given to begin dismantling nearby Camp DeLuz. The maintenance battalion at Camp Pendelton was charged with relocating ten of its Quonset huts. Under the direction of Colonel C. H. Shuey, Master Sergeant Kenning and his maintenance staff developed a reusable steel semi-trailer system for the transport of 20' x 48' huts. Using stock steel components and wheels from a heavy-equipment vehicle, a team of four welders fabricated the semitrailer system in eight days. The first test run took place on October 7, 1948. Using a 20-B crane, a complete hut was lifted and secured to the trailer. When pulled by a KR-10 tractor, the whole assembly cruised to its new location at an average speed of twenty to twentyfive miles per hour. This first trial run was successfully completed in five hours.69 Whether they were relocated or left where built, the Quonset hut became a fixture of war. Soldiers, especially, were familiar with the arched structure that housed them and served as places for strategizing,

working, worshipping, training, eating, and more. While many Quonset huts were sent with soldiers to serve abroad, many were shipped to bases in the homeland—to help soldiers prepare for war and to protect the U.S. from foreign attack. This was the beginning of a long history of Quonset huts in America—one Otto Brandenberger and his team could not have imagined when they first designed the hut.

CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT: Ninetieth Seabees carry a Quonset hut to its foundation, Pearl Harbor Navy Yard, HI, ca. 1944; A Stran-Steel Quonset hut is transported by custom bobsled, Barrow, AK, 1946; Stran-Steel Quonset Huts moved by custom-made trailer, Camp Pendleton, CA, October 11, 1948

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Chapter 2 Quonsets, Alaska, and World War II

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Steven Haycox

Quonset huts, although meant to be temporary structures, were shipped all over the world and never dismantled in some locations. As a result, they were incorporated into the long-term built environment. Alaska, due to its surprisingly significant strategic significance in World War II, was one of the remote places that became populated by Quonset huts.

Few episodes in Alaska’s history have had a more profound impact in shaping the territory’s development and character than World War II. Preceding the war, Alaska was an isolated wilderness populated by thirty thousand native Alaskans and thirty thousand non-natives living in more than two hundred widely separated and remote villages, most with no road access. There, they pursued a traditional lifestyle, including substantial harvesting of subsistence resources and building a new society on the last frontier— mainly in scores of small towns scattered across the Alaskan landscape, far removed from the American mainstream. The war brought fundamental economic change to Alaska. Vastly increased federal spending injected ample new money into the region, creating jobs and attracting a substantial new non-native population. During the war, the United States military spent nearly $3 billion in Alaska. Three hundred military installations were constructed; 300,000 military personnel served in the territory, 150,000 of them full-time soldiers. Tens of thousands of civilians also moved to the region to work for the military. At the same

time, numerous federal agencies increased the scope of their activities in the territory: these included the Bureau of Indian Affairs, the National Park Service, and the U.S. Geological Survey. From 1940, federal spending became the major aspect of Alaska’s economic base, usurping salmon canning, which was the most important economic activity in Alaska before the war. Apart from a rare few individuals— foremost among them, William “Billy” Mitchell of the Army Air Service—military and political leaders did not foresee a major military role for Alaska before World War II. Alaska, far from the traditional theaters of war and politics and physically difficult to access, seemed strategically insignificant. Events occurring far from Alaska in distance and time determined its unexpected and historic role in the war. In the aftermath of World War I, world leaders sought means for preventing further war and alternative methods of resolving international conflict. A number of international agreements followed, including the Five-Power Treaty, a naval disarmament treaty that emerged from conferences

Pilots and navigators leaving their hut, Umnak Island, AK, ca. 1943

Locations of military installations in Alaska during WW II

in Washington, D.C., in 1921 and 1922. According to the agreement, the U.S., Great Britain, France, Italy, and Japan established a naval armament ratio between themselves of 5:5:3:3:1, respectively, with Japan allowed only 20 percent of the naval-arms capability of the U.S. To persuade Japan to accept this disadvantageous relationship, the U.S. agreed not to fortify or militarize Alaska. After World War I, Japan embarked on a course of imperialist expansion, using both diplomatic and military means to exert control over parts of the Asian mainland. Japan increasingly began to see itself as the protector and champion of Asian interests against the West, inevitably conflicting with the Western powers. Japan’s conquest of Nanking by 1938 and Hitler’s violation of the Munich Pact (signed September 29, 1938) in early 1939 persuaded many American military leaders that the U.S. must prepare for possible war. Among other activities, the U.S. Navy reevaluated its position in the Aleutians and drew up proposals in 1938 for construction of naval bases at Sitka, Kodiak,

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and Dutch Harbor. Little was done, however, until in September 1939, when, following the signing of a nonaggression pact with the Soviet Union, Germany invaded Poland. Moreover, the deliberate violation of Poland’s sovereignty and England’s necessary declaration of war against Germany suggested that all the world’s nations would inexorably be drawn into the maelstrom. Adjusting to these contingencies, the U.S. military began the remilitarization of Alaska and shattered the illusion of Alaska’s lack of strategic consequence. The swirl of war in Europe and conflict in Asia confirmed the wisdom of the decision to remilitarize Alaska. The U.S. Army proposed construction of a major land base near Anchorage, a network of air bases in the territory, and troops to protect the new naval bases. In 1938 the Army began building additional air bases, a submarine base, and two Army posts throughout Alaska. Large numbers of civilian workers were brought into the territory to build these facilities by such major construction companies as Morrison-Knudsen, West Construction, and Sims-Drake. It was at this time, in late 1941, that large numbers of Quonset huts began to arrive in Alaska. While the attack on Pearl Harbor shocked most Americans, it inspired terror in Alaska. Acting with cautionary prudence, the U.S. military did not inform Alaska civilians of the level of danger to the territory. No one knew if Alaska might also be targeted, particularly the southern ports of Ketchikan, Sitka, and Juneau. Such anxiety had been partly forecasted in prewar arguments by

Alaska’s lone delegate to Congress, Anthony Dimond, who had argued that fortification of Hawaii without the militarization of Alaska amounted to defending one door to America while leaving another one wide open. Alaskans had grown accustomed to thinking of their territory as an American Pacific bastion. The pace and magnitude of military construction in 1940 and 1941 reinforced such perceptions. Reports in Tokyo that Japanese air raids had killed 3,000 in Fairbanks exacerbated the rumors and accompanying fears. So, too, did the directive ordered by Brigadier General Simon Bolivar Buckner, the head of the Alaska Defense Command, an authority recently created by the Army to direct the Alaskan war efforts and to rotate military dependents out of the territory as soon as transportation could be arranged. Alaskans started to assume an attack was imminent and the military’s preparatory actions only served to reinforce the fear. Alaska went on a war footing immediately. Buckner ordered all defenses strengthened, and construction accelerated on all projects underway. Seward, the principal transportation entrepot, became a beehive of defensive and anticipatory activity. At the same time, the military appropriated about 25 percent of Alaska’s land area for the war effort. Part of that endeavor involved the Lend-lease program. Tons of supplies were to be moved to Russia from the United States. At the same time, the U.S. committed hundreds of ships and submarines to protect the shipping lane along the west coasts of Canada and Alaska. Aircraft provided to the

33

Soviets were flown across Canada and Alaska to Fairbanks where they were transferred to Russian pilots who flew them across the Bering Strait to Siberia and to European Russia. Also brought in were tens of thousands of Quonset huts. It is difficult to imagine World War II in Alaska without the Quonset hut. When military troops and civilian workers flooded into the territory in 1940, there was insufficient housing for such a population. Housing was needed for workers during construction, for Army and Navy personnel who needed quick, temporary structures, and for quasi-permanent facilities on most of the three hundred military installations established in the territory during the war. This need fostered the ubiquity of the Quonset hut during World War II. They appeared throughout the territory where troops were stationed. One estimate

Quonsets, Alaska, and World War II

Quonset huts at Cold Bay, Alaska, December 28, 1942

suggests that between 20,000 and 30,000 of the huts were shipped to Alaska, a number highly likely but impossible to verify; their use can be documented in nearly all bases. The first units likely came to the territory soon after the attack on Pearl Harbor, when the Corps of Engineers ordered 16,000 for Alaska. Most went to the Aleutian Islands. Thousands of these were sent to Anchorage, the headquarters of the Alaska Defense Command and all Army deployment in the region. Some were shipped surreptitiously: the shipping labels of some of the Quonset huts sent to a secret base on Umnak Island were marked “Blair Packing Company” and “Saxton Canneries,” fictional companies invented to disguise the contents of the crates. The Alaska Defense Command included within its purview two other huge World War II construction projects, the Alaska Highway and the Canol Pipeline project. The Alaska Highway would run from Fort St. John, British Columbia, to Fairbanks, Alaska. It was constructed principally as a military contingency, in case the sea-supply route along the coast should be interdicted, and to service the string of airfields used for the lend-lease aircraft being flown to Fairbanks for consignment to the Soviet Union. It was never conceived as a primary supply corridor for Alaska. Thousands of troops worked on TOP: Portaseal huts at Camp Canol, Yukon Territory, ca. 1943; CENTER: Maintenance camp of Butler huts along the Alaska Highway, Muncho Lake, British Columbia, 1944; BOTTOM: Cowin hut theater, Whitehorse, Yukon Territory, ca. 1943; OPPOSITE: Rows of Pacific huts at Adak Army Town, Adak Island, AK, ca. 1947

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CLOCKWISE FROM LEFT: Actress Olivia de Havilland signing autographs in a Quonset hut, Aleutian Islands, 1944; Barber shop, interior view, Amchitka, AK, July 4, 1943; Jamesway hut at Ladd Field (Ft. Wainwright), Fairbanks, AK, April 11, 1944

construction of the highway, and Quonset huts and Quonsetlike structures were a common sight up and down the road and still are today. The Canol Pipeline project brought twenty-five hundred men north to construct the line between 1942 and 1944. The Corps of Engineers constructed an oil pipeline from Norman Wells on the Mackenzie River in Canada’s Northwest Territory to Whitehorse, Yukon Territory, a distance of over sevenhundred miles across mountains and muskeg. The military hoped oil from Norman Wells could be refined in Whitehorse for use by both the Army and Navy in Alaska. As it happened, the sea route was completely reli-

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able throughout the war, and Norman Wells turned out to be a disappointing oil deposit, far smaller and lower in quality than initially estimated. The line operated for thirteen months before being decommissioned. Again, Quonsetlike structures were commonly used along the Canol route. In total, thousands of civilian workers poured into the territory to work construction, labor as longshoremen, and to help operate the many new facilities brought on by the Quonset huts. None of Alaska’s towns were prepared for the onslaught, and general services were intolerably strained. Housing was inadequate; water, sewer, power, and telephone systems were swamped. At the

CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT: Recreation facilities building, Adak, AK, August 2, 1944; Interior of Naval Hospital, Attu, AK, December 5, 1943; Pin-up girls pose across the walls of a bomber-crew Pacific hut, Adak, AK, 1943

CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT: Harold Hobbard, Alaska Highway comic, 1945; Jake Nunn, Wartime comic, ca. 1944, Nunn painted comics on walls of 404th mess hall on Shemya and Adak, AK; Don L. Miller, Aleutian Islands comics, ca. 1945, Miller was a comic artist for the AdakianAdak, Alaska’s military newspaper

same time, permanent residents and business owners experienced an economic windfall as prices rose rapidly and money flowed as never before. For Alaska, war fueled a superheated economic engine. The Quonset hut was an acutely familiar sight for those serving in World War II in Alaska, Hawaii, and abroad. They worked in them, lived in them, ate in them, recreated in them. Quonset huts were the military’s bunks, cafeterias, hospitals and war rooms. Soldiers made efforts to humanize their surroundings. They posted pin-ups along the curved walls of the huts, sometimes covering every square inch of the interior with photos of home and photos from girlie magazines. Alaska was in no immediate danger of attack or invasion following the attack on Pearl Harbor, but the Japanese military command would soon change that. The Japanese Navy had determined that its strategy in the Pacific War mandated the conquest of Midway Island at the far west end of the thousand-mile Hawaiian archipelago. The Japanese sought to use the island, nearly at the midpoint of the Pacific Ocean between Japan and mainland U.S., as the anchor for a forward, north-south defensive perimeter securing Japan’s Pacific interests. Midway was a U.S. possession, and Admiral Isoruku Yamamoto sought to lure the U.S. Pacific fleet into battle there, not only capturing the island, but destroying what remained of the U.S. fleet following the blow inflicted at Pearl Harbor. Yamamoto staked the future of the Pacific war on the battle, for Midway would be the start of the U.S. Navy’s steady thrust

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westward toward Japan and Southeast Asia, and he knew the Japanese Navy would not be strong enough to prevail if Japan did not stop the thrust before it began. Alaska was an important part of Yamamoto’s strategy. Yamamoto calculated that a Japanese attack there, against American sovereign soil, would generate political pressure to repel the invasion. This would divert a vital component of U.S. Admiral Chester Nimitz’s Pacific Navy, thus weakening the force Nimitz would have available to defend Midway. A Japanese Aleutian attack timed to coincide with the move against

Quonsets, Alaska, and World War II

A newspaper illustration utilizing Quonset huts to quantify the number of U.S. Naval troops stationed in the Pacific, 1945

LEFT: Japanese attack on Dutch Harbor, Alaska, June 3, 1942; RIGHT: Quonset rebuilt on bombed site, Dutch Harbor, Alaska, June 17, 1942

Midway could have devastated Nimitz’s forces and won the Pacific war for Japan. In its totality, Yamamoto’s was an audacious and daring gamble, equal to his extraordinary gamble at Pearl Harbor, and while there was considerable opposition to the scheme within the Japanese general staff, Yamamoto likely carried the day because of his success in Hawaii. But at Midway, the outcome would be much different. Initially, Japan scored a pyrrhic victory. On June 3, 1942, without warning, aircraft from a Japanese carrier task force attacked Dutch Harbor on Unalaska Island. Though the attack was a complete surprise to the U.S., the Japanese bombers inflicted only moderate damage, partly because of the weather. They returned two days later, this time bombing the U.S. Army barracks at Ft. Mears, destroying an oil tank farm, damaging the radio station and the hospital, and sinking ships and planes moored at the major dock. Simultaneously, other units of the Japanese force landed 1,200 men on Attu

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Island at the far end of the Aleutian chain, capturing the island and its only village. The Americans had known for at least two months that the Japanese were likely to strike the Aleutians. American cryptologists had broken Japanese military codes, and radio intercepts provided enough information to alert the Americans that an enemy force was gathering for a move north. But the Americans did not have sufficient information to know where or when the attack would take place, nor its exact nature. At the same time, military planners detected and began to position themselves for the coming drive against Midway. American planners had to decide how to counter the Japanese Pacific grand strategy: how to prepare for simultaneous attacks against Midway, the key to the Pacific War, and the Aleutians, a diversionary aside designed to divide American forces. The Japanese had destroyed about 40 percent of the American Pacific fleet at Pearl Harbor. As a consequence, Nimitz could not afford any substan-

tial dividing of his remaining forces. He ordered most of his ships and air forces to the battle of Midway. He did deploy a token group, the North Pacific Force, to the Aleutians, which Admiral Theobold stationed south of Kodiak Island, far east of where the Japanese chose to attack, but well positioned to protect the lend-lease shipping lane. They were unable to defend Dutch Harbor. The battle of Midway began on June 3, 1942, and lasted four days. It was a milestone in naval warfare; none of the ships involved were ever within sight of each other: the entire battle was fought from the air. When it was over, the Japanese had lost hundreds of planes and four of the six aircraft carriers they committed to the battle. The Americans had lost three of their four. The Japanese strategy for the mid-Pacific was in shambles and the Japanese empire lay exposed to the American Pacific navy. It would take more than three years for the U.S. to dislodge the Japanese from their individual holdings in their Pacific empire, but as Admiral Yamamoto noted after the battle of Midway, it was but a matter of time. But while American strategists understood Japan’s defensive position, they also understood that it would take persistent, well-supplied campaigns to force the Japanese from their “sphere of influence” and back to their home islands. Intense fighting with high casualties lay in store for the 1.5 million American troops who would fight the Pacific War. One of the bloodiest of all the battles in that war would be the reconquest of Attu Island in the Aleutians.

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The bombing of Dutch Harbor threw the Alaska Defense Command into a frenzy of reactive and cautionary preparations. The immediate concern was whether other ports might be targeted. General Buckner commandeered every aircraft he could find, military and civilian, to rush forces and supplies to Nome, which he anticipated was the next target. Emergency defenses were rapidly erected around the small town near the tip of the Seward Peninsula and Bering Strait. When it became clear that the Japanese did not have the capability to move beyond their isolated island outposts, Buckner devoted his efforts to protecting his aircraft, shoring up his defensive vulnerabilities, and planning for the expulsion of the invaders. First, he temporarily moved all aircraft to inland bases until he was certain the Japanese offensive was concluded. Then he began the construction of still more bases in the Aleutians, from which General Butler hoped his air forces would fend off the Japanese planes. By August he had Fort Morrow (Port Heiden) and Davis Field (Adak) operational. Work proceeded at breakneck speed at facilities on Umnak, at Cold Bay, and on Atka Island. U.S. bombing raids from Atka kept the Japanese forces on Kiska isolated. At the same time, U.S. submarines sunk three Japanese destroyers in Reynard Cove on Kiska. In the meantime, Admiral Thomas Kinkaid, who replaced Theobold, established a loose naval blockade south and west of the Aleutians and undertook the occupation of uninhabited Amchitka Island, only forty miles from Kiska. The blockade cut off easy Japanese resupply of the two conquered

Quonsets, Alaska, and World War II

islands, forcing the troops there to rely on supplies from submarines. Perhaps the most significant preparatory action for the coming fight for the western Aleutians, however, was the American success in the battle of the Komandorski (Commander) Islands in March 1943. The strategic importance of this fortuitous American victory was immense, for now the Japanese troops on Attu and Kiska were without provisions and could not rely on being resupplied by future drop shipments. The reconquest of the Aleutians was about to begin. The Americans engaged in what was one of the costliest battles of World War II. While the actual invasion force totaled about 14,000 men, nearly 100,000 were involved in staging and supporting the invasion. After the restoration of American sovereignty in the Aleutians, Alaska played little role in World War II. Airmen flying from bases on Amchitka and Shemya (near Attu) Islands carried out numerous, dangerous raids against bases in the Kuriles, on Hokkaido, and the main Japanese island of Honshu. But throughout the rest of the islands, and on the Alaska mainland, there was little for American forces to do but wait out the war. In August 1944, the American high command ordered a general troop withdrawal from Alaska, reducing the force there to 50,000. For Alaska, the war was over. The economic impact of the war in Alaska, already noted, was but a manifestation of the war’s impact across the country. The war was a boom time for the workers who produced the carriers, airplanes, tanks,

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and other war material that made the U.S. the dominant force in both Europe and the Pacific. Wages were high; unions made “no strike” pledges in return for good pay, working conditions were good, and the government attempted to hold down prices to maintain the economy. Near war plants, ramshackle housing developments sprouted overnight to meet the demand. Nevertheless, other needs could not easily be met, and many families were forced to do without basic household items and facilities. Women braved the condescension of male workers, taking jobs in heavy industry both for the money they needed to provide for their families while the men were fighting the war and to demonstrate their patriotism. At this time, Roosevelt issued an executive order forbidding discrimination in employment by the government and in defense industries. All of these new conditions were felt in Alaska where few civilians left the territory, preferring to brave electrical blackouts and other supply shortages in order to maintain their homes and take advantage of high-wage jobs. The legacy of Quonset huts in Alaska is remarkable. As with any architecture, the space people live and work in is integrally related to how they define and understand themselves and how they perceive the world. The Quonset may be an elegant or inelegant design. Certainly, after World War II the city fathers of Anchorage found the buildings inelegant, but Alaska would not have been defended in the war without Quonset huts. The many housing and operational needs of the American military personnel and civil-

ians of Alaska could not have been provided for with the normal temporary tents that prevailed before the creation of the Quonset. Tents did not provide sufficient protection in Alaska against wind, snow, ice, and the cold; standard building materials, wood frame structures on cement foundations, was cost prohibitive and difficult to transport. Over 30,000 Quonset huts were sent to and utilized in Alaska because they were an appropriate, applicable solution to a critical need. The millions of dollars expended in materials acquisition, in operations, and in payroll

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were expended in a context made possible by the ubiquitous presence of Quonset huts. We take for granted such elemental aspects of our endeavors as housing. Perhaps Quonsets are a tangible lesson in why we shouldn’t.

Quonsets, Alaska, and World War II

Abandoned anti-aircraft artillery site, Fairbanks, AK, 2003

Chapter 3 War, Design, and Weapons

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of Mass Construction Brian Carter

The last hundred years have seen increasing amounts of time, energy, and money dedicated to war and defense. While much of this effort has been directed toward the development of new weapons and equipment, it has also radically influenced the design of buildings. The criteria for the design of buildings for war differ significantly from those that are traditionally associated with architecture; preoccupations with “firmness, commoditie and delighte”1 are set aside in favor of the pragmatic—the development of strategic defensive systems and facilities that can be improvised quickly. Governments, politicians, and military leaders, prompted by these unusual circumstances, have frequently commissioned massive site-specific installations, extensive defenses and constructions embedded in the landscape. At the same time, other structures were built to fulfill immediate needs for equipment that could be mass produced, easily transported over long distances, designed to respond to rapidly changing needs, and deployed in numerous different settings. Presented with these urgent challenges, teams of soldiers, architects, industrialists, and engineers worked together to develop a range of designs that have created unique and experimental structures. The outbreak of World War I and the advent of mechanized warfare saw the assembly and movement of larger and more elaborately equipped armies than ever before. With more than 3.7 million German and English troops mobilized on the Western Front by 1917, the demand for shelter was critical. The Nissen Bow Hut quickly became

the building that was most widely used by the allied forces, and its sudden appearance prompted one observer to note: At about the same time that the tanks made their memorable debut on the battlefield another creature, almost equally primeval of aspect, began to appear in the conquered areas. No one ever saw it on the roads; it just appeared. Overnight you would see a blank space of ground, in the morning it would be occupied by an immense creature . . . in a week or two you would find a valley covered with them . . . the name of this creature is

R. Buckminster Fuller,

the Nissen hut. It is the solution of

Dymaxion Deployment Unit,

one of the many problems that

ca. 1940

every war presents. The problem here was to devise a cheap, portable dwelling place wherein men could live warm and dry; cheap enough to be purchasable by the thousands; portable enough to be carried on any road; big enough to house two dozen men; simple enough to be erected by anybody and on any ground; and weather proof enough to give adequate protection from summer heat and winter cold. All these conditions are fulfilled by the Nissen hut.2

Although in shape and form it recalled the primitive huts of indigenous peoples, the Nissen hut was a structure that made use of contemporary materials and the latest industrial technologies. Designed on a six-foot-nine-inch grid and with a T-section iron frame, the simple semicircular form of the hut consisted of only four components— a curved metal roof built over a floor and an enclosing wall panel at each end. Constructed without any excavated foundations or footings, it was built on two longitudinal sleeper joists and designed to touch the ground lightly. In addition, all connections were devised to be fabricated by using a hook bolt—an innovation that made it possible to assemble the entire building with just a wrench. The finished structure had also been designed so that each component could be carried by two men and the entire kit of parts could be loaded onto a single truck. Capable of being assembled by a team of four men in four hours, the Nissen hut con-

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sisted of a single room large enough for fifty-two people and able to provide sleeping accommodation for twenty-four. Subsequently, this design was developed to create a larger structure, the Nissen Hospital hut, which could be used as a hospital ward, dining room, storage building, office, or recreation hall. A year after it had been designed, it was estimated that 20,000 Nissen Huts were already in use and that number was to increase significantly before the war ended. While there were numerous examples of mass-produced building components and systematized methods of construction that had been developed before 1916, the Nissen hut proved to be one of the most extensively used of these early comprehensive construction systems. Utilizing modern materials and designed as a series of components that could be prefabricated in a factory, easily transported, and assembled quickly, it was a building that became an important piece of military equipment and one that, albeit indirectly, was to have an impact on the development of modern architecture. In the same year, prompted by the same war effort that necessitated the mass production of the Nissen hut in England, the design and construction of a new factory in America also significantly influenced industrial production and the evolution of modern architecture. Eagle Plant (aka Eagle “B”), one of many factories designed by Albert Kahn between 1900 and 1940, was built in Detroit in 1917 as a place where new steel submarines could be constructed for the U.S. Navy. As such, this was also a place where

War, Design, and Weapons of Mass Construction

Isometric drawing of Nissen Bow Hut, 1917

numerous technical innovations were to be made with regard to the construction of another type of metal structure that was subsequently used in a variety of extreme settings. However, the vast, single-story steelframed building that was designed to house these activities also established an entirely new setting for industry—a context that made it possible to create uninterrupted industrial assembly lines and advance mass production at unprecedented levels. Defined as the place where “the open-purpose shed was born,”3 this radical breakthrough preceded some of the most advanced industrial structures in Europe, such as the bold factory designs by German architects like Peter Behrens and Walter Gropius, by more than a decade. The factory building and the site at River Rouge, where many more factories designed by Kahn were eventually built, were places where an increasing output of complex new equipment designed for war was to be manufactured during World War I and later for World War II. It was also the place where, in peacetime, Henry Ford was to mass produce that ultimate machine— the automobile. America’s preparations for World War II raised questions of how to move even larger, fully equipped military forces quickly and efficiently around the world; the attack on Pearl Harbor suddenly made these concerns a reality. The first camps constructed for American soldiers in Europe were built using locally available materials. The brick, concrete, asbestos-cement, and steel buildings that were constructed in England were, as one observer noted, “all of British

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design . . . and we are merely going to use them.”4 As the war progressed, however, the Americans developed their own alternative building systems. While many made use of wood—the most plentiful resource available in America at that time—others, like the Quonset, utilized metal. Inspired by the Nissen hut, it had a similar arched form of curved and corrugated metal sheets attached to semicircular T-section steel ribs, but with a prefabricated floor of plywood supported on a raised metal frame. It was an example of the potential of new materials and innovative production techniques that were being advanced as a part of the war effort and that were also inspiring architects and designers. Prompted by government agencies, publishers, and entrepreneurs, and as a result of a series of demonstration projects, commissioned articles, and design competitions, building professionals were encouraged to develop ideas and make proposals that used this new knowledge and capitalized on America’s rapidly expanding industrial capacity. Designs for Postwar Living was a competition to design new forms of housing that was sponsored by California Arts and Architecture in 1943 in collaboration with a group of twenty-two materials manufacturers. It attracted hundreds of submissions and a wide range of ideas, and the three selected schemes were published in the journal Art & Architecture. The winning proposal, submitted by architects Eero Saarinen and Oliver Lundquist, capitalized on industrial advances in the construction of metal buildings, like

the Quonset, to propose a series of standardized, prefabricated-metal residential units. Claiming that “the economic and social demands for postwar housing must be met by extensive utilization of our assembly-line potential,” they devised two basic housing types. Each was defined as a “pre-assembled component” (PAC), where “the biological and mechanical functions of the home—sleeping, dressing, bathing, cooking, washing, heating and cooling—are standardized and incorporated into PAC’s ‘A’ and ‘B.’” They went on to suggest that “by attaching these units to the living space (which can form a single house or row housing, motels or even a tent) a maximum adaptability is achieved. Because the PAC’s can become standardized for a wide variety of climates and income groups, it is estimated that PAC can answer 80% of postwar housing demands.”5 These ideas were to provide the basis of a second design by Eero Saarinen, which originated under the aegis of the National Housing Association. Prepared in 1945, this design proposed an “unfolding house” that made use of prefabricated units with curved lightweight metal skins but also introduced a flexible, clear spanning roof to create a house that could be enlarged as needed. Exploring similar ideas of lightness and optional adjustments that had been developed in the design of the Quonset, Saarinen’s proposal for this unfolding aluminum roof that connected packaged housing units was a response to the varying needs of families and the demands of building on different sites across the country. While neither of these projects was built, they helped to promote the trans-

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Eames plywood leg splint, 1943

fer of ideas, materials, and construction techniques developed in wartime for peacetime use—ideas that directly connected industry and design to project a view of architecture as equipment, an extension of the machine. Eero Saarinen also worked closely with Charles Eames. Their explorations into the potential of molding wood in furniture making, started at Cranbrook Academy of Art in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, before World War II, were further pursued by Charles and Ray Eames after they moved from Cranbrook to California in 1941. Prompted by the war effort and advanced under the auspices of the U.S. Navy, the Eameses also used this experience to design a series of molded-wood splints and litters for servicemen who had been injured in the field. The Navy placed its first order for 5,000 splints in November 1942, and the request prompted the designers to establish the

War, Design, and Weapons of Mass Construction

Plyformed Wood Company, where the splint was mass produced and where they could conduct design research into other moldedplywood techniques and products in a development laboratory. It was work that led to the design and fabrication of stretchers and larger curved-wood blisters for use in the construction of aircraft and gliders. Advanced through improvisation and the subsequent intensive testing of materials, models, and large-scale mock-ups, these studies strengthened the connections between design and industry. In 1943, Charles and Ray Eames collaborated with John Entenza, Buckminster Fuller, and Herbert Matter on a special issue of Art & Architecture that was devoted to the impact of prefabrication, industrialization, and mass production on the design of housing. Published in July 1944, at a time when the production of the Quonset hut was in full swing, it was a response to an anticipated postwar housing shortage and sought to capitalize on new industrial technologies and ways of working. It presented the house alongside conspicuous images of other massproduced domestic products—the toaster, iron, telephone, and pressure cooker—as well as production lines of trucks and airplane parts. “The architects of the prefabricated house,” it suggested, “must be the student of human behavior, the scientist, the economist and the industrial engineer.”6 In the same issue, the magazine also highlighted the Quonset hut in a review of emergency shelters that encouraged a new approach to design. In a subsequent December 1946 issue, Art & Architecture urged its readers to

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“look at the Quonset again with a more analytical attitude and an open mind...let’s stop thinking of the Quonset as a stop-gap emergency shelter or as a poor relation to a real house.”7 These ideas continued to influence Charles Eames, Eero Saarinen, and numerous other designers, and in 1945 a group of architects were commissioned to design a series of steel-and-glass houses for the Case Study House program initiated by John Entenza and Art & Architecture. Although the houses that were designed and built in California as a part of this program now have the status of cult objects, at the time they were viewed as “capable of duplication and in no sense be an ‘individual’ performance.”8 Buckminster Fuller had explored duplication and the use of prefabricated metal components to construct lightweight buildings prior to the outbreak of World War II. His design for the Dymaxion House in 1927, which proposed a hexagonal-shaped metal structure suspended from a central mast that also housed all of the equipment for the kitchen, laundry, and servicing of the house, advocated the use of factory-made metal components. His belief in the potential of industry to assist in the production of houses was further advanced through his collaboration with Emanuel Norquist of the Butler Manufacturing Company, the largest general metal sheet fabricator in America at the time. They developed the Dymaxion Deployment Unit (1940), a low-cost house that was designed to capitalize on the potential of metal and to benefit from the expertise that the Butler Manufacturing Company had acquired since its founding in

1902. Butler Manufacturing Company’s experience with the use of corrugated metal sheets and pressed metal panel systems, as well as the urgent need for wartime housing, inspired designers and industrialists to devise and build a prototype for what would become the Dymaxion Deployment Unit. The prototype passed final government inspection in 1941, and three plants were committed to produce 1,000 Dymaxion Units daily,

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each at a cost of $1,200. Unfortunately, because the government was unable to divert enough steel from the war effort for the project, the few hundred units that were built were used by the U.S. Army to house the Signal Corps and for operating rooms. Nonetheless, Fuller’s ideas challenged the concept of a frame structure by articulating an option in which the shape of the building and the use of standardized

War, Design, and Weapons of Mass Construction

Charles and Ray Eames, Model of Kwikset House Project (unbuilt), 1951

Bruce Goff in Navy Uniform, ca. 1943

curved corrugated metal sheets created an envelope that also served as the structure. There were numerous other efforts by architects and industrialists to utilize the new advancements that became available during World War II. Louis Kahn, I. M. Pei, Richard Neutra, Edward Larabee Barnes, Ralph Rapson, Henry Dreyfuss, and many others developed projects that were aimed at capitalizing on this knowledge by using different materials and creating new building systems. Later designs, like the prototype for Fuller’s Dymaxion Wichita House, built in 1947, were developed in an attempt to use new materials—predominantly metal—and redirect the expertise and facilities of former wartime factories and assembly plants. Each of these schemes—preoccupied by lightness, improvisation, materials, and processes— advanced ideas for prefabricated housing in ways that sought to create innovative, massproduced and inexpensive models for the future. A few years later, Charles Eames was commissioned by the Kwikset Lock Company to design another low-cost prefabricated house. It adopted some of the ideas embodied in the design of the Quonset hut but explored the properties of wood rather than metal. Envisaged as an assembly of simple, off-the-shelf parts made possible and affordable by industrialized mass production, the house was marketed as a kit. A modular system was devised to create a single-story house with a large plywood-skin roof supported by curved and laminated plywood beams left exposed internally. The open internal space and the extruded building

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Brian Carter

section of the Kwikset House recalled the Quonset. The design was clearly founded on the material studies and fabrication techniques that Charles Eames had seen and pioneered in his collaborations with industrial companies and that he and Ray Eames advanced in the design for their experimental house at Pacific Palisades, California (1945–49), which made extensive use of readily available factory-made components. In a discussion about the ideas that shaped midcentury modernism in America, the late design critic and theorist Reyner Banham highlighted a group of designers who, he suggested, were influenced by Charles Eames, “the Mr. Fixit of the nittygritty, not to say grass roots, tradition of the Americans who ‘got learned mechanicking down on the farm.’”9 He went on to identify two particular people who, in their very different ways, epitomized these “down-home, do-it-yourself aspects of America better than most others.” Both, Banham claimed, had “a sort of hot-rodder attitude to the elements of building, ingeniously mating off-the-peg components, specials, and off-cuts from other technologies.”10 Charles Eames was one of these architects. The other was Bruce Goff. Never formally trained as an architect, Goff underwent military training in Rhode Island and Mississippi in 1942 and was assigned to serve on a Navy Construction Battalion later that year. While on duty in the Aleutians, he designed a series of military installations—several of which incorporated Quonset huts. However, it was not until Goff was transferred to Camp Parks near San Francisco in 1944 that he had an opportunity

TOP: Bruce Goff, Aerial perspective of Camp Parks Chapel and Library, Dublin, CA, 1945; BOTTOM: Bruce Goff, Camp Parks Chapel and Library, Dublin, CA, 1945

Bruce Goff, Elevation Studies for Stran-Steel Quonset House project (unbuilt), 1945–46

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Bruce Goff, Perspective of Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, Cody, WY, 1946

to ingeniously mate “off-the-peg components” with “specials and off-cuts” from other technologies. After first working on a series of projects involving the renovation of existing buildings, he was asked to design a new chapel at Camp Parks; this prompted him to look again at the Quonset hut. Responding to a set of particular requirements, he developed a design for the chapel that connected two “elephant” Quonset huts, each 40' x 100', to form a 200' long enclosure. A third, smaller Quonset housed offices within an adjacent connected wing. These large prefabricated metal structures were integrated together with two thick masonry walls that intersected the main vaulted spaces. Both of these walls were hollowed out to form a series of rooms and ventilation ducts; one also incorporated a large concrete cross, supported a canopy, and formed a backdrop to a semicircular reflecting pool at the main entrance. Goff’s design for the Camp Parks Chapel utilized the ready-made but, by adding other unique elements, transformed it

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to create a building of significance within the setting of the camp. Following his discharge from the Navy in July 1945, Bruce Goff opened an office in Berkeley where he designed a series of other buildings that further explored the potential of the Quonset hut. He adopted the same familiar arched form in a house and studio for himself but sought to exploit the large open volume that it created by inserting a series of mezzanines linked by ramps and bridges. While his design for the Camp Parks Chapel had combined the simple metal enclosure with masonry walls, this scheme juxtaposed the precise factory-made components with several other elements constructed of masonry and wood to create a more spatially complex and eclectic ensemble. Other designs examined the same prefabricated construction system to create modest and affordable houses immediately after World War II. Developed for Stran-Steel as well as individual clients, including Mr. and Mrs. G. E. McCabe and L. A. Wilson,

War, Design, and Weapons of Mass Construction

Bruce Goff, Interior of Ruth Ford Residence, Aurora, IL, 1947–50

Goff planned two- and three-bedroom houses, each around 1,000 square feet, within a single Quonset hut. A second similar adjacent structure provided a covered parking area and an enclosed space that could be used either as a guest room or workshop. Aiming to provide new inexpensive housing, the designer investigated different internal plan configurations and alternative elevational treatments.11 These included the addition of large sculptural fireplaces built in concrete and masonry as well as elaborate screen walls, louvered facades, and shaded roofs in response to environmental needs, while site plans proposed layouts for groups of Quonset houses each with an acre of garden and a shared play area for children. In 1946 Goff also designed schemes for the Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints Church in Cody, Wyoming, and the Kozak House in Sleepy Hollow, California, using the same set of industrially fabricated components designed for the Quonset. The Kozak House was planned for a large site on a south-facing slope in Marin County, and the two schemes that Goff developed explored the creation of different forms by reassem-

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bling pieces of the Quonset frame. The first scheme was a long thin house; the subsequent proposal turned the Stran-Steel ribs and connected them to create a series of curving frames that defined a linear space that was low on the north side but increased in height on the south. Enclosed by a tall tilted glazed wall to the south facade, this house was to be built on a heavy masonry floor and with louvered panels at both low and high levels to promote natural ventilation. It was a scheme designed to realize the potential of a now-familiar kit of parts but at the same time assemble them in a new way and address particular environmental concerns. However, like the earlier, more modest schemes, this project was not built, and it was only when Goff was commissioned by Sam and Ruth Ford in 1947 to design a house in Aurora, Illinois, that he was able to fully deconstruct the design of the Quonset and reassemble selected pieces of it to make a very different building. The Ford house was built using a modified assembly of structural ribs combined with an eclectic collection of materials including cedar shingles, coal, and acrylic canopies salvaged from an aircraft.

War, Design, and Weapons of Mass Construction

Bruce Goff, section drawing for L. A. Wilson house (unbuilt), CA, 1945

LEFT: Robert Motherwell in his house, East Hampton, NY, ca. 1948; RIGHT: Glen Murcutt model of Aboriginal Alcoholic Rehabilitation Centre (unbuilt), Kempsey, New South Wales, Australia, 1983–85

This expanded kit of parts was configured to form a series of domes constructed using two types of structural steel ribs—the Quonset 20 and 24. The main living spaces were planned within one large dome, arranged around a sunken central kitchen under a saucerlike mezzanine cantilevered from a central chimney. Two bedrooms were contained within an additional, partially domed structure connected to the space under the center dome; the entire structure was clad in glass and shingles. The house was completed in 1950. Banham applauded the “the wit with which elements of other structures and other technologies have been deployed”12 and went on to suggest that “in his ability to mould the off-cuts of standardized America,” Goff was “an even more radical hot-rodder than Eames.”13 A second house, radically different but also based on the Quonset structure, was designed for the Fords by Goff in 1948 but was never built.

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The studio that Pierre Chareau designed for the American artist Robert Motherwell also adopted and reconfigured the Quonset, though in a different way. Chareau, an expatriate European architect, delighted in the beauty of the ordinary— interests that had been clearly demonstrated by his inspired transformation of standard industrial components in his design for the Maison de Verre in Paris in 1931. Confronted with an even wider range of standardized products in the U.S., he adopted them much more freely in his design for the Motherwell Studio. Unlike Goff’s design for the Ford House, Chareau modified the form of the Quonset only minimally and, by combining it with other materials and systems of construction, created a large open studio and smaller workspaces. The scheme married the light openness of the frame structure with masonry construction, randomly pierced windows, and a large piece of

glazed wall salvaged from a commercial greenhouse to create an adhoc and ungainly hybrid of a building. Planned for a site on Long Island, this twentieth-century primitive hut, completed in 1947, provided living space with a kitchen and a free-standing fireplace alongside column-free areas where Motherwell could work on his increasingly large canvases. In his Essai sur l’architecture of 1753, Marc-Antoine Laugier highlighted the significance of the primitive hut in architecture and noted how it established the first principles of design and building. He suggested that “the parts that are essential are the cause of beauty, the parts introduced by necessity cause every license.”14 Developed for use in times of war, the Quonset hut was,

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of necessity, comprised of the essential parts. Adopted to make a shelter that was easy and quick to build, it captured the spirit of the machine as well as the simplicity and obviousness of the vernacular—qualities that have continued to inspire architects such as Glen Murcutt, Norman Foster, and Renzo Piano. More than sixty years after it was first constructed, the Quonset hut remains a significant project. It embodies unlikely combinations of invention and the elemental, of pragmatism and of timelessness, and of a lightness achieved without actual transparency. But perhaps it is most compelling because it represents a design that emerged from a fundamental demand for mobility and of stasis, war and peace.15

War, Design, and Weapons of Mass Construction

Renzo Piano Building Workshop, IBM Exhibition Pavilion, 1982–84

Chapter 4 After the War: Quonset Huts and

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Their Integration Into Daily American Life Tom Vanderbilt

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.” In the background of the ad, on the edge of the glacial baseball diamond, lay another American icon, one that was also being spread through the incidental globalization of World War II. Along with Coke, chewing gum, the Jeep, the Kilroy was Here logo, and any number of other field-deployed accoutrements of the U.S. military campaign, it, too, had become a kind of symbol for American ingenuity, can-do pluck, and ubiquitous cultural influence. There, in the ad, low-slung on the horizon, lies an instantly recognizable, arch-like and half-barreled, form: the Quonset hut. While the Quonset hut could claim any number of literal or metaphoric predecessors, ranging from the cylindrical “longhouses” of the local Narragansett tribe (in whose language, coincidentally, Quonset itself means “long place”1) to the British Army’s Nissen hut, it was, in effect, a historical hybrid, melding the traditional housing forms typically adopted by nomadic peoples

with the latest advances in materials and prefabrication technologies. Its lines were clean, its facade unadorned, but it spoke less about modernism than wartime contingency (which is not to say the two are unrelated), or what has been described as the “spirit of functional consequence [that] gripped every facet of wartime construction, from the steady stream of more than one hundred thousand Quonset huts made and shipped overseas to the network of coastal defenses that guarded our shores against the possibility of enemy attack.”2 With the Quonset, housing was a weapon. An September 1946 advertisement for Kimberly-Clark (makers of Kimsul, an insulation used in Quonsets) shows a “recently declassified” photo of a vast collection of sleek Quonsets; the accompanying text states: “A massive Naval installation on New Guinea gives a better idea of the Quonset’s contribution to the winning of the war.” It was a kind of heroic icon—“A new

Coca-Cola advertisement, 1943

Stran-Steel advertises the new “Jeep,” Pencil Points, 1943

Jeep in the military field,” as a Stran-Steel (a division of the Great Lakes Steel Corporation) ad put it, part of the same massive industrial complex that was churning out bombers and munitions.3 Its appearance on some Pacific Atoll represented not just an advance of troops, but a virtual outpost of America, a

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home away from home, a Coca-Cola of the landscape. In an age prior to McDonald’s or the corporate Holiday Inn, the Quonsets, as they sprang up, arranged in miniature Instant Cities—“the world’s largest housing project,” as another Stran-Steel ad4 went— from the Aleutians to the Ardennes, promised standardization and efficiency, the soon-to-be buzzwords of the commodified American landscape. They were standardbearers of sorts, although of exactly what it had yet to be seen. As the design historian Thomas Hine writes: “As American forces moved island by island across the Pacific, [the Seabees] proved to be the most gifted scroungers of all . . . There was something joyous in the surprising things they did with oil drums and Quonset huts that seemed then to open the door to industrial materials and forms used in unexpected ways.”5 War, despite its overwhelming air of destructiveness, is also a creative force. The very process of waging war requires, for each age, new design solutions, new products. That so many useful products and technologies are bred from war is not only a consequence of the increased expenditures for research and development in such a period— the utter massing of talent and assets toward an overarching goal of victory—but also a condition of the very lack of resources available—whether time, money, or materials. For a designer such as Charles Eames, the constraints of the war represented an opportunity: to look again at commonly accepted objects, to find new ways of doing things when previous materials and methods were unavailable. The Quonset, indeed,

CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT: Constructing officers’ quarters, Russell Island, South Pacific, November 10, 1943; Dedication day at the Navy Memorial Chapel, Clark Field, Philippine Islands, August 26, 1945; Aerial view of the island of Guam, 1945

Base Hospital #3, Espiritu Santo, South Pacific, April 22, 1943

was created in the spirit of the Eamesian declaration, “design should bring the most of the best to the greatest number of people for the least,” to which only need be added the caveat: and do it in three months or less. War, as the landscape historian J. B. Jackson once noted, also presents its own landscape; or, rather, “the military landscape and military society are . . . both in essence intensified versions of the peacetime landscape, intensified and vitalized by one overriding purpose.” The temporary military encampment could be as real a landscape as a city park, a “place where men and environment were in harmony with one another and where an overall design was manifest in every detail.”6 The Quonset hut expressed perfectly the logic of this landscape: speed, economy, efficiency. And yet the mobilization of World War II represented for America not only a mass deployment of troops and equipment, but a symbiotic mobilization of the home front as well, a reordering of the domestic landscape that uprooted hundreds of thousands of workers and created vast

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overnight industrial complexes that would, for the most part, be shuttered once the war drew to a close. The Quonset was a subtle symbol of this reordering: it was, in essence, performing double duty, housing both soldiers abroad and relocated workers and military personnel at home. It is interesting to note, then, that as early as 1943—when the end of the war was not easily foreseeable—the StranSteel Division of the Great Lakes Steel Corporation, the manufacturers of the Quonset, were already positing the potential role of the Quonset in the postwar world. “There is little doubt that the high point of industrial efficiency achieved during these war years will prove an important holdover in the days of peace,” read the ad for StranSteel in the December 1943 issue of the architectural journal Pencil Points. “Serving the needs of progressive industrial designers,” ran another Stran-Steel ad, appearing a year later in Pencil Points. In a series of advertisements in the February 1944 issue of Architectural Record, Stran-Steel unveiled its most ambitious pitch for a place in the postwar world. Having helped to win the war with its Quonset huts, the ads implied, Stran-Steel’s steel framing systems would similarly help win the peace. Supporting Stran-Steel was nothing short of, as the ad put it, a “Responsibility for Democracy.” “What means will be taken to accomplish slum clearance in the post-war world have not yet been determined,” the ad text read, below a before-and-after photo that contrasted dingy brick row houses and factories against a series of gleaming steel-

CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT: Stran-Steel advertisement, New Pencil Points, 1943; Stran-Steel advertisement, Pencil Points, 1944; Stran-Steel advertisement, Architectural Record, 1944; StranSteel advertisement, Architectural Record, 1944

and-glass boxes (with attached Quonset greenhouses) set amidst swaths of vegetation—the embodiment of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Radiant Cities.7 “Industry goes rural,” went another ad, showing a crisp Quonset factory in some presumptive Edge City, “the engineering know-how that gave the armed forces their ubiquitous ‘Quonset Hut’ and other Stran-Steel utility buildings will be applied to the varied needs of industrial development.”8 Great Lakes Steel, like many other war contractors, was no doubt attempting to secure a foothold in the postwar world by adapting its products to peacetime use. But its ads, present well before the end of the war, speak to a larger, anticipatory rendering of just what the postwar world would look like—a kind of “premature modernism” that was played out primarily in museum exhibitions and the pages of architectural journals. Just as European modernist architects viewed the Second World War as a certain force of “creative destruction” that would sweep away the dead hand of the past and clear the way for tomorrow’s utopian cities, the seeming promise of Allied victory in the war, coupled with the massive expansion of productive capacity and unprecedented advances in technology, augured an incipient sense of a postwar America brimming with promise and vitality. A preeminent question was housing. It was expected that some twelve million men would return to private life—and any number of men and women would be relocated once their war-manufacturing employment ended. Millions of new homes would

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be required in the U.S. to accommodate them. The end of the war brought a curious situation to America: a sense of wild optimism, on the one hand, and the economic realities of materials shortages, a housing crunch, and a flooded employment market, on the other. At the end of World War II the United States came face to face with an acute housing shortage that rivaled the demands of the war itself. The housing industry, still reeling from the Great Depression, had been further diminished by a wartime shortage of materials and labor. When coupled with a high rate of wartime marriages, a trend of migration from rural areas to urban areas, and a population increase of eight million in five years, housing starts would consistently lag behind the need for housing as it had every year since 1932. Furthermore, unions representing building trades inadvertently compounded the problem by maintaining excessively long apprenticeships and by imposing “make work” rules that decreased efficiency and added hours to extend the duration of scarce jobs. Their actions, in part, slowed construction and inflated costs.9 When veterans returned home by the hundred thousands, there was no place for them to live. As a result, an estimated one million families were forced to double up with other families in homes and apartments across the nation. Before the end of 1946, that estimate would triple10—a figure greater than that of all the families in New York, Chicago, and Philadelphia combined. Other families would resort to any structure that could be made livable. At Devil’s Lake,

Veteran’s Housing Project, Brooklyn, NY, September 1, 1946

Unable to find living quarters after he was discharged from the Army, Ardell Hagen bought a gigantic barrel that housed a hamburger stand and converted it into a two-story home for his family, 1946.

North Dakota, an army veteran purchased a barrel-shaped hamburger stand and joyfully converted it into a two-story home. In Anchorage, Alaska, a 6' x 9' beer van was converted into a makeshift apartment and rented to families for $30 a month.11 In San Francisco, a family of four happily took over a renovated mortuary. A classified advertisement in an Omaha newspaper read: “Big icebox 7x17 inside. Could be fixed up to live in.”12 Desperate times obviously called for desperate measures. In the postwar years, it was not uncommon for apartment hunters to visit funeral parlors in hopes of finding addresses of recently vacated apartments. Families could also try their local Housing Tout who for $50 would supply tips on available housing. And as a last resort, when hotels were filled, all-night establishments such as Turkish baths could suffice for a night’s stay.13 To prevent the situation from worsening, President Roosevelt called upon Wilson

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W. Wyatt to take on the role of nationalhousing expeditor. Five weeks after accepting the position, Wyatt presented the president with a report estimating that 3.5 million homes were needed in 1946.14 To fill the gap, he set a goal of 2.7 million housing starts by the end of 1947. In 1924, the best home-building year to date, only 937,000 had been constructed. Although it was conceivable for the U.S. to finance and build approximately 1.26 million homes per year, to have done so would have required a complete overhaul of the building industry. As Life magazine pointed out, “the average U.S. house, except for certain components like the heating and electrical system, is the only major commodity largely unaffected by the industrial revolution. To a great extent it is built now as it was built in 1700—by hand, outdoors, slowly, laboriously and inefficiently.”15 This was the brief window for American modernism, a desire, driven by economic necessity, to find new ways of doing things with new materials, new designs, and new technologies. But just what physical shape this would take was open to question. In 1945, a Saturday Evening Post poll revealed that only 14 percent of the population wanted to live an apartment, or a “used house.”16 As one historian put it, “The postwar buyers wanted a new house, with modern floor plan, up-to-date materials, and the latest appliances.”17 The postwar home became an object of collective desire and speculation. As Thomas Hine wrote, there were some assumptions about what shape it would take:

The first was that there would be a new postwar home for a significant portion of the population. The second assumption was that it would be built new for modern living, that it would not be an older house adapted for contemporary needs. Indeed, except for the occasional restored eighteenth-century Connecticut farmhouse or hundredyear-old barn with modern insides, older houses virtually disappeared from home and decorating magazines until well into the 1960s.18

But just how adventurous would the American consumer be in this quest for “modern living,” and what means would they have to achieve it? Those visionary architects who saw in airplane factories a way to mass produce houses simply assumed that the overwhelming desire for the new, aided by the industrial dynamism of an economy tuned to a wartime hum, would enable those assembly lines to simply switch from armaments to habitation. This, after all, was America, land of automation and air conditioning, which had lured European modernists with its shimmering technological frontiers. As the authors of the 1936 book Art and the Machine wrote of Albert Kahn, Richard Neutra, and others: “They believed, no doubt, that the land most committed to machines in living would be the best land in which to create a machine-age architecture.”19 There were several obstacles, however. Americans may have marveled at airplanes and automobiles, but that did not

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necessarily mean they wanted to live in them. Zoning regulations often preempted attempts to build novel housing forms. And not all architects embraced such modern concepts as prefabrication. As the architectural historian Arthur Pulos put it, “Although mass production was being welcomed in every other realm, the thought of houses rolling off production lines was too much for most architects.”20 It was into this rather muddled, nascent scene that the Quonset hut, the object of our study and an almost accidental agent of modern architecture, entered the domestic landscape en masse, demobilized with the troops and looking for a postwar occupation. Oddly enough, it seemed to straddle both ends of the contradictory picture: it was seen as a stop-gap means to manage the logistical conundrum of housing the returning soldiers; it also, if its marketing is to be believed, was a harbinger of high-tech, postwar modernism —Quonset hut advertising brims with words like “progressive,” “flexible,” and “efficient.” The idea of using Quonsets as housing in a nonmilitary setting had been raised midway through the war and, by its conclusion, had escalated into a steady drumbeat. A February 1944 article in Architectural Forum, titled “Hutments to Housing,” postulated a number of civilian uses for Quonsets (e.g., garages, greenhouses), noting: “Such a structure could be erected by the owner himself, with the help of his neighbors, particularly if they all had military experience setting up huts.” And, more often than not, it seems, they did have experience. For veterans most

LEFT: “Freedom Train” at Rodger Young Village, 1945; RIGHT: Row of Quonset homes at Rodger Young Village, 1945

acutely felt the effects of the housing shortage when they returned and, under a federal Public Housing Authority program, Quonset settlements were established in any number of communities, from New York City’s Manhattan Beach to Los Angeles’ Rodger Young Village. In July 1946, a newspaper account noted that when 811 surplus Quonset huts were to go on sale at Port Hueneme; more than a thousand veterans camped out, some for three days, in order to buy “their little Quonsets [for $295] and sweat out the housing squeeze for a year or two.”21 In Los Angeles, where nearly 200,000 wartime industrial workers had lost their jobs by 1945, and nearly 100,000 returning veterans loomed on the horizon, the city housing authority, in 1946, created the Rodger Young22 Village, described as “the largest and first temporary veterans’ housing project in the nation.”23 On some 112 acres of former National Guard airstrip land in Griffith Park, the village, consisting of 750 corrugated

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Quonsets, was erected in April 1946, just sixty days after the funds were approved.24 With each containing two units, nearly 1,500 veterans’ families—some 5,000 people—were housed in what virtually became an overnight community with a medical center, chapel, library, even a malt shop. As Dana Cuff writes in The Provisional City, although the layout of this Quonset village was overseen by architects, there was not necessarily a bold architectural ambition at stake in places like the Rodger Young Village: From an architectural perspective, the pressure to house essential war workers bred an expedience in housing production that virtually eliminated traditional aesthetic preference. Priorities had shifted, and the aesthetic symbols of efficiency, technological advance, material resourcefulness, and alacrity counted for more than traditional associations of home. Not

that residents liked the temporary

most of the families they are a

trailers they might be lucky enough

haven and a shelter.26

to snag, but, like victory gardens, they were a sign of the patriotism and sacrifice of a nation. Mostly, they were a roof over one’s head.25

And no one knew better the value of a roof, even the arched roof of a Quonset, than a veteran. As one wartime account from a Navy patrol bomber in the Aleutians described it in a Kimberly-Clark ad: “When we first arrived we slept in tents. With the temperature around 10 degrees below, and the wind about 130 knots, it was pretty tough. Finally we got some Quonset huts and it was like moving into a mansion. They were snug and warm.” With the same spirit of frontier self-sufficiency they had employed in their far-flung Quonset homes, veterans remobilized in places like Rodger Young Village, drawing their Quonsets around the campfire of a temporary community. As one magazine account described the community: The Quonset huts out on the rim of the city in Griffith Park are no mansions. They are humble dwellings, rows upon rows of them, each one just like the next. But the families who live in them have made them their homes, built trellises for plants, grown a few flowers, shrubs, vines. The homes are small, especially if there are six children to be housed with their parents in the two-bedroom homes, but to

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Sometimes Quonset huts were called in for housing shortages of a different sort. Always the hut of crisis, Quonset huts were used to house those made homeless by natural and other disasters, such as the Texas City fire in 1947. The fire triggered the Grandcamp explosion, the worst industrial disaster in the U.S. resulting in, until 2001, the largest number of industrial-accidentrelated casualties in American history. One-third of Monsanto’s (the site of the Grandcamp disaster) homes were condemned, leaving 2,000 persons homeless and exacerbating the already-serious postwar housing shortages.27 Another similar situation took place in the small Ohio town of Scio, which was also destroyed by fire in 1947, taking out the town’s lone industry, a pottery plant, and leaving 800 of its 1,200 people jobless. But a Quonset hut, the one building in the town that had not burned down, was what convinced one local resident that Quonsets were what should be used to rebuild the town. Three hundred workers toiled through a rainy night to rig up emergency wiring so that reconstruction of the town could go forward on a 24-hour basis. Quonset huts were rushed to Scio by special trains, and some were even flown in by air. Men and women formed construction crews to erect the Quonset huts and the town was saved. Its main plant was rebuilt and residents, again, had shelter.28 In the architectural press, the Quonset hut was seized upon not only as an expedient

TOP: John Campbell and Worley K. Wong Architects, Felton cabin, Fallen Leaf Lake, CA, ca. 1946; BOTTOM: Stran-Steel advertisement, Saturday Evening Post, 1948

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John Campbell and Worley K. Wong Architects, Felton cabin, Fallen Leaf Lake, CA, ca. 1946

solution to the housing shortage, but for the same kinds of clever prefabrication and rational use of materials praised in such efforts as the Case Study Houses. “Let’s look at the Quonset again with a more analytical attitude and an open mind,” counseled Art and Architecture in December 1946, “Let’s stop thinking of the Quonset as a stop-gap emergency shelter or as a poor relation to a real house.” The magazine showed a contemporary home, in Fallen Leaf Lake, California, that had been created out of a converted Quonset. “Adapt the Quonset to its site and the climatic needs. Don’t start out with a restricted point of view. Think of it in terms of fullest use. It can be adapted to nearly any

Spread from “Stop Gap Housing,” Popular Science, March 1946; OPPOSITE: Cover of Popular Science, March 1946; FOLLOWING SPREAD: From “A Home from a Quonset Hut,” House Beautiful, September 1945

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site.” Aesthetically, the best choice for the Quonset was, essentially, to leave it as is. “Keep the form simple. Avoid dormers with orthodox roofs, period balustrades, unrelated forms. The Quonset can be accented with trellises.”29 The New York Times, in a 1947 article titled “Planting for the Temporary Home,” wrote: “Temporary housing like the Quonset huts to be seen near New York City has a bare look that fairly cries out for some kind of planting. Using just annual flowers, which are quick to grow and abundant to bloom . . . transformations can be made in the appearance of these small properties.”30 Others were less boosterish, but still intrigued by the flexibility of the Quonset.

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LEFT: Stran-Steel advertisement, Country Gentleman, 1954 RIGHT: Stran-Steel advertisement, Saturday Evening Post, 1949

“House Beautiful doesn’t consider a Quonset an ideal house,” wrote the magazine in its September 1946 issue, “but it’s available, and is one practical answer to an acute housing need, if you have land zoned to permit such an unconventional structure. The home shown here, made from an Army prefab unit of wood, similar in design to the metal Quonset, suggests how a Quonset could be made homelike and livable.”31 Where Art and Architecture advised readers to emphasize the form of the Quonset itself, House Beautiful viewed the Quonset more as a template out of which to create one’s own statement: “Quonsets, despite their assembly-line nature, lend themselves to variation.

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The above [pictured Quonset], used as a vacation house near Mansfield, Ohio, omitted the usual corrugated steel sheetings on one end wall, substituted novelty log siding.”32 A little log cabin was far from what Great Lakes Steel had in mind in its barrage of Quonset advertising immediately after the war. The ads did stress the flexibility of the Quonset: “Dress it up . . . .Or use it straight,” went one slogan, showing a standard Quonset contrasted with one that had been given an open, glass-paneled facade. But more subtly, and more profoundly, the ads suggested that there was something inherently valid and productive in the structure’s shape:

Look around you, America, at the clean, flowing lines of a building that’s changing your world . . . Functional in concept, [the Quonset] introduces a vital new trend in postwar architecture . . . Even in their simplest form, as industrial warehouses and farm buildings, there is an aliveness to the Quonset shape that satisfies both eye and mind.33

In a brochure titled Quonsets: The Story of a Building That Gave America a New Standard of Quality Building Values, Great Lakes extols its part in meeting the postwar building shortage, declaring “the clean lines of the Quonset have won nationwide acceptance, and with a minimum of care the basic Quonset will maintain its good appearance almost indefinitely.” Illustrating the brochure are a number of buildings that have been fashioned from Quonsets, from the Razorback Cafeteria to a Houston multiple-dwelling unit framed with Stran-Steel. “This gay hillside retreat was once a basic Quonset 20,” the brochure notes, declaring that “America has found the answer to its building needs.”34 The Quonset was positioned less as a building than as an instrument of modernization, a machine not just for living but for shopping, banking, and farming. “The farm building of today has become a ‘working tool’ in the operation of the farm unit,” stated a 1947 Stran-Steel ad. “In order to function properly for the farmer, it must be engineered to meet his needs for greater efficiency and

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reduced labor.” Not surprisingly, the Quonset was the best working tool. “Cows feed themselves on this modern Quonset dairy farm,” trumpeted a Stran-Steel ad in the September 1954 issue of Country Gentleman. “Increased milk production is the direct result of our Quonset loafing barn.” In a Saturday Evening Post advertisement from September 18, 1948, a Stan-Steel ad depicted the Poier Motors Chevrolet and Oldsmobile Dealership in Snohomish, Washington. The gently sweeping contours of the roofline of a series of Quonsets strung together, fronted with glass, matched the aerodynamic styling of the new car models parked outside: “These streamlined buildings strike the right note in architectural design . . . just as the sleek new cars on salesroom floors strike the right note in automotive design.” Given the perceived modernity of the Quonset, it was perhaps no surprise that when businessman Clarence Saunders (founder of the Piggly-Wiggly grocery chain) opened the Keedoozle, his “push-button” grocery store in Memphis, Tennessee, the building of choice was a Quonset. A 1949 Stran-Steel advertisement shows a woman staring in wonder as groceries are whisked down a conveyor belt, as patrons are shown gaily exiting down a swooping ramp. Again, the ad copy brimmed with the most forwardlooking language of the day: “Both represent advancements in their respective fields. Both are efficient, time and labor saving, economical. And both the Keedoozle and the Quonset have the modern functional beauty, the purposeful arrangement that symbolizes today’s architecture . . . today’s business . . . today’s

CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT: StranSteel advertisement, Saturday Evening Post, 1949; StranSteel advertisement, Saturday Evening Post, 1948; StranSteel advertisement, Saturday Evening Post, 1947; OPPOSITE: StranSteel Advertisement, Saturday Evening Post, 1948

progress.” No more cluttered corner grocery—all that inefficiency was swept away in the streamlined, corrugated confines of the Quonset. The Quonset was arguably the quintessence of the postwar American landscape, a building-in-a-box that arrived, just in time, to meet the needs of a society that was eager to get back on track. As National Building Museum curator David Chase described it, the Quonset represented “a fabulous example of American ingenuity and can-do spirit and productive power. It’s an example of what this nation can achieve when it gets its ducks in a row.”35 House Beautiful, in 1953, would counsel its readers (then on the cusp of the “long 1950s” economic boom): “You will have a greater chance to be yourself than any people in the history of civilization.”36 But in the mid-to-late 1940s, the American dream still had to surmount a flooded labor market and a postwar materials shortage. And so just as the Quonset had sprung up in distant military outposts as some harbinger of victory, it also ranged out across the domestic scene as the advance guard of a culture in the making. “The amazing versatility of Quonsets was first shown in World War II,” went one 1950 Stran-Steel ad, “After V-J Day their fast erection and economy of material helped speed the nation’s quick return to peacetime prosperity.” The circumstances in which the Quonset emerged are captured most memorably in the 1947 film The Best Years of Our Lives— the first film to deal with the end of the war and the strains of readjustment for returning

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veterans. In one scene, former Air Force bombardier Fred Derry is strolling among a desert “bone yard” of former planes, now arrayed in endless rows, ready to be salvaged. Climbing into a plane, Derry begins to relive his combat experiences. After the yard boss commands him down from the plane, Derry, who has had trouble finding work, learns that the planes are being converted to “prefabricated housing” and is subsequently hired. In this version of swords into plowshares, the products of the wartime productive apparatus are beaten down into the armaments of a new struggle: the remaking of domestic America. In this moment, as with America itself, there was an entwined sense of haunting remembrance and industrious optimism, undershot with a sense of temporal urgency. Like the frontier shacks of the nineteenth-century American westward expansion, Quonsets marked the newly evolving frontier of the postwar suburban spread. Quonsets, known a few years earlier only as temporary housing for soldiers, could contain any incipient expression of the postwar dream, from dancehall to dining room. “Now that they are on the market,” The New Yorker wrote in 1946, “enterprising civilians ought to be able to think of many other uses, some of them sensible.”37 “Quonset huts were becoming as familiar a part of the American landscape as they had been in Newfoundland or Guam,” observed House Beautiful in 1946. The Quonset form rippled throughout postwar visual culture. It no longer needed explaining; it had become an icon unto itself.

CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT: Film still from Gomer Pyle, USMC, 1964–69; Gomer Pyle board game, manufactured by Transogram Company, Inc., New York, NY, ca. 1967; Gomer Pyle lunchbox, manufactured by Aladdin Corporation, Nashville, TN, 1966; Marx Big Inch Pipeline Playset, Louis Marx and Company, Erie, PA, 1962

Quon-Kote advertisement, Great Lakes Steel Corporation, Saturday Evening Post, 1949

On television shows like Gomer Pyle, USMC, the action played out on a stage set dominated by the horizontal lines and half-circle forms of the Quonset. The Marx Toy Company, creator of the Yo-Yo, released a yellow “Construction Office” Quonset toy. Sherwin Williams, playing to the evolving market, developed, in conjunction with Stran-Steel, a special paint called Quon-Kote, whose can was festooned with rows of Quonsets. “Quon-Kote dresses up your Quonset, gives it a trim, well-kept look that is an important business asset.” One can

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even find a lasting example of the Quonset influence, oddly enough, in an engineering textbook, where the Quonset was pictured with a halo of arrows and numbers. The typical exercise posited the situation thus: “You are to design Quonset huts for a military base in the Mideast. The design windspeed is 100 ft/s.” Problem-solving questions included, “What is the net drag force acting on the Quonset hut?”38 The Quonset seemed ubiquitous in any sector of life; indeed, it even played a part as ideal fallout shelters in provinggrounds tests and elsewhere (e.g., in Palm Beach, Florida, a buried Quonset-type structure served as a temporary shelter for the vacation home of President Kennedy) as postwar peace and optimism were quickly overshadowed by the threat of atomic war. Indeed, Quonsetlike structures, designed by entrepreneurs like Nebraska’s Walt Behlen, were even submitted to test atomic explosions at the proving grounds in Nevada. Civil defense officials were intrigued by the domelike profile for the same reasons as engineers—the way the wind, or the force of an atomic blast, moved across its surface. On college campuses, where enrollment had soared as returning veterans took advantage of the GI Bill, Quonsets mushroomed as temporary classrooms and student housing. “It was a lifesaver for all of us because housing prices in New Haven were out of sight,” one veteran told Yankee Magazine, “We had to wait three semesters to get a Quonset hut.”39 In Kalamazoo, Indiana, the Quonset community was referred to as a “genteel slum”—one veteran

remembered the walls being so thin he could hear his neighbor asking for bread. Another Quonset resident recalled the instant neighborly bonhomie that seemed to arrive with the huts: “We enjoyed our neighbors, had people to dinner and sherry parties, and a lot of drop-in visitors from the campus and from the neighboring college where I was still teaching . . . We tackled the insufficiencies with enthusiasm.”40 Bernard Malamud was said to have written a number of his short stories in a Quonset at Oregon State University in 1948. The writer Lewis Lapham’s recollections of a job interview with the Central Intelligence Agency a year out of college involved a Quonset: “The interview took place in one of the Quonset huts near the Lincoln Memorial that had served as the Agency’s temporary headquarters during World War II. The military design of a building hastily assembled for an urgent purpose imparted an air of understated glory, an effect consciously reflected in the studied carelessness of the young men asking the questions.”41 But Quonsets were hardly limited to campus. Their geography and end-use was as varied as the Quonsets themselves were standardized. In Nashville, Tennessee, the legendary producer Owen Bradley built his first studio in a surplus Quonset hut. To offset the poor acoustics of a half-circle building, Bradley used inexpensive sound absorption materials. This Quonset-imposed deformity resulted in a major bump in the upper middle range that added a boost of what producers call “presence” and helped create the distinctive aural effect that would

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TOP: Student housing at Yale University, New Haven, CT, ca. 1945; BOTTOM: Display model of a Quonset house erected by the Great Lakes Steel Corporation in Mansfield, OH, 1946

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Stran-Steel brochure, 1948; FOLLOWING PAGE: StranSteel Advertisement, Saturday Evening Post, 1947; PAGE 91: Stran-Steel brochures, ca. 1950; PAGE 91 TOP LEFT: Stran-Steel Advertisement, Country Gentlemen, 1946

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CLOCKWISE FROM TOP: The Quonset Auditorium where Johnny Maddox and his Rhythm Masters regularly performed, Bowling Green, KY, 1952; Advertisement for Johnny Maddox and his Rhythm Masters to play at the New Quonset, Bowling Green, KY, 1952; Pasty Cline records at Owen Bradley’s Quonset studio in Nashville, TN, ca. 1958

come to be known as the “Nashville sound.” That signature sound proved so valuable that when Bradley built his new studio, he instructed engineers to design it with the same acoustics as his old Quonset studio. Today, a small segment of curved Quonset roofline juts out from Sony’s Nashville offices, which were built around the original Quonset. In Bowling Green, Kentucky, a local band named Joe Marshall and his Rovin’ Ramblers built, in 1946, a music venue dubbed the Quonset Auditorium. The band, looking to replace a previous venue called the Armory, turned to Quonsets because, as one band member put it, “they were prefab buildings, you could put them up quick.”42 Over the years, the Quonset Auditorium played host to such musical performers as James Brown and Little Richard, while, in a later incarnation as a professional wrestling venue, it was visited by Gorgeous George and Andre the Giant. Like many Quonset projects, it received some window-dressing: a false front of bricks and glass curved in an Art Moderne style.43 It also had an unfortunate architectural modification that was more social in nature: separate entrances for white and African-American patrons. As it happens, the legendary disc jockey Wolfman Jack worked in the 1960s in a nonsegregated nightclub called the Tub, in Shreveport, Louisiana, that was also housed in a Quonset. The Quonset, a ramshackle building on the edge of town, was the perfect venue for the fledgling rock-and-roll style, which had not yet attained the kind of stature or respectability afforded to more

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mainstream theatrical engagements. Just as the Quonsets themselves were an example of the design ingenuity and novelty—the bold reenvisioning of new materials in new ways—unleashed during the war; rock and roll, too, represented an urgent refashioning of forms, and of society. In 1948, a young political neophyte named Gerald Ford set up his congressional campaign headquarters in a Quonset (emblazoned with his portrait) in Grand Rapids, Michigan. It is not clear whether Ford was trying to tap into postwar patriotism by adopting the “fighting Quonset”—a replica of which sits in a museum dedicated to his life—but it is clear that the Quonset, with its relatively low cost and easy assembly, was the ideal vehicle for start-up ventures of all sorts. “Do you want to start—or expand—a business? Are you holding back because of high building costs and long building delays?” asked Great Lakes Steel.44 Foreshadowing Bill Gates’ garage founding

Gerald (“Jerry”) Ford campaign headquarters, Grand Rapids, MI, 1948, Gerald Ford ran for Congress in a Quonset hut.

Pierre Chareau, Robert Motherwell house, Long Island, NY, 1946

of Microsoft, engineer William Bradford Shockley, in 1955, set up his fledgling and pioneering semiconductor company—the creative spark that ignited what would become Silicon Valley—in a Quonset in California, near Palo Alto. In 1947, a food company salesman named Jeno Paulucci opened his novel business—what would become the Chinese food giant Chun-King—in a Quonset near Duluth, Minnesota. Great Lakes actively pitched such uses: “You’re in business Faster and for Less money with a Quonset.” Quonsets were giving an instant shape to postwar economic ambition. But not all Quonset projects were intended to be temporary or motivated by short-term logistics. A number of renowned architects turned to the Quonset, inspired by modernism’s embrace of new materials and innovative building methods. The Oklahoma City architect Bruce Goff, while serving in the Navy’s Seabees during World War II, first came to national attention with his Quonset chapel at Camp Parks, California. While not occlud-

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ing the Quonset form, Goff used a number of architectural effects to both heighten and downplay the Quonset’s distinctive geometric shapes. The blank facade was replaced with a blue-tinted glass wall, broken up by vertical steel columns. Goff used masonry walls to intersect the Quonset and introduced light through a slot notched at the apex of the roof. In East Hampton, Long Island, the artist Robert Motherwell turned to the architect Pierre Chareau for a house that Alastair Gordon describes as “an improvisation conjured up from the most readily available materials of the period.”45 Motherwell purchased a pair of Quonsets for $3,000—one intended as a residence and the other as a studio. Despite the low-cost materials and presumed ease-of-use of the Quonsets, costs on the building site ranged well above estimates. “I wasn’t trying to make a manifesto,” Motherwell said, “I was just trying to make something that suited me.”46 Still, the use of a structure associated with military encampments proved revolutionary in a domestic setting. “The house brought Modernism to the Hamptons,” noted architectural historian Rosanna Liebman. “It was a marriage of the needs of the moment—a tight budget and a scarcity of building materialism—and the desire to do something daring with industrial materials.” Other Quonset adaptations, by less renowned architects, flitted throughout the pages of architectural magazines—a bank here, a hillside house there. In a Quonset adaptation in Knoxville, Tennessee, the magazine Architectural Forum hinted at a kind of

TOP LEFT AND RIGHT: James W. Fitzgibbon, Daniel Residence, Knoxville, TN, ca. 1950; BOTTOM: Garfield, Harrison, Robinson and Schafer, National City Bank of Cleveland, OH, ca. 1948

Bruce Goff, Ruth Ford Residence, Aurora, IL, 1947–50; OPPOSITE: Bruce Goff, Interior of Ruth Ford Residence

essential Americanness at work: “A constant factor in American life is the Yankee tinker, who hooks up a pump motor to cartwheels to move himself around, who makes lighting fixtures out of pie tins or furniture out of plow handles. Architect Fitzgibbon used this kind of skill in producing his oddly graceful house in the form of a cascading double Quonset.”47 The Quonset, in this analysis, was something akin to the American grain elevator, and its spirit of ingenuity, that had so captivated European modernists like Le Corbusier. James Jackson Jarvis, a nineteenth-century observer of the grain elevator, wrote: The American, while adhering closely to his utilitarian and economical principals, has unwittingly, in some objects to which his heart equally with his hand has been devoted, developed a beauty in them that no other nation equals. His clipper-ships, fire-engines, loco-

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motives, and some of his machinery and tools combine that equilibrium of lines, proportions, and masses, which is among the fundamental causes of abstract beauty.48

Goff married the kind of wartime technological imperative that had produced the Quonset with the Yankee tinker tradition in his 1948 Ford House in Aurora, Illinois. Described by Architectural Forum in April 1951 as a “fine spangling lustrous toy” and a “Hollywood fantasy,” the structure was supported by a series of Quonset ribs freed from their half-barrel orientation and refashioned as a series of circular extensions radiating from a central mast. And yet there was another force underlying Goff’s desire to reconfigure the Quonset form: the client’s dislike of the Quonset. In a letter to Goff, Ruth Van Sickle Ford wrote: “I am sorry I feel as I do about quansit [sic] huts, but too I feel they are not your design. They were something conceived for war time living and gives

Stran-Steel advertisement, Architectural Record, 1947

[sic] me this same feeling as a prefabricated house does . . . I have a terrible aversion to that half tubular shape which is like a half piece of pipe chopped off in convenient lengths.”49 As architectural historian Jeffrey Cook noted, Goff, in his experimentation with the Quonset form, created a “counterpoint to

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what would otherwise be a ruthless enclosure” and made “architecture out of Quonset huts, one of the most efficient and most hated prefab systems of the twentieth century.”50 The client’s averment of the Quonset form was not an isolated sentiment. Architecturally, there was a long-standing slight against such structures, as epitomized by the critic Nikolaus Pevsner’s prounouncement: “A bicycle shed is a building; Lincoln Cathedral is a piece of architecture.” Popularly, as well, there were biases against the Quonset. Indeed, to the thousands of veterans forced to occupy the same form of prefab housing they had endured during the war, or to those who had occupied them as temporary wartime housing, the Quonset represented a familiar way of life, but also the American dream deferred. The persistence of Quonsets at campuses into the 1960s was seen as a source of embarrassment, not pride. The New York Times reported in 1965 on the survival of Quonsets within the State University of New York system: “World War II veterans probably feel at home in such buildings, but young freshman are shocked when they first see them.” The article quoted a student: “They are a campus joke.” At the Rodger Young Village in Los Angeles, as historian Cuff noted, “a common goal of the residents was to stay long enough to pay off debts and save $500 for a down payment on a house.”51 The Great Lakes Steel Company, however, thought there was nothing wrong with that first house being a Quonset. The Quonset 20—with 960 square feet of living space, was promoted at the end of the war

as a housing solution; Waldvogel Brothers in New York sold the 20 for $1,048, plus shipping. Design refinements were made to standard Quonsets, and more domestically friendly huts entered the marketplace. StranSteel’s “Brighton” model home, billed not as a Quonset but as a “Stran-Steel Arch-Rib Home,” was “eligible structurally for FHA mortgage insurance . . . Never before have you been able to design homes that are so truly modern in the best sense . . . and see them built for $4,000 to $6,000!”52 And yet despite their modern materials and streamlined forms, consumers did not gravitate in significant numbers toward the Quonset. Instead, public desire shifted towards places like William Levitt’s new, eponymous suburban development, which, ironically, was inspired by the same wartime

drive for prefabrication and mass assembly that had produced the Quonset. As Jan Cohn notes in her study of American housing, The Palace or the Poorhouse, “William Levitt’s use of modern technology made Levittown, but modern technology strikes no chords of tradition and association. Therefore, in the styling of Levitt’s houses, contemporary technology was masked with imagery that served up the American idea of home.”53 Levittown was modernism with a neocolonial face: while it too may have been in effect a mass mobilization of instant housing, erected as quickly as some Aleutian base during the war, its metaphoric intent was not to dazzle the eye with space-age forms but to impart a sense of instant tradition and permanence, two qualities that no doubt appealed to those having just come through the dislocations of

Alan Dunn, Quonset hut comic, ca. 1947

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wartime. A photograph of a Quonset home at Rodger Young Village hints at the psychic discomfort some had with the huts: the interior features lace curtains on the windows (despite the curved walls) and a child playing with a dollhouse of the most traditional variety. A 1947 cartoon showing a store marked Quonset Hut Furniture Company that featured furniture with curved backs illustrated the stylistic gap between the modern form of the Quonset and blocky and square traditional home furnishings, which were hardly compatible with “life in the half shell.”54 There were those brave pioneers, however, for whom Quonsets represented a housing choice that, as Robert Venturi once said of the suburban strip, was “almost all right.” One California Quonset resident, noting that the Quonset represented for him first and foremost an affordable home, cited some of the unusual limitations of hut life: “The internal walls are angled, which makes hanging things on them a challenge.” With changes in weather, he added, “the hut tends to ping and pop a lot, like a motor when it’s cooling down.”55 Another Quonset resident, in response to skepticism he endured from friends and passersby, said: “Don’t knock it until you’ve tried it. In homes they’re building now, there’s water rushing in the roof, cracks in the slab and all the rest.”56 If Quonsets never caught on as the ideal American house, they proved quite popular in other capacities, and the irony today is that a building intended to be temporary should still be so pervasive in the

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landscape. In a 1991 Los Angeles Times article on the Quonset’s unnoticed fiftieth anniversary, the writer, mentioning the Quonset-housed military museum at Port Hueneme, commented on the preponderance of Quonsets nearby: Within a few miles of the museum’s doors, there are the main exhibit buildings of the Ventura County Fairgrounds, a pair of former Quonset structures that once were military hangars. Next door to the Oxnard Airport, there’s a jumbosized Quonset, idle and rusting, that once held a tropical-theme nightclub. Along the road from Ventura to Ojai, there’s the Quality Muffler Shop, a sky-blue arch guarded by a chocolate Labrador named Cherokee.57

The article shares the owner’s Quonset experience: “It used to be a military barracks, I guess. I talked to one guy who said this building was built for the Philippines, that it would withstand a 200 mile-an-hour wind. I believe it. It’s a good building. I’d like to have another one and just bolt it onto the end.”58 In the Solano Beach neighborhood of San Diego, a group of Quonset huts built in 1949 to house an aerial reconnaissance and photography company have been restored under the auspices of the Cedros Design District and are now home to boutiques, alleries, and restaurants. The Quonset motif has proven so strong that when the trans-

portation authority set about to build a new train station for Solano Beach, the San Diego architect Robert Quigley responded with a design that actually echoes the distinctive Quonset form. In 2003, it was reported that GM, in its rollout of dealerships for the newly revamped “Hummer” brand—another military veteran retooled for the domestic market—would feature a giant “H” made of steel girders and a curved metal roof, a “design inspired by Quonset huts on U.S. military bases.”59 In Dana, Indiana, two Quonsets house the museum dedicated to renowned war correspondent Ernie Pyle. In Ogden, Utah, sits the Abbey of Our Lady of the Holy Trinity, housed in a Quonset. As the Order explains, On July 7, 1947, thirty-four monks boarded a train in New Haven, Kentucky, and made their way to Ogden, Utah. On July 10th, 1947 they reached their newly purchased ranch and established the newest American trappist monastery, named for Our Lady of the Holy Trinity. For over a year, the founding monks lived in primitive warsurplus army barracks during the construction of their Quonset-hut monastery, itself intended to be only temporary until a permanent building could be built. More than fifty years later, this temporary monastery complex is still in use.60

While many Quonsets have simply survived through benign neglect or because

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their functionality and low-cost have yet to be eclipsed, they have also at times been thrust into the spotlight of architectural attention, in both positive and negative terms. As the entire built landscape ages, the attention of preservationists and architectural enthusiasts has begun to focus on buildings from the 1940s and 1950s, historicizing a period that not so long ago was too current to be considered historical. In West Palm Beach, Florida, for example, a number of Quonsets, which were used first by the military and later by industry, have been added to the National Register of Historic Places. “I’m looking forward to a whole Quonset hut historic district in West Palm,” a historic preservation official explained. “We’ve got a whole street of them!”61 And yet Quonsets, precisely because of their agerelated decay, and lingering associations of the era of wartime scarcity, are often perceived as unloved, outmoded eyesores. In Carmel, New York, a Quonset hut that had served as a movie theater and bank storage facility was demolished in 2001 after nearly thirty years of efforts to do so. Stationed next to the town’s courthouse, a Greek Revival structure that had been renovated in the 1980s for several million dollars, was a Quonset hut, described thus: “The corrugated metal is peeling away in some areas, and yellow insulation oozes out of the crevices. Graffiti is visible on the building.”62 Historic preservation, perhaps by necessity, skews toward older buildings, those that read most historic. And yet newer structures, like the Quonsets, can find themselves in jeopardy—paradoxically not

Quonset hut monastery, Abbey of our Lady of the Holy Trinity, Huntsville, UT, interior

because there are so few examples but because there are so many examples. “You can talk all you want about Greek Revival and such,” said one preservation official, “but to people my age, who were of draft age during World War II, the Quonset hut is as familiar as a hot dog.”63 Their massproduced ubiquity lends the impression that there must always be a Quonset lurking in some nearby landscape. Familiarity breeds neglect. Yet as a National Trust for Historic Preservation official wrote in 1996, “The Quonset has been disappearing at an alarming rate since its nomination to the National Register in 1977, and no comprehensive cultural resource surveys have been undertaken to determine how many are left.”64 In November 2003, the Quonset Auditorium in Bowling Green, Kentucky, was demolished. Joe Marshall, the longtime “Rovin’ Rambler,” wrote afterwards, “I attended the funeral and cried. The Quonset is now buried. It had no soul, so it will never be resurrected.”65 The Quonset was not the only form of housing deployed by the U.S. forces in World War II; it did not represent the only pre-fabricated house to grace the postwar scene, nor was it an entirely novel housing form without historical precedent. For a number of reasons, however—its innovative engineering, the logistics of wartime, an energetic manufacturer, and a postwar American landscape open to low-cost, flexible alternatives to traditional building forms—the Quonset emerged as the most popular choice and the one that lodged most firmly in the public imagination (whereas a comparable few would be as familiar with

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the profile of, say, Buckminster Fuller’s Dymaxion house). The Quonset also represented the advance deployment of largescale prefabrication in the American environment; having proven itself in wartime, it gained a new respect on the domestic front. The building industry is now rife with prefabrication, with the rapidly growing manufactured-housing sector offering units preequipped with kitchens and bathrooms. In the year 2000, more than 1,900 churches were built using prefabricated metal systems. “Do metal buildings raise visions of rusty Quonset huts or machine sheds?” asked Your Church magazine. “If so, you’ll be surprised to know that yesteryear’s uglyduckling structures are now re-engineered and redesigned into today’s beautiful metal buildings.”66 The Quonset’s greatest legacy, however, does not reside in its design or engineering, but in the fact that, in all its “understated glory,” it transcended its functional attributes and became a symbol— like the Coke bottle or the Jeep. From the Yukon to Youngstown, it is enshrined as a mythically resonant object in the postwar pantheon of American iconography.

Chapter 5 The Huts That Wouldn’t Go Away:

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Alaska Adopts the Hut Chris Chiei

Alaska was no different from the rest of the country in terms of a need for permanent housing after World War II, but it had an added burden. In addition to its own soldiers returning home from war and starting families, many men stationed in the territory now wanted to make Alaska their new home. These men found Alaska so alluring that they returned home just long enough to gather their families and bring them north.

Before long, the headlines once reserved for war were replaced with accounts of housing shortages that grew to epidemic proportions. A January 20, 1945, article in the Fairbanks Daily News Miner indicated at least two hundred of Fairbanks’ families were living in shacks for lack of better housing;1 a survey released by the Anchorage Chamber of Commerce declared that there were thirteen families in Anchorage alone that had searched for a place to rent, without success, for five months or more.2 By September 3, 1946, an estimated 1,482 families in Anchorage would be homeless.3 The severity of this crisis at its peak is aptly summarized by Governor Ernest Greuning in his Annual Report of the Governor of Alaska: The problem of housing in Alaska has now grown to such serious proportions that it well may be said to be the most effective deterrent factor to a permanent and stable development of the Territory. The

shortage is so acute that we might further say that the evils of the substandard shacks and hovels found in such abundance throughout Alaska are to be passively tolerated as serving a shelter need. With the great influx of people at the beginning of the defense and military activities of World War II, the shortage of homes became a serious problem. With the beginning of peace and the arrival of the permanent settler, the shortage has become catastrophic.4

When military build up was needed in Alaska—at the recommendation of the 1939 Hepburn Board report—it was in no way prepared for the influx of soldiers and private contractors who would arrive in droves. Not long after the military arrived in Fairbanks in September 1942, housing needs for the Army grew so rapidly that it required military occupation of the Fairbanks Pioneer Hotel.5

Chris Arend, Fresh Crop, 2003

Headline in Anchorage Daily Times, August 29, 1946

That same week, Northwest Airlines, who during World War II flew military equipment and personnel from the continental United States to Alaska, likewise took possession of the Fairbanks International Hotel.6 The civilian population housed in these establishments was forced to find other options— a consequence that placed an even greater strain on Fairbanks’s marginal housing market. In Anchorage, the first real signs of a housing shortage appeared in 1942. It was an ever-present and slowly growing problem that took a backseat to the immediate issues of war. Long before the matter made headlines, factors responsible for the shortage were well in place. In the 1930s the Depression extended its reach into the territory, slowing what little development was there. Furthermore, a ban on “non-essential” construction materials that followed America’s entry into the war added to the limitation on the territory’s fledgling construction industry and the availability of housing.7 Unfortunately, action to alleviate the escalating shortage was, in part, delayed by a misconception that the territory’s population would return to prewar levels as soon as peace was declared.8

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Between 1942 and 1945, the people of Anchorage seemed to live in harmony with their Quonset neighbors. It was as though they had accepted these structures for their part in the war effort. One Quonset camp was erected in the railway yard at Ship Creek, the very birthplace of Anchorage’s original tent city. Huts were laid out nearly end-to-end in long rows. Called the Snake Ranch, this camp was the home of the Seven Hundred Fourteenth Railway Operating Battalion, a military contingent deployed to assist the Alaska Railroad in efficient transportation of military supplies. Having served the territory for twenty-five months, the battalion was relieved of duty on May 7, 1945. They were shipped out three days later. Left behind was a village of Quonset huts that stood silent amid the desperate cries of a housing shortage.9 The silence ended on Tuesday, May 29, 1945. That morning, the front page of the Anchorage Daily Times featured the headline, “Sale of Huts to Aid Housing”— Anchorage’s first large-scale military surplus announcement.10 In addition to one- and two-story wood-frame buildings and miscellaneous other equipment, the list included Quonset huts, Pacific huts,11 and Cowin

huts.12 It was announced that bids for individual huts would be favored over blanket bids—a clear message that persons or groups were discouraged from attempting to purchase huts for resale at a profit. Two days later an editorial appeared in the Anchorage Times regarding the sale of army huts to the general public. Although the article hailed the surplus as immediate relief from the housing shortage, it also cautioned that “these buildings will add little to the beauty of the city. They will have many problems of health, safety, and welfare as the years go on. They may cause values on adjacent properties to drop because of their mere presence . . . If we approve of the use of these structures during the emergency (housing shortage) [would] we have to have them in our community permanently?”13 In the case

of Quonsets, tolerance was apparently better suited for the impermanent. Although little was said about the appearance of Anchorage’s Quonset camps while they served America’s war machine, the mere thought of them as a permanent neighbor was greeted with unrest. On June 1, 1945, the announcement for bids was made official.14 Bids would be accepted on June 20. If Anchorage officials wanted to stop the movement of Quonsets into the city, they would have very little time to do so. Anchorage’s first official public action against the Quonset hut took place one week later. At a meeting of the city council, local civic leaders debated a measure to ban Quonset huts from the city limits. Councilmen were split on the issue. Some Housing for the 714th Engineer Railway Operating Battalion (nicknamed the Snake Ranch), Ship Creek, Anchorage, AK, May 31, 1943

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contended that many of the frame buildings permitted in the city are “worse than the huts.” Others clearly felt that the suggested permanence of the temporary structures would insure “future headaches.” The city engineer, who had already reviewed the hut drawings, asserted that the structures met all the requirements of the current building code and could only be forbidden if an amendment was adopted. The city attorney confirmed that such an amendment would be legal.15 Exactly one week before the bid opening, the fate of the Quonset hut was sealed. Although not banned outright, the huts were covertly entangled in red tape so thick that even the most ambitious Quonset bidders would think twice about placing their bounty within the city limits. Ordinance 157 placed the following restrictions on Quonset huts, Pacific huts, Butler huts,16 and other temporary buildings: 1. The owner must agree to remove the structure within two years. 2. He must pay an inspection fee of $25. 3. He must post $1,000 corporate bond with the city as surety against violations of the ordinance.17

The ordinance went into effect immediately. It appeared that the city fathers had saved the city limits from the invasion of huts. But what they saved represented only a small part of what Anchorage is today. At that time, the city limits constituted roughly an approximate one-square-mile area. All that lay beyond those boundaries was outside their control.

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On the bid date, fifty-six bids were opened and approximately fifty huts awarded.18 In the weeks that followed, the wayward Quonset huts migrated to every corner of the region that would become the Anchorage Bowl. Much to the chagrin of city fathers, they loomed about city limits like the Mexican Army at the gates of the Alamo. An ambitious or desperate few accepted the terms of the city council and requested permission to erect huts within the city core. Disputes quickly arose. When the Alaska Railroad Brotherhood of Locomotive Firemen and Enginemen requested permission to erect two Quonsets as a clubhouse, Jack Parsons, owner of the nearby Strathmore Apartments, protested on the grounds that they would be a fire hazard and a nuisance.19 Similar to the controversy that ensued in Anchorage, the Seward city council quickly enacted their own ban on Quonset huts in the downtown area.20 Even Fairbanks, a city noted for its frontier individuality, raised its eyebrows when confronted with the issue of temporary buildings. City Manager Louis Kelsey staged a drive against wannigans, or any kind of portable, temporary structure, that had been moved into the city without permission. Under Kelsey, violators were issued warrants and brought to city court to face misdemeanor charges.21 However, there was only so much the government could do to deter the use of available buildings in the midst of a housing crisis. Not all hut proposals were met with resistance. The use of the Quonset by philanthropic organizations often seemed exempt from the protests. Prior to the enactment of restrictions, members of the Anchorage

Rotary Club were able to acquire and erect a hut for use by Boy Scout Troop 618. Rotarians and Scouts joined together for a dedication ceremony and a baked-bean dinner on June 6, 1945.22 On the immediately adjacent site, Frank Brink, a representative of the Theater Club, successfully petitioned Mayor Francis Bowden and City Manager A. J. Koenig for permission to erect the Little Theatre in a hut.23 Meanwhile, the Soroptomists Club, a group of young Anchorage businesswomen, made it their organizational mission to provide a Teen Town, a national program hosting activities for the city youth. In a letter presented to the city council it was cited that there was “no place for young people to meet after school and enjoy the companionship of their friends away from undesirable contacts.”24 It was ironic perhaps that they presented the goal of using Quonset huts to separate children from the “undesirable”—a term commonly used to describe the Quonset hut itself. Having acquired a number of huts, the club requested the city council to provide space for their facility along the existing golf course (now Anchorage’s Park Strip), promising they would move the huts if the property were needed for other purposes in the future. A number of Teen Towns in other cities were also housed in surplus Quonset huts. In Fairbanks, a hut formerly owned by the Elks Lodge was sold to the local Teen Town Committee for $575.25 After two short years, the Fairbanks’s Teen Town was closed due to lack of funds and volunteer help.26 The hut was sold again, this time to O’Harra bus line, which transformed the building into a bus station waiting room.27

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On May 5, 1946, Mrs. Howard Bunker, secretary for the Anchorage Health and Welfare Council, presented statistics to the city council showing that over a three-month period in 1946, seventy-eight “transient charges of the Health Department, the Department of Public Welfare, and Alaska Native Service” arrived in Anchorage and required a one- to two-night stay. Some were taken in by kindhearted residents, but even that effort required hours of going from door to door: “Many times [Alaska Native Services] just can’t find a place [for them] at all. In that case people have had to sit up all night on benches in hotel lobbies, in the Salvation Army building, or in airline offices. We have had people sit right here in this office for hours, while we try to find them a place to spend the night—often they are mothers with children.”28 In late 1946, the Anchorage Health and Welfare Council was able to acquire and

Government Hill Youth Club, Anchorage, AK, ca. 1947

Articles in Anchorage Daily Times, August 21, 1946

erect a Quonset hut for use as transient housing for Alaska Native Services and the Department of Public Welfare. Mrs. William Smith, president of the council, convinced the city to donate property in support of the effort. Dr. C. Earl Albrecht, territorial commissioner of health, provided a surplus army Quonset to be dismantled and moved from Fort Raymond in Seward. Dr. Ruth Gruber, a former Anchorage resident, donated $200 to help furnish and equip the hut.29 Institutional Housing Throughout WWII and into the postwar years, the Alaska Railroad’s30 efforts at recruitment was stymied by the lack of available housing for railroad workers. Potential employees, especially those with families, were informed of the housing situation, and, as a result, many heads of families turned down offers of employment. Those that did

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accept positions with hopes of bringing their families at a later date were often discouraged by the severity of the housing situation and asked to be reassigned in a short period of time, or they were left unassigned.31 Following the war, the Alaska Railroad embarked on a proactive campaign to deal with the lack of housing for married railroad personnel. On June 12, 1946, Colonel John P. Johnson, general manager of the Alaska Railroad, addressed the Anchorage City Council with a proposal to house an estimated two hundred railroad workers and their families on a triangle-shaped parcel atop Anchorage’s Government Hill—a site just north of the city’s downtown. The Government Hill project was one of the most organized postwar Quonset communities.32 The timing was fortuitous. The nearby Whittier base, including all of its structures and equipment, was soon offered as surplus to the general public. This base and others along the rail line and throughout the territory had an abundance of Quonset huts that could easily be purchased, dismantled, and shipped by rail to other locations. The challenge was finding a way to integrate these huts into a civilian community that was digestible, if not inspirational, to the average railroad worker. Having observed the controversy surrounding the surplus of huts at numerous locations around the city, the Railroad understood that the Quonset hut was associated with temporality and the military. In addition to being a reminder of the struggles of World War II, it was far from the “white picket fence” expectations of America’s young couples. In order to counter these perceptions, the Railroad subdivided

the parcel into a grid of major city streets where the backs of individual lots would meet along a common alleyway. Huts would be erected on the rear side of the lot, leaving the street side vacant. A railroad family would have the opportunity to purchase a lot that came with a home they could immediately occupy at a price they could afford; better yet, there was still room for the American Dream. As finances permitted, families could build their permanent home on the front of the property and transform the Quonset hut into a garage or storage shed. The Railroad intended to hold all properties as lease agreements until families were settled permanently. The land would then be withdrawn from the Railroad reserve, individually assessed for taxes, and sold to permanent residents.33 On July 25, 1946, the Interior Department officially transferred possession of the Whittier base to the Railroad. Immediately following, railroad employees were given permission to begin dismantling huts in Whittier. In exchange for the huts’ removal, employees were granted ownership of structures and provided with free rail service for the transportation of materials back to Anchorage.34 By August 21, 1946, nine huts had been reerected on properties at Government Hill; four others were in transport. In addition to the remaining structures at Whittier, another 190 Quonsets had been procured from the Dutch Harbor and were on their way.35 In a short period of time, the Government Hill Housing project developed into a community of 165 Quonset huts, a church, and a Teen Town before the project

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Groundbreaking ceremony for Government Hill housing project, Anchorage, AK, 1946

was halted by a lack of funds and materials in late 1948. At its peak, the seventeen-block area served as home for 866 Alaska Railroad employees and their families.36 In addition to the Government Hill Housing project, the Railroad established other Quonset communities up and down the rail line. Towns such as Fairbanks, Healy, and Seward each had their own hut camps for railroad employees and their families. Going, Going, Gone According to the Anchorage Daily Times, the very first sale of Quonset huts to Alaska’s civilian population took place at Fort Raymond on October 9, 1944. Chris Paulson and Bert Schock were the successful bidders on twenty-four army buildings, nine of which were Quonsets. The two men purchased the buildings with plans to move them to Wasilla, Alaska, for use at their gold mining operation.37 On behalf of the Bureau of Land Management (BLM), Fred R. Kessler, a real estate consultant and appraiser from Washington, D.C., visited the defunct Fort

RIGHT: Government Hill, Anchorage, AK, December 2003; BOTTOM: Aerial view of Government Hill housing project Anchorage, AK, December 8, 1947

Raymond base in the fall of 1945. His task was to individually assess each type of structure in the infantry and warehouse area. According to his appraisal, dated August 5, 1947, the fair-market value of “almost new” Quonset huts were modest—$25 for the 16' x 36' and $50 for the 24' x 60'.38 Though the local community did not attach a high monetary value to these buildings, the huts, more often than not, were genuinely welcomed throughout Alaska, from the little fishing town of Ketchikan to

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Barrow. Hal Johnston and his wife, residents of Skagway, a town noted for its outstanding gardens and gardeners, and one that had seemingly been commandeered by Quonset huts during the war years, moved into their first home there—a surplus Portaseal hut39 being rented as an apartment. Their hut came complete with a log-frame covered porch, proudly capped with moose antlers. Members of Palmer, a farming cooperative born from a Depression-era New Deal program, repeatedly placed requests for

Quonsets toward the end of the war. The cooperative purchased a total of eighty-nine structures.40 Local resident Jessie DeVries vividly recalled her experiences with one of those huts:

and the bridge was just a little narrower than the Quonset hut. So, it was kind of a puzzlement. Either we had to take the Quonset all apart or how were we gonna get it across there, without a lot of

When we got back to Palmer at the

destruction. And at about that time

end of the summer (1945) we dis-

the temperature dropped down to

covered that the Matanuska Valley

40 below and stayed that way for at

Coop had purchased all of those

least two weeks. My husband had

Quonset huts up there (Glukana)

hired a man with a D8 and they

for $50 a piece, and were reselling

went out and tested the ice. The

them for $55 a piece. And since we

Matanuska River had completely

had no housing, we went down and

frozen over enough so that it would

purchased one of those for $55. The

hold a cat. So they drug it across

trouble was that we had to go up

the river on the ice. And then to get

and get it from Dry Creek (Glukana)

up the hill—there were four curves

and to bring it down here. And of

that you had to navigate to get up

course we had no place to put it

before the straightaway. Well in the

either. When we decided we’d go

process of getting those up there,

up on our property, we had to go

there was a little of the tin along

across the bridge to get up there,

the edges that fell off (laugh). But Hal Johnston and his mother beside his Portaseal hut, Skagway, AK, March 1949

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that wasn’t anything like taking it apart, ya know, and getting it

I can remember the awful blizzard

together again.41

of the early 50s, and how the snow would drift through any small

Once settled on their property, the DeVries family grew, but their Quonset did not. With the addition of four children, the DeVries gained an entirely different perspective on “Quonset living.” As Jesse DeVries remembers, “The walls were where kids could reach it. Lots of times they’d scribble on it. You didn’t scream at them and get all upset because it was just a Quonset hut.”42 Exactly how big a family can you raise in a single Quonset hut? Dennis and Cleo Green of Delta Junction, Alaska, raised five in a single Quonset Redesign, with just a small log shed added to one end. The issue of close quarters did not seem to bother them. According to Mrs. Green, “It was really quite roomy, or at least it seemed like it. Kids were small then.” Of greater concern was the challenge of heating a poorly insulated metal Quonset hut against the extreme winter temperatures of interior Alaska. As Green remembers, “It was pretty cold. The frost would come through the walls on the little buttons and things. We usually put ‘roll-out’ insulation along the wall—in the winter time—behind the furniture and things. And then also when we got snow we piled snow around it. When it was really cold we run the wood stove as well as the oil one.”43 The effects of the Alaskan climates on the Quonset hut was recollected by Wyman Owens of Seward as well:

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opening and collect in small piles near the draft. After a while we finally were able to plug the openings and make the hut warmer and dryer. There was an oil-fired kitchen range with oven, and it was the only heat we had for the Quonset. The oven door would have to be left open and back room sealed off to stay warm. The blizzard winds from north would drift snow into the insulated area between the ceiling and the roof, and when the weather warmed, the dripping would start and we would take down ceiling panels and use a scoop shovel to clear the snow out. My folks fixed the old Quonset hut up to be pretty comfortable inside, as my dad was pretty good with carpenter tools. One particular night, while the family was asleep, there was a small earthquake, and I awoke to a metal rumble. Being somewhat frightened and in the dark, I thought I was rolling down the hill in an oil drum, as it was quite loud in that little hut. My dad came in the room and said it was just another “shaker.”44

How many Quonset huts can make up a home? Apparently several. Gretchen Bersch and Findlay Abbott grew up in a

Quonset homestead in the coastal town of Homer, Alaska. They described the following inventory of huts that made up their homestead:

little door in the front and some windows. But Melissa [Ms. Bersch’s four-year-old sister] drew a Quonset hut. All of us lived in them. It was so interesting to think that it wasn’t

First, at the top of the Baycrest Hill,

anything out of the books. She drew

were Chuck’s two huts connected

a Quonset hut as her house, because

by the bathroom. The Jamesway

that was her idea of a house.47

hut45

was sort of the garage/shed,

with a freezer and other supplies. We had a Quonset hut with a cabin on the front. Down the road just a piece, a very short distance, our grandmother lived in a Jamesway. At the end of the Spit, Chuck, with his huge Duck House [a Jamesway]. One hut on the land was a little like a quick log-cabin kind of thing with a Jamesway as a dormitory off to the side. And since at that time there were eight of us children, we spent a lot of time in the dormitory, with all these old beds that all the kids slept on when the parents were in the little cabin.46

In fact, so many kids in Alaska grew up in or near a Quonset hut that it affected the way they perceived the structure of a typical home. As Gretchen Bersch recounts: I can remember once playing school with all the kids. I would play the teacher of the school and I remember asking the kids to draw a picture of a house. And, you know, most kids draw these little stick drawings of a house with a

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Unfortunately, the Quonset hut’s newfound acceptance as a stop-gap solution to the housing shortage was short-lived in Alaska. On April 22, 1947, the Oregon Export Company of Portland, Oregon, burst onto the scene with a prefabricated housing option not seen before in the territory. Their first advertisement, which consumed two full pages of the Anchorage Daily Times, offered a mail-order house kit that was eligible for a Federal Housing Authority (FHA) loan—an option not available for those who sought any other type of temporary structures. Though these simple flat-roofed buildings were obviously influenced by methods of prefabrication and mass production developed in wartime, they did not appear to be vestiges of war. Its advertisement claimed easy assembly—only requiring two men and three or four days. House kits were available in one-, two-, or three-bedroom options, and the price was more than six times the going rate for a surplus Quonset hut.48 Shortly thereafter, Ove Selid of Selid Construction Services, announced, in an advertisement appearing in the Fairbanks Daily News Miner, their exclusive rights as distributors of Martin-Alden Precision Cut Homes. Because postwar Americans associ-

Chuck Abbott, Homer, AK, ca. 1950; OPPOSITE CLOCKWISE FROM TOP: The Garden of Eatin’ Restaurant, Anchorage, AK, June 21, 1954; The Garden of Eatin’ menu, Anchorage, Alaska; Duke Russell, Garden of Eatin’, 2004, oil on board

ated prefabrication with temporary military buildings such as Quonset huts, Selid was quick to point out that these were not prefabricated structures.49 The image this company presented was more familiar to prewar America. The advertisement included a rendering of a one-story orthogonal structure with double-hung windows flanked on either side by artificial shutters. The rambling volume, capped by a gabled roof and adorned with a hedgerow, even included parsley-looking trees—all elements indicative of marketing techniques used by the midcentury developers-to-be. Born from the same technology that perfected the Quonset hut, these mass-produced housing options shifted the limelight away from Quonsets. In Alaska and throughout the nation, the Quonset, along with the housing crisis, would soon fade from the headlines of newspapers. Classified advertisements for surplus huts would become fewer and then disappear altogether. In the end, these huts, born of one crisis and called in to service for another, were never truly celebrated or loved by either.

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Quonset Huts Mean Business Commercial development quickly accompanied the increasing number of homes that sprung up around Alaska and throughout the U.S. to house the growing population. In Alaska many small businesses that needed low-cost, low-maintenance buildings that required very little initial investment of capital commonly chose the Quonset hut. Given the need for structures for commercial use, it often made sense to use the the Quonset huts that remained. If they could not be the perfect family home, they could perhaps become the perfect home for a family business. “What sounds like a greasy spoon joint, looks like a barracks and tastes great?”50 inquired a restaurant review in a 1973 issue of Anchorage Daily Times. Then, anyone living in the Anchorage area knew the answer: The Garden of Eatin’. The Quonset hut in which the restaurant operates was constructed by Hans and Gerry Kirchner in 1947. Originally intended as their home, the hut served them in a multitude of ways before taking its final form as a public dining room and kitchen. The Kirchners arrived in Anchorage at the height of the housing shortage. Although jobs were scarce and housing options dismal, Hans found employment with the Alaska Railroad, and Gerry became a shopper for Alaska Airlines—a service provided to rural residents for assistance in purchasing items from the city. Before long, they came closer to achieving their American Dream through the purchase of twenty-five acres of land, their “little spot.”51 But their dream of becoming frontier farmers on this land, which they named “Aching Acres,” was

quickly squelched by misfortune: the destruction caused when a North Air trainer plane crashed into their property and a surprising early frost that prematurely ended the life of their crop.52 They surmised that by moving onto the land they would at least be able to eliminate their current boarding costs. Hans was able to acquire a Quonset hut from the Alaska Railroad53 and they moved into their “Quonsie,” as they called it, on October 23, 1947.54 Fine tuning this hut was an ongoing affair. Immediately after moving in, the power failed, the plumbing failed, and the hot water heater all but exploded. After resolving these issues, Han’s included in his Christmas note to Gerry the following statement: The day when the heat rose from the furnace, the lights came on, the hot and cold water flowed out of the right spigots, I just sat down on the only seat in the house and flushed in ecstasy contemplating on the marvels of modern conveniences and how wonderful was my life. For me, the summer with all its toil was over and I looked forward to a winter of leisure—books, music, hot buttered rums and best of all just an eight-hour work day.55

Once the Quonset was fixed up, it was used to entertain guests. In addition to a hut-warming party, where twenty-four friends brought dinner “complete from the

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fried chicken to the mints,” the Kirchners also shared their first Quonset Christmas with friends: For Christmas the hut was fancied up with crepe paper and ribbon bows; at one end we stood a beautiful spruce tree from our very own land and ornamented it with fruit and cookies and candy and popcorn strings. The party was gay and the potluck dinner shared by fifteen of us was festive in an Alaskan sort of way. . . Perhaps no Christmas will be remembered with more nostalgia.”56

After giving up on farming entirely, the Kirchners embarked on their next venture—real estate. Consuming most of their time and the last of their resources, they subdivided half of their property into individual lots. Soon, a community of newcomers arose on the old potato field. Quonsie became the community center—partly due to the nature of its location, but mostly due to the welcoming spirit of the Kirchners. As Gerry described, “Our hut was headquarters for borrowing tools, getting water, taking baths, and the like. Grand Central Station had never seen a thing on the traffic that shuttled through the place.”57 Having spent five years in the territory by then, both Hans and Gerry had established themselves with a certain amount of occupational success—Hans in his five years of service with the Alaska Railroad and Gerry with Alaska Airlines. But they were

ready for a change. On June 30, 1951, they officially renamed Quonsie “The Garden of Eatin’,” and opened its doors as a public dining room.58 Hans took on the role as head chef. Gerry became the restaurant’s hostess. The restaurant accommodated as many as fifty-eight guests at candle-lit tables extending to either end of its tunnel-like space.59 The walls were adorned with humorous sayings and paintings. The menu followed suit, with its own page of fictitious entrees including “bees knees,” “mosquito knuckles”, and “dehydrated water.” Most memorable was an easel at the entry that supported large parchment sheets signed by all visitors. The Garden of Eatin’ soon rose in rank to become the premier dining experience in all of Anchorage. Many famous visitors to the territory were hosted for dinner in the Kirchners’ humble Quonset. When Nebraska Senator Hugh Butler first visited the territory as part of an effort to assess Alaska’s readiness for statehood,60 there was no question which dining establishment was best suited to impress upon him the advanced state of Alaska’s culture. Word of the Garden’s success would eventually reach the food editor of the New York Times who, in 1965, wrote, “one of the most unusual and successful restaurants in Anchorage bears the ludicrous name of Garden of Eatin’.”61 In the late 1970s, an influx of people and money came to Alaska for the construction of the Alaska Pipeline. Larry Osenga, who purchased the Garden of Eatin’ in 1970, decided to ride the wave by adding a twostory banquet hall and bar to the back end of the Quonset. Joined to the original structure

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at the kitchen, the banquet hall hosted a dinner theater, weddings, and special events. Although the capacity of the facility more than tripled, the Quonset’s tiny kitchen continued to serve as the culinary hub for the entire complex.62 Huts for Public Service Other Quonset dwellers, restaurant owners, and roadhouses aspired to live up to the standards set by the Garden of Eatin’. Quonset huts became schools, churches, even homes for sporting events. The families that arrived in postwar Alaska faced not only a housing shortage but also a lagging educational system. With the arrival of so many new students, communities across the state experienced a growth in student population that completely overwhelmed the existing facilities. In Anchorage alone, student enrollment jumped 13 percent between 1945 and 1946. To address this situation, less than one year after the Anchorage City Council attempted to outlaw Quonsets, the school board and city council, unable to find another solution, accepted a proposal to construct a number of Quonset huts to be used as a temporary school. Again, the huts were “better than no solution at all.”63 Representatives of the Anchorage city council contacted the army surplus division to inquire about huts that could be utilized as a school. In pursuit of ten new classrooms, the city purchased three 24' x 60' Quonsets and four 16' x 36' Quonsets. The total cost for all seven was $925—hardly an investment worth seeking a municipal bond.64 When the Quonsets were officially

LEFT: Interior of schoolhouse, Galena, AK, March 1, 1949; RIGHT: Mr. Freeman’s junior high-school class, Anchorage, AK, April 4, 1952

turned over by the army on August 6, 1946, construction was expedited in hopes that huts would be ready in time for the fall semester. However, a shipping strike delayed the arrival of building materials necessary to complete the project.65 Without any additional classroom space, the school year commenced on September 4th with the existing facility filled far past its capacity. As an emergency measure, overflow classrooms were established in activity rooms and “any other spot that a seat could be set up.”66 A thirdgrade class was conducted in a storeroom; other classes were held in the school basement and in a space rented by a local church. These Quonset units were used as classrooms throughout much of the 1950s but were considered far from ideal; they served their purpose while other more permanent facilities were being constructed. The biggest problem was the inadequacy of

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an oil-stove heating system. Some complained that stoves often overheated and always gave off an offensive odor.67 One heater even exploded, covering an entire classroom in soot, but fortunately harming no one. Quonset huts, despite their clean safety record, gained an inaccurate reputation as being too unstable for occupation—though public officials often claim that they were fire hazards, no one ever produced supporting data. Some were convinced that Quonset huts were an ever-present danger. In reality, not one Quonset fire was reported in the Anchorage Daily Times or the Fairbanks Daily News Miner between 1942 and 1950— the same period of time in which notorious hotel fires occurred and during which the Matanuska Valley Hospital was consumed by flames. These structures were all traditional wood or long-frame constructions, unlike the metal-clad Quonset.

Members of the Palmer community rebuild Valley Hospital with Quonset huts, Palmer, AK, 1947

The log hospital destroyed by fire in the town of Palmer had once been the center of health care for the entire Matanuska Valley Colony—a post-Depression farming program established by President Roosevelt in 1935. After more than ten years of operation, on May 27, 1946, an electrical fire originating in the hospital’s attic slowly spread and overwhelmed all efforts to put it out. The temporary, makeshift replacement facility that followed was significantly undersized for the functions of a community hospital. In desperation, the people of Palmer turned to the U.S. military for help. On behalf of the Army, Lt. General Nathan F. Twining agreed to provide three Quonset huts and miscellaneous building materials for the expansion of the current facility.68 When the huts arrived in Palmer, still in their crates, they were greeted by a force of local volunteers who, in the spirit of a traditional barnraising, worked

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together to construct the first. The other two were added at a later time—each linked to the next by wood-framed corridors. Although intended as a short-term solution, the assemblage of buildings served the community through 1953, at which time a new hospital was constructed and the temporary facility abandoned.69 Quonset huts were also used to create environments much less sterile than hospitals. Curling is a winter sport where players slide heavy granite stones down a sheet of ice while teammates sweep the ice in front of the stone to strategically control the speed of the stone as it moves toward the goal. Developed as outdoor sport on the frozen lakes of sixteenth-century Scotland, the sport migrated to other northern countries along with Scottish immigrants. Eventually, the sport moved indoors; the Quonset-type structures were ideal for this application. Link

TOP: Spenard post office and store, Anchorage, AK, ca. 1950; BOTTOM: Terminal News Company warehouse, Fairbanks, AK, 1949

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four huts together and you have enclosed a full playing field. Such fields were found as far away as Beaver Creek in the Yukon Territory. Ready to relax after curling? Residents of Alaska knew to head to a postwar Quonset bar on a Saturday night. According to Fairbanks resident Cathleen Doyle, “There were a couple of great bars down on the south side that were in Quonsets. They were the after-hours bars. So, after the other bars closed at 4:00 a.m., that’s where you went—if you still were up and running.”70 Quonset watering holes included The Wind Tunnel in Delta Junction, a bar appropriately named for the three Quonsets that formed its interior, and the Portage Bar, located south of Anchorage. Drinks were served until the town was overrun by flood waters—a side effect of Alaska’s 1964 earthquake. In Fairbanks, Bill Green and his family rode out that very same earthquake at their Quonset homestead. As Green remembers, “We were eating dinner that time when the earthquake hit. That old Quonset hut creaked and groaned, but it didn’t show any damage. If you take a tin can and squeeze it in your hand that’s really what it sounded like.”71 Others described similar sounds while occupying the huts—sounds caused by high winds and rapid temperature changes. “You could hear the creaking,” remarked Hank Dubee, a former Quonset resident. ”You could hear the metal shrink, pop and crack.”72 Even the oil industry found use for these humble structures. In March of 1955, Richfield geologist William Bishop was sent to Alaska in search of the territory’s long-

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suspected oil wealth. In previous months, Richfield had officially filed paperwork to gain rights to explore for oil on 71,000 acres of the Kenai Peninsula. Bishop explored the site, and, after much consideration, chose a spot on the banks of the Swanson River. By digging his boot heel into the snow and placing a sign that read, Drill Here, he set in motion a drilling operation that commenced on April 7 and hit oil on July 17. The strike would prove to be Alaska’s first successful commercial oil venture. Many would say it was this event that convinced Congress Alaska was ready for statehood.73 In commemoration of this historymaking event, Bishop’s boots were bronzed and put on display at the Anchorage Museum of History and Art. Unfortunately, the Quonset hut that had been constructed within a stone’s throw of his heel marks was omitted. Was it too large to receive the same honor? After all, historic photos do indicate that a hut was utilized at the base of the original drilling rig. Its presence is further proof of the Quonset’s role as the Forrest Gump of Alaska’s built environment. In this, and in nearly every other significant event of Alaska’s postwar history, it seems that a hut can be found lurking somewhere in the background. Each, in their own way, quietly supported the forward movement of the Territory. Sacred Spaces Were Quonset huts deserving of worship? Perhaps not, but they did find themselves in service of many a god, even if they were not always the most practical solution. Pastor Dick Benjamin, Sr., ministered in a Quonset hut—the Abbott Loop Church in Anchorage,

St Patrick’s Catholic Church, Barrow, AK, ca. 1980

Alaska—after the war. While the church’s rounded home was fully functional, not everything worked perfectly. “We had seats right against the wall on both sides. If a person was tall and they stood up to sing a song, they were bending over toward the middle,” Benjamin recalled. But it wasn’t a problem filling the seats: “One thing about having a small place like that: When you had fifteen to twenty people, you have a pretty good crowd.” The Quonset-hut church also boasted great acoustics. “It was like singing inside a barrel,” said Benjamin. “The organ just filled that place up. It’s like how people

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like to sing in the shower. You’d have hard time beating the acoustics of the inside of a Quonset hut.”74 In 1954, Father Thomas Cunningham became the first Catholic pastor in Barrow, Alaska. Father Tom, as most people referred to him, was a New Zealand–born missionary who arrived in the territory in 1930. After twenty-three years in various roles and locations, Father Tom’s superiors assigned him to Barrow, where he assumed responsibility for the largest, most northern, Catholic parish in the entire United States. This area, which included military outposts and native villages,

was strewn across mostly uninhabited and, more often than not, frozen tundra—an area above the Arctic Circle, now commonly referred to as the North Slope.75 When he arrived in Barrow there was no existing chapel or church of Christian faith. Father Tom took up residence in an old Eskimo dwelling and reached the outer limits of his parish by way of dog sled and military transport. Determined to create a spiritual base of operations, he went in search of surplus military buildings. In a letter he had written ten years prior, he stated, “When the Navy begins raining down the duck-soup, I want to be there with a fork.”76 Indeed, he was. A surplus Navy Quonset found four miles away would become the seed from which his mission would grow. Local citizens, military personnel, and members of the Puget Sound Drake Construction Company all worked together on the hut’s relocation and reerection. To move the structure, they cut it in two and then hauled it across the tundra with a D4 tractor and sledges borrowed from the U.S. Weather Service. It was mid-July but an untimely cold snap kept the temperature below freezing. That didn’t discourage Father Tom; he knew that “the Arctic has no warm weather; just different kinds of cold.”77 Additional lumber was salvaged from the abandoned military base at Umiat and transported free of charge by the Air Force. Dedicated volunteers continued to work throughout the summer, but it was ultimately Father Tom who completed a great deal of the carpentry and all of the wiring. When the church neared completion, he named it after St. Patrick, his patron saint.78

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Although the church was ready for occupancy that winter, it was not until the summer of 1955, with the arrival of a 350pound locomotive bell, that Thomas considered it complete. It was a gift from Colonel John E. Carroll, who convinced the president of Seattle’s Great Northern Railway to donate it. With the blessing of General Patrick Carter, the bell was flown to Barrow at no charge.79 Father Tom passed away only five years after opening his Quonset church. In the years that followed, the parish was kept intact by itinerant priests serving the Distant Early Warning (DEW) Line, the communication line across Alaska and Canada used to detect an enemy approaching from the north, and the Navy Arctic Research Laboratory. It was not until 1966 that Father Angus McDonald took over as resident pastor. He was followed by Father Thomas Handley, and then long-time resident pastor Francis Mueller. Throughout the tenure of these three Catholic priests, the little Quonset church served Barrow as the center of Catholic life and would remain as such until 1993, when it was removed and replaced by a wood-framed structure.80 The same year that Father Tom built St. Patrick’s, another Catholic priest would start another Quonset church, this one beside a dusty road known as the Alaska Highway. Its champion, Father Eusebe Morriset, was a Catholic missionary from the Province of Quebec. Having arrived in the Yukon shortly after completion of the highway, he was assigned by the Diocese of Whitehorse to roadside communities never

LEFT: Our Lady of the Way Catholic Church, Haines Junction, Yukon Territory, ca. 1966; RIGHT: Interior view of Our Lady of the Way Catholic Church, Haines Junction, Yukon Territory, 2003; OPPOSITE: Our Lady of the Way Catholic Church, Haines Junction, Yukon Territory, 2003

before accessible by vehicle.81 The Diocese first sent Morriset to Burwash Landings, a loosely knit, partially nomadic First Nation community northwest of Whitehorse. There, he quickly earned the respect of locals, and together they constructed the Yukon’s first church north of Whitehorse. In the years following the war, services necessary to sustain the highway attracted a new wave of settlers. Some came in hopes of cashing in on roadside services such as fueling, automotive repair, and overnight accommodations. Others came with government jobs to maintain the road and man its border station. Overall, the increase in population was negligible, but to a dedicated missionary like Morriset, it was nonetheless an opportunity to widen the influence of Christianity. In a short period of time, he would extend his work as far north as Beaver Creek and as far south as Haines Junction—two communities separated by a distance of 186 highway miles.

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Having been an auxiliary chaplain for U.S. and Canadian forces along the highway, Father Morriset was well acquainted with military buildings. In the Haines area alone, nearly every type of temporary structure utilized by U.S. forces in World War II was represented. With this full range of structures now available, Morriset selected a Butler hut, which, besides the Quonset and the Armco,82 was the most substantial of all the temporary structures used by U.S. forces. With the help of the local community, the structure was moved to a site near the center of town. Confronted by this fairly low, rather dark, linear shell, Morriset was challenged to find a means by which to transform this humble structure into a house of God. The solution he chose was brilliant. Instead of joining the hut’s curved ribs at the peak of the arch, he set them apart, allowing light into the structure along its entire length. Making that possible were wood beams

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Chris Chiei

utilized on each side of the opening to support arched sections and to serve as a base upon which a raised clerestory could be constructed. Morriset also incorporated the hut’s curved form into details throughout the building. On the exterior he constructed a false-front steeple that announces the church to the highway beyond. This seemingly twodimensional Gothic form transitions downward with apposing curves that recall the scrolls and half pediments of Renaissance church facades. Historically used on basilicas to fill a transition point between nave and side isle, these simplified buttresses appear to have been introduced for visual continuity between steeple and hut. Morriset also added an arctic entry immediately below the steeple, extending the facade with curving sidewalls whimsically opposed to form an hourglass-like space. To either side of that are quarter-round windows with mullions configured like radial spokes—a detail that adds a gemlike quality to the overall facade. Our Lady of the Way Catholic Church, named by Morriset, opened in 1954. In the churchyard beside the main structure, were two more huts—one a Quonset Redesign and the other a Butler hut. The former served as a parsonage for Father Morriset, the latter as a storage shed. The only structure in the complex without a curved roof was the outhouse tucked behind the shed. While commuting between Burwash Landing and Haines Junction, Father Morriset planned yet another church, this one at Beaver Creek. His missionary work included the little border town, which

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appeared to exist for no other purpose than for the border stations and a few roadside amenities. Although its population was much smaller than Burwash Landing or Haines Junction, Father Morriset felt it was ready for its own Catholic church. Nearly ten years after completing of Our Lady of the Way, Morriset again choose a Butler hut as the starting point for his design. He also created an open ridge for clerestory lighting in this structure, but this time with natural light from the end walls rather than lengthwise along the ridge. The solution was equally effective given the smaller scale of the space and also allowed a greater opportunity to sculpt the clerestory into a more responsive curvilinear form. Here, too, he utilized modest materials in elegant ways. Dime-store lampshades became elegant luminaries when mounted upsidedown along the edge of the clerestory. Unostentatious wood paneling became a warm wainscot, and simple wood-trim strips accentuated the curvilinear form of the space. Much in the way that architect Alvar Aalto brought natural light into a space without a direct visual connection to its source, Morriset would do the same, using a small west-facing window tucked to one side of an opening that framed the altar. The result was a haze of natural light illuminating the apse. Unlike Our Lady of the Way, where the hut sat directly upon the floor, the church at Beaver Creek was raised eighteen inches onto a stud frame wall constructed between the floor and the base of the arch. The impact on the space was dramatic, with a striking emphasis placed on upward

Our Lady of the Way Catholic Church, Haines Junction, Yukon Territory, 2002

movement. The new church, Our Lady of Grace, was fully complete by the end of 1962. Beat Ledergerber, a resident, remembered that first midnight mass, “Oh, it must have been 50 or 60 [degrees] below [zero]. Standing room only. People you’d never see in church.”83 In the years that followed, the little Quonset church became the site of baptisms, weddings, and funerals for many of the residents of Beaver Creek. As Hank Dubee said of the Quonset hut, “With a little imagination you can do just about anything with them. They’re not fancy, but they do the job.”84 Jim Griffin, another Quonset dweller in Alaska in the 1950s, was asked recently if he missed Quonset life. “Do you miss a tooth ache or an ingrown toenail? You’re not in love with

Interior view of Our Lady of Grace Catholic Church, Beaver Creek, Yukon Territory, 2003; OPPOSITE: Our Lady of Grace Catholic Church, Beaver Creek, Yukon Territory, 2003

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those things, it’s just some place to keep you out of the weather so you can do things you’d rather be doing.”85 Quonset huts symbolized the stereotypical Alaskan lifestyle—function over form. The rugged climate and landscape of the North inspired a make-do mentality that was well suited to Quonset living. Quonset huts were never intended for permanence but, in Alaska, they became fixtures of the built environment, primarily out of convenience. Eventually their familiarity bred acceptance. Today they are a pivotal part of the history of the U.S. and symbols of its pride in a simple and practical way of life.

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Chapter 6 Quonsets Today: Concluding Thoughts

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Architecture schools have often taught that buildings should be static, stationary, and motionless—meant to be frozen in time and place. Partly because of their inherent mobility, practical solutions to provisional shelter such as mobile homes and Quonset huts were much maligned in the twentieth century. But today, architects and designers are looking for ways to turn impermanence and mobility into desirable traits rather than liabilities. Perhaps enough time has now passed to leave behind postwar sentiments about temporary housing, accompanied by social, cultural, economic change has sparked a shift in attitude. Poet Andrei Codrescu, in his introduction to Mobile: The Art of Portable Architecture, by Jennifer Siegal, wrote: Nearly every American house I’ve lived in has long ago been demolished to make room for some other building. There is a delicious (though painful) paradox here: Americans long for stability, but all they get is stationary impermanence. No wonder then many of us long to become permanent nomads, snails with houses on our backs, Touareg tribesmen, and Gypsies.1

Siegal, and others like her, are working toward reinventing the identity of the mobile house, changing the traditional design but

retaining the concepts of affordability and flexibility. FTL Happold, an architecture, structural engineering, and interior design firm led by Buro Happold, designs structures such as a transportable music pavilion, which is carried by six custom semi-trailers to any open performance site. As with the Quonset, the size of the building has, in part, been determined by the means of transportation required to move it; in fact, “the allowable weight of the trailers for highway travel ultimately determined the exact surface area of the overhead tensile shell.”2 The German firm Festo Corporate Design works in the realm of “airtecture,” including what it calls the “first building in the world to be constructed with a cubic interior comprised of supporting structures built with air inflated chambers”3—it can be folded up in a standard forty-foot container. Austrian architect Oskar Leo Kaufmann designed FRED, a customizable, building-block-style home that can be assembled in two hours on site. Japanese architect Shigeru Ban has become known for his experimentations with and highly successful applications of alternative materials. Instead of wood, he used paper in 1986 to build a small pavilion. Though applied as a result of a tight

Quonset hut for rent in Kenai, AK, 2003

LEFT: Oskar Leo Kaufmann and Johannes Kaufmann, “FRED,” a customizable, building-block style home that can be assembled in two hours once it’s on site, 1999; RIGHT: Shigeru Ban, Paper Log Houses designed for temporary housing of earthquake victims, Nagata-Ku, Kobe, Japan, 1995

budget, he was pleasantly surprised at the effects of the substitute, specifically the strength of the paper, and, inspired by traditional Japanese houses made of bamboo, began to use paper tubes in his built structures. This eventually developed into an ingenious application in inexpensive and durable housing units, first offered to the victims of earthquakes in Kobe, Japan, in 1995, and later to house refugees in emergency situations in other parts of the world. Jeremy Edmiston and Douglas Gauthier of the New York firm SYSTEMarchitects set out on a similar mission, designing refugee housing for Kosovo and creating an easily transportable, simpleto-construct kit of parts to create housing from prefabricated components. Their project was designed to be constructed primarily of Stresskin, an inexpensive panel system that sandwiches a layer of foam between two sheets of corrugated-metal decking, providing insulation as well as durability. So why not the Quonset hut? Will it see a rebirth? Although the DNA of the

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Quonset—whose unique structural system liberated the interior space from walls and other supports—can be found in any number of contemporary designs, such as the Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center at the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum, a revival seems unlikely. Perhaps the answer to the question of its unlikely restoration is partly in its geometry and partly in the American ideal that new is always better. The Quonset hut’s shape is both its charm and its nemesis. The Quonset hut is a simple geometric form where the walls and roof are one and the same, much like the tipi, A-frame, igloo, and pyramid. None of these, all popular building forms in their time, have prevailed in contemporary times. Though cost- and time-efficient, the Quonset possessed attributes, such as portability and ease of assembly, that overshadowed its less-than-desirable use of space. Its curved walls create a lot of lateral space too low to stand in. As a dwelling, the Quonset hut was often unfriendly to furniture, artwork, and other traditional, domestic embell-

ishments. Jim Griffin, who grew up in a Quonset home in Seward, Alaska, said its form made the Quonset hut a challenge to beautify: “When you’re in a building that’s got, I’m going to guess, twenty- to twentyfive-foot diameter with three-foot pony walls holding up that curve, you don’t have a lot to work with. Especially if you’re not real creative as an architect.”4 So maybe Quonset huts are meant only for times of crisis when creative instincts, born of necessity, are at their zenith. Or, perhaps, it is meant for those whose imaginations can embrace the extraordinary. In a society where self-expression is controlled by a housing committee established for no other purpose than selfperpetuated mediocrity, Quonset-hut dwellers, where they have been permitted to exist, seem to go to great lengths to distinguish themselves in their tin cans. Quonset huts have served many as a canvas of life and living. Quonset dwellers have been free to record themselves much the same way that ancient people did in the caves of Europe. World War II GIs painted the interior wallboard of Quonset huts with scenes of places they would rather have been and images of women they would very much like to have known. In the postwar years, self expression moved from inside to outside on Quonsets with murals, such as in the case of artist Lee Culhane who continually repaints his Quonset shed in Cohoe, Alaska, as though it were an ongoing art exhibition. Fairbanks artist David Mollett felt lucky to find his Quonset hut in 1978 in which he still lives today:

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The city auctioned off about fifteen They were using them for storage. In fact, mine was full of old parking meters. They had a silent-bid auction, so I went down there. I was just going to use it as a temporary building, a studio to work in...I think I got it for $120. I picked the very best one out of the fifteen of them—just picked the one that was in the best shape. And I won it. Nobody bid against me. So I took it apart with a screwdriver and took it home. I put it back together and then built a little arctic entry that kind of matches the curve. Instead of my studio, it became my house.

Frank Gehry once said, “The only time we notice buildings is when they are being built and when they are falling down.” Quonset huts are doing just that; they are falling down. Where they have not been dismantled and shipped out, they have been left

Kohler, Quonset comic, 1946

Quonset hut residence in Girdwood, AK, 2003; OPPOSITE: Cohoe Studio storage shed in Cohoe, AK, 2003

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Julie Decker and Chris Chiei

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Julie Decker and Chris Chiei

Abandoned gas station, Buckinghorse, British Columbia, 2003; OPPOSITE TOP: Quonset hay shed, Musk Ox Farm, Palmer, AK, 2003; OPPOSITE BOTTOM: Ruins of a Navy base, Massacre Bay, Attu, AK, 1992

to rust and decay. Today, the few Quonset huts that remain in use still serve as stores, restaurants, homes, and churches, but they are distinct icons of the past. Some are preserved because of the simplicity they represent; others are merely the most economic solution to a need for shelter. Our nation’s relationship with the Quonset has been a tumultuous, complicated, and, at times, an affectionate one. Cathleen Doyle, a resident of Fairbanks, Alaska, who once lived in a Quonset hut said: “After you’ve lived in a Quonset, it’s kind of a love hate relationship—you start hating it at the beginning, and then by the time you leave, you’re looking at your new house and saying, ‘Lets put an arch into the house—sort of like a Quonset, but not really.’”5

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Perhaps the Quonset hut will enjoy a resurgence in a time of crisis and return to its glory days when it was prefabricated by the tens of thousands. More likely, some other structure, born from the specific needs of its era, will rise to the occasion. The Quonset hut was a building of its time that got to hang around just a bit longer. Perhaps it falls just short of being celebrated. But its simple form, its sometimes awkward but proven ability to adapt to a variety of climates and uses, its durability, and its stubborn longevity make it a true American icon. It’s the temporary building that almost became permanent. It is the hut that has come full circle.

Appendix: Hut Types

1. QUONSET HUT—T-RIB 16' x 36' and 16' x 20' The original Quonset hut, which came to be known as the T-Rib Quonset, was developed in response to the Navy’s desire to produce a new prefabricated hut system during World War II to shelter troops abroad. At Quonset Point, Rhode Island, George A. Fuller and his design team, under the direction of Otto Brandenberger, created the T-Rib Quonset, an adaptable building for mass production that would be portable, erected and knocked down quickly and easily, adaptable to any climate and geography, and provide soldiers with the most protection and comfort possible.

2. QUONSET HUT—REDESIGN 16' x 36' and 24' x 60' The basic strategy of the Quonset Redesign was to keep the footprint of the T-Rib design but to introduce a lighter I-shaped steel arch with fourfoot vertical sidewalls. The new arch, assembled in two sections instead of three, reduced erection time and required fewer fasteners. More impor-

148

Appendix

tantly, counter-height equipment could now be installed close to the wall without out any residual loss of floor space.

3. QUONSET STRAN-STEEL HUT 20' x 48' and 20' x 56' The third and final generation of the Quonset hut was produced by StranSteel of Detroit, Michigan. This design reverted back to the full arch profile and used many of the same structural components as the Redesign, but now it appeared lighter, thinner, or pushed to greater spans. Initially introduced with corrugated panels, similar to the T-Rib, it was later modified to use the factory-curved panel only at the ridge. The remaining sidewall and end wall panels were mounted with corrugated metal oriented in the opposite direction.

4. PACIFIC HUT 18'–6" x 37'–4" Frank Hobbs, a mechanical engineer who later formed the Pacific Hut Company in Seattle, took blueprints of his all-wood Quonset design, the Pacific hut, to the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers in summer of 1942. It was designed to overcome the major short-

coming of the Quonset: its all-steel construction. Steel was not only a critical material during the war but also rusted quickly in the tropics and, in the Arctic, permitted cold temperature migration across metal structures. Wood structures greatly reduce thermal transfer. The Pacific hut is easily recognizable by the celotex, a waterproof form of masonite, exterior and the triangular ridgeline vent cover.

5. BUTLER HUT 16' x multiple of 4' and 24' x multiple of 4' Developed by the Butler Manufacturing Company of Kansas City, Missouri, the Butler hut was an all-steel arched hut—profile slightly more than half a circle—with Ushaped arched ribs around an eightfoot radius. End walls were framed with steel and end walls and sidewalls were enclosed with two-footwide standing seam metal sheets. Not long after World War II, however, Butler abandoned the curved-roof approach, although they still produce metal prefabricated buildings today with gabled roofs.

6. JAMESWAY 16' x multiple of 4' and 20' x multiple of 4' The James Manufacturing Company of Fort Atkinson, Wisconsin, created a version of the Quonset hut with wooden ribs and an insulated fabric covering for the Army Air Corps. This portable and easy-to-assemble hut was designed for Arctic weather conditions when personnel were wearing bulky clothes and mittens but needed shelter construction to proceed quickly. Insulated blankets in four-foot-wide lengths were made with glass fiber insulation faced with flame-proof muslin and enclosed in plastic-treated cotton that was water, vermin, and fire proof. The hardware (nails, fasteners, and connecting bars) was the only metal component, and the whole package weighed 1,200 pounds for a 16' x 16' hut. Its wooden packing crates were designed for reuse as the hut floor.

7. ARMCO HUT 20' x 50' During World War II, the Armco International Corporation of Middletown, Ohio, produced arched corrugated ingot iron bunkers, ammunition magazines, and personnel shelters. The heavy steel buildings were modeled on earth-retaining structures

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such as culverts and storm sewers. The heavy iron (8- to 14-gauge) did not require supporting ribs but was curved and corrugated much like a Quonset hut. Armcos were strong enough to be completely buried in up to six feet of dirt.

8. PORTASEAL HUT 16' x 37' The Portaseal hut, frequently seen along the Alaska Highway and CANOL pipeline, is a Canadian version of the wood-framed, plywood-clad structure. These huts were shipped in prefabricated sections, could be erected quickly, and were heated with improvised oil drum stoves. Identifiable features include a tar-paper finish nailed atop plywood sidewalls, end walls with large windows, and wide batten-type trim boards atop the end walls' vertical panel joints. Some surviving examples have been observed with six-inch sheathing strips in lieu of plywood.

9. EMKAY HUT 20' x 48' Morrison-Knudsen Company designed the Emkay (M-K) hut to shelter their crews for their large and remote military construction contracts. While they

credit the origin of the design, inspired by a chicken shed, to their engineer G. D. Paxson, the similarities to the Quonset and Pacific huts are undeniable. Built in Boise, Iowa, beginning in 1943, the Emkay had laminated wood ribs. Its distinct “two-centered arch” appears pointed, or gothic, in profile. The huts look peaked from outside after the exterior sheathing is applied. All styles were built entirely of wood and wallboard, could be built to any lengths in multiples of twelve feet, and could accommodate different climates.

10. COWIN HUT 36' x 60' The large, steel semicircular warehouses were developed by Cowin and Company, Inc. for the Air Corps at Wright Field. Cowin called their structure a 36' x 60' Steeldrome. To resist thrust on the arch caused by snow loads, Cowins used a truss system of horizontal steel tie rods and vertical steel hangers. Not many Cowin huts were shipped to Alaska after 1943 because they were inadequate for Alaskan snow loads. A number of them collapsed in their first winter of use.

149

Notes

First Session of the Seventy-Seventh Congress

ber of the team. Peter Dejongh, a career-long

of the United States of America, 1941–1942,

engineer with George A. Fuller and

and Treaties, International Agreements Other

Company, is memorialized as the hut’s

than Treaties, and Proclamations

designer in his obituary appearing in the

(Washington: Government Printing Office,

New York Times that year, but McDonnell,

Richard M. Casella, Martha H. Bowers, and

1942), 55:31–33. Since the Navy later used

the last surviving member of the design

Leonid I. Shmookler, prepared for the United

these two firms for numerous construction

team, claimed to have never hear of Dejongh.

States Navy, Northern Division Naval

projects on the Atlantic Coast and overseas,

Tim Clark, “Living in a Quonset Hut Is Like

Facilities Engineering Command, Recordation

they eventually acquired the official title of

Eating Spam,” Yankee Magazine 49, no.11

Report for Naval Construction Training

“East Coast Contractors.” “The Quonset

(November 1985): 119

Center Davisville (Camp Endicott) Buildings

Hut,” transcript, 187, Providence College

19

T2-8, T11, T13, and T15-19: North Kingston,

Archives, Rhode Island.

Brandenberger) to Author, Responses to

Washington County, Rhode Island, (Lester,

9

Public Laws, 31–33.

Interview Questionnaire regarding Otto

PA: Northern Division Naval Facilities

10

Engineering Command, 1997), 9.

bases usually located in friendly territory, or

20

afloat, that are established to extend control

Quonset on Map,” Providence Evening

Company: General Contractors (New York:

or communications or to provide support for

Bulletin, 15 July 1966, Quonset Hut

George A. Fuller Company, 1937).

training and tactical operations. United

Collection, Providence College Archives.

States Navy, Building the Navy’s Bases in

21

Ibid.

Cleveland, Ohio,” 2003, collection GLMS-3,

World War II: History of the Bureau of Yards

22

Fred McCosh, Nissen of the Huts (Borne

Historical Collection of the Great Lakes,

and Docks and the Civil Engineering Corps

End, England: B. D. Publishing, 1997),

Bowling Green State University Manuscript

1940–1946 (Washington, DC: Government

76–108.

and Archival Material, http://www.bgsu.edu/

Printing Office, 1947), 1:162.

23

colleges/library/hcgl/glms0003.html

11

(accessed November 14, 2003).

Training Center Davisville, 11.

Chapter 1 How the Hut Came to Be Chris Chiei 1

2

3

George A. Fuller Company, George A. Fuller

“Dunbar Sullivan Dredging Company:

Recordation Report for Naval Construction

Rudolph A. Hempe, “Ugly Hut Put

Keith Mallory and Arvid Ottar, The

Architecture of War (New York: Pantheon, 1973), 81. 24

McCosh, Nissen of the Huts, 109–12.

Fuller Company: War and Peace, 1940–1947

25

Hempe, “Ugly Hut Put Quonset on Map.”

2003), http://www.structurae.de/en/firms/

(New York: George A. Fuller Company, 1947),

26

George A. Fuller Company, The George A.

data/fir1299.php (accessed November 14,

62.

Fuller Company, 63.

2003).

13

5

Recordation Report for Naval Construction

Training Center Davisville: 9. 6

U.S. Department of State, Peace and War:

12

George A. Fuller Company, The George A.

Brandenberger, 11 January 2004.

Database and Gallery of Structures (15 October

4

“Merritt-Chapman and Scott,” International

Forward bases are special-operations

Robert Brandenberger (son of Otto

27

Ibid.

newspaper source, nd., Quonset Hut

28

Miller assigned a Navy Drawing

Collection, Providence College Archives.

Accession number 2759 to the drawings and

14

“They Slept Under Our Roof,” unknown

George A. Fuller Company, The George A.

forwarded them to Moreell for review. R. V. Miller to the Chief of the Bureau of

United States Foreign Policy, 1931–1941

Fuller Company, 61–62.

(Washington, DC: U.S., Government Printing

15

Office, 1943): 564–67.

bases established near or within a joint spe-

Washington, DC, “Contract NOy-4175, U.S.

cial operations area to command, control,

Naval Air Station Quonset Point, R. I.

Chief of the Bureau of Yards and Docks,

and/or support training or tactical opera-

Temporary Aviation Facilities,” 4 April 1941,

“Contract NOy-4175, Aviation shore facilities,

tions, usually controlled and/or supported

RG 71, box 769, vol. 10, National Archives I,

Naval Air Station, Quonset Point, R.I,” con-

by a main operations base or a forward

Washington, DC.

tract correspondence, 20 May 1941, RG 71,

operations base.

30

box 769, vol. 2, pg. 2, National Archives I,

16

Washington, D.C.

Fuller Company, 62.

7

Board to Negotiate Fee Contracts to the

George A. Fuller Company, The George A.

29

Yards and Docks, Navy Department,

J. N. Laycock to the officer-in-charge of

construction, U.S. Naval Air Station, Quonset Point, RI, “Temporary Aviation Facilities,

17

Ibid., 63.

Contract NOy-4175—A, B, One, Two—

Statutes at Large Containing the Laws and

18

A 1985 Yankee Magazine article by Tim

Revisions to Partial Summary of Equipment,”

Concurrent Resolutions Enacted during the

Clark explored and discredited a fifth mem-

8

Public Laws. Part 1 of United States

Advanced bases are small temporary

150

Notes

8 May 1941, RG 71, box 774, vol. 1, National

Archives I, Washington, DC.

RI, “Temporary Aviation Facilities, Contract

Officer-in-Charge of Construction for Contract

NOy-4175, A, B, One and Two—Change in

NOy-4175, Naval Air Station, Quonset Point,

Eating Spam,” Yankee Magazine 49, no.11

Designation of 16' x 36' Hut,” 18 July 1941, RG

RI, “Temporary Advanced Facilities, Contract

(November 1985): 119.

71, box 774, National Archives I, Washington,

NOy-4175, P. D. Q.—Authorization to Commit

DC.

for purchase of Security Materials,” 15

31

32

Tim Clark, “Living in a Quonset Hut Is Like

Officer-in-Charge of Contract NOy-4175 to

According to Fuller: “A night gale of hurri-

contractors, “Temporary Aviation Facilities,

42

16' x 36' Hut—Item 1-A,” 22 May 1941, RG 71,

cane proportion that wrecked shipping in the

National Archives I, Washington, DC.

box 774, vol. 1, National Archives I,

harbor, tossed crumpled PBYs (patrol bomber

49

Washington, DC.

planes used by the Navy) on the beach like

Construction for Contract NOy-4175, TAF, U.S.

paper hats, and ripped the covering com-

Naval Air Station, Quonset Point, RI,

pletely off of many British Nissen huts, left

“Contract NOy-4175, Temporary Advanced

the Quonset huts practically undamaged.”

Facilities, Program for Production of Quonset

box 3, manuscript collection 117, Manuscripts

George A. Fuller Company, The George A.

Huts,” 15 January 1942, RG 71, box 777, vol.

Division, Quonset Point—Davisville Records,

Fuller Company, 64.

18, National Archives I, Washington, DC.

Rhode Island Historical Society, Providence,

43

RI.

box 3, manuscript collection 117, Manuscripts

1: 162.

Division, Quonset Point—Davisville Records,

51

Rhode Island Historical Society, Providence,

Training Center Davisville: 11.

RI.

52

33

George A. Fuller Company, The George A.

Fuller Company, 63. 34

35

“Quonset Hut—Specifications,” vol. 63:14,

Building the Navy’s Bases in World War II,

1: 162. 36

J. N. Laycock to commanding general, U.S.

“Quonset hut-specifications,” vol. 63:14,

Admiral Ben Moreell to Officer-in-Charge

December 1941, RG 71, box 777, vol. 16,

50

E. S. Huntington to Officer-in-Charge of

Building the Navy’s Bases in World War II,

Recordation Report for Naval Construction

George A. Fuller Company & Merritt-

Marine Barracks, Quantico, VA, “Nissen

44

Huts,” 23 May 1941, RG 71, box 769, vol. 12,

of Construction, Contract NOy-4175, Naval

#A–16841 addressed to Great Lakes Steel

National Archives I, Washington, DC.

Air Station, Quonset Point, RI, “Additional

Corporation, Stran-Steel Division, 24 July

purchases under Contract NOy-4175—

1942, RG 71, box 773, vol. 30, National

Yards and Docks, “Equipment for Advanced

Supplemental Agreement No. 2 and Change

Archives I, Washington, DC.

Bases, procurement of,” 24 May 1941, RG 71,

Order,” September 1941, RG 71, box 770, vol.

53

box 779, vol. 26. National Archives I,

14, National Archives I, Washington, DC.

Fuller Company, 65.

Washington, DC.

45

37

L. E. Rea to the chief of the Bureau of

Chapman Scott Corporation, purchase order

George A. Fuller Company, The George A.

George A. Fuller Co. & Merritt-Chapman

54

Ibid.

Scott Corp., Boiler and Battery Room Addition

55

Building the Navy’s Bases in World War II,

respondences between 1941 and 1942 make

to Dispensary Surgical Hut (drawing), Navy

1: 162.

reference to the twenty-foot-long hut,

Accession No. 3736, approved 5 September

56

Ibid.

although little is known about this variation

1941, RG 71, Master Facility 215,

57

Ibid.

of the design.

Cartographic and Architectural Branch,

58

Ibid., 1:374–75.

National Archives II, College Park, MD.

59

Ibid.

60

Ibid.

38

39

It is noted that several other contract cor-

D. W. Hopkins, memorandum to the Chief

Monica Garcia Brooks, ed., The Good

of the Bureau of Yards and Docks, “Comments

46

on Nissen Huts,” 18 June 1941, RG 71, box

Housekeeping Stran-Steel House, Chicago

61

Ibid., 1:133.

774, vol. 2, National Archives I, Washington,

World’s Fair, 1933, http://members.tripod.

62

Leonid I. Shmookler, Naval Construction

DC.

com/~brooks_mgb/stran3.htm (accessed on

Battalion Center Davisville, Davisville, Rhode

November 16, 2003).

Island, A Historical Perspective 1942–1994,

40

Officer-in-Charge of Construction to Chief

George A. Fuller Co. & Merritt-Chapman

of the Bureau of Yards and Docks, “Contract

47

NOy-4175, Naval Air Station Quonset Point,

Scott Corp., Redesign of 16 ' x 36 ' Quonset Hut

Naval Facilities Engineering Command,

R.I.—Temporary Aviation Facilities—A, B,

(drawing), Navy Accession No. 3722,

1994): 1.

One Two—Crating of Quonset Huts,” August

approved 21 October 1941, RG 71, Master

63

Ibid., 1:133–34.

8, 1941, RG 71, box 775, vol. 9, National

Facility 215, Cartographic and Architectural

64

Building the Navy’s Bases in World War II,

Archives I, Washington, DC.

Branch, National Archives II, College Park,

1:135–36.

MD.

65

41

E. S. Huntington to officer-in-charge of con-

struction, Naval Air Station, Quonset Point,

151

Notes

48

Chief of the Bureau of Yards and Docks to

(Port Hueneme, California: Northern Division

Naval Construction Battalion Center

Davisville, Davisville, Rhode Island, A

151

Historical Perspective 1942–1994, 4. 90th USN Construction Battalion: Its

14

Marc-Antoine Laugier, Essai sur

9

Paulette Goddard, “The Great Housing

L’architecture (An Essay on Architecture),

Shortage,” Life 19, no. 25 (17 December

History and Accomplishments 1943–1945

trans. Wolfgang Hermann and Anni

1945): 30.

(Baton Rouge, LA: Army & Navy Pictorial

Herrmann (Los Angeles: Hennessey and

10

Publishers, 1946).

Ingalls, Inc., 1977).

Years,” Life 19, no. 25 (17 December 1945):

66

67

Building the Navy’s Bases in World War II,

15

I wish to acknowledge the work of Keith

“U.S. Needs 16,100,000 New Homes in Ten

33.

Mallory and Arvid Ottar and in particular

11

Ibid.

their book, The Architecture of War, which

12

Ibid.

Freighting: Oumalik Test Well, No. 1, Drawing

was an invaluable reference in preparing this

13

Paulette Goddard, “The Great Housing

No 698.1, NARL Collection Archives,

chapter; Chris Chiei and Julie Decker for

Shortage,” Life 19, no. 25 (17 December

University of Alaska, Fairbanks.

their advice; and Martha Thorne and Lori

1945): 33.

Hanna Boyer at The Art Institute of Chicago

14

who provided access to many drawings by

Popular Science, March 1946, 66–71.

Bruce Goff in the Institute’s archive at the

15

Ibid., 68.

Department of Architecture.

16

Gwendolyn Wright, Building the Dream: A

1:373. 68

69

Arctic Contractors, 20' x 48' Hut Truss Trail

“Post Maintenance Builds Trailer to Move

Huts,” The Pendelton Scout, October 25, 1948.

Chapter 3 War, Design, and Weapons of Mass Construction Brian Carter 1

The components defined two millenna ago

by the Roman architect Vitruvius. 2

“The Nissen Hut on the Western Front,”

Social History of Housing in America (New

Chapter 4 After the War: Quonset Huts and Their Integration Into Daily American Life Tom Vanderbilt 1

Charles Cutler, Tracks That Speak (New

The Architects’ and Builders’ Journal 45

York: Houghton Mifflin Co., 2002).

(February 14, 1917): 91.

2

Terry Smith, Albert Kahn: Inspiration for the

Harley E. Howe, “Stop Gap Housing,”

Donald Albrecht, World War II and the

York: Pantheon Books, 1981), 253. 17

Albrecht, World War II and the American

Dream, 253. 18

Hine, Blueprints for Modern Living, 169.

19

Sheldon Cheney and Martha Candler

Cheney, Art and the Machine: An Account of Industrial Design in 20th-century America

American Dream: How War Time Buildings

(1936; New York: Acanthus Press, 1992), 160.

Modern (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan

Changed a Nation (Cambridge, MA: MIT

20

Museum of Art, 2001), 35.

Press, 1995), xvi.

Adventure, 1940–1975 (Cambridge, Mass:

3

4

Waldo G. Bowman, “Military huts and

3

Great Lakes Steel Corporations, Stran-Steel

Arthur J. Pulos, The American Design

MIT Press), 31. Quoted in Dana Cuff, The Provisional City:

structures at American installations in

Division advertisement, New Pencil Points,

21

Britain,” Engineering News Record, October

September 1943.

Los Angeles Stories of Architecture and

21, 1943, 98.

4

5

“Competition Prize Winners,” The

Architectural Forum, September 1943, 88–89. 6

Herbert Matter, Charles Eames, and

Great Lakes Steel Corporations, Stran-Steel

Urbanism (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000),

Division advertisement, New Pencil Points,

182.

September 1943.

22

5

Thomas Hine, “The Search for the Postwar

Rodger Young was a slain serviceman

after whom the Rodger Young Village was

Buckminster Fuller, “Prefabricated Housing,”

House,” in Blueprints for Modern Living:

named. The village was, then, a rare instance

Arts & Architecture, July 1944, 37.

History and Legacy of the Case Study Houses

of a new ethnically mixed American commu-

7

Ibid.

(Los Angeles: Museum of Contemporary Art;

nity. Dana Cuff, The Provisional City: Los

8

Ibid.

Cambridge: MIT Press, 1989), 169.

Angeles Stories of Architecture and Urbanism

9

Reyner Banham, The Age of the Masters

6

(New York: Harper & Row, 1962), 77.

J. B. Jackson, Discovering the Vernacular

(Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 2000). “Big Rodger Young Village Vanishing,” Los

Landscape (New Haven: Yale University

23

Angeles Times, 4 April 1954, part 2, 1–2.

10

Ibid.

Press, 1986), 135.

11

David Gilson De Long, The Architecture of

7

24

Cuff, The Provisional City, 186.

Bruce Goff: Buildings and Projects, 1916–1974

Division advertisement, Architectural Record,

Great Lakes Steel Corporations, Stran-Steel

25

Ibid., 178.

(New York: Garland Publishing, Inc., 1977),

February 1944.

26

Grace Simons, “Project Eviction

195.

8

Great Lakes Steel Corporations, Stran-Steel

Attacked,” California Eagle 72, no. 45

12

Banham, The Age of the Masters, 79.

Division advertisement, Architectural Record,

(February 7, 1952): 1.

13

Ibid.

September 1944.

27

152

Notes

Mark Pandanell, “Texas City Firefighters

1259,” http://www.local1259iaff.org/disas-

(posted 28 February 2002).

ter.html.

45

28

Great Lakes Steel Corporations, Stran-Steel

Alastair Gordon, Weekend Utopia (New

York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2001), 49.

64

T. Luke Young, The Unassuming Quonset:

Survival of Semi-Circular Significance, no. 4 (Washington, DC: Cultural Resource

Division advertisement, Saturday Evening

46

Ibid., 50.

Management, U.S. Department of the Interior,

Post, 15 May 1948.

47

“Hillside House,” Architectural Forum,

National Park Service, 1996), 9.

29

“Converted Quonset,” Art and

Architecture, December 1946, 34–35. P. J. McKenna, “Planting for the Temporary

August 1950, 95. 48

Quote from Sheldon Cheney and Martha

65

Joe Marshall, letter to the editor, “City

Handling of Huts Distasteful Troubling!” Daily

Candler Cheney, Art and the Machine: An

News Bowling Green Kentucky, November 10,

Account of Industrial Design in 20th-century

2003, http://bgdailynews.com/.

America (1936; New York: Acanthus Press,

66

Quonset Hut,” House Beautiful, September

1992), 1.

Sanctuaries,” Your Church. January/February

1946, 120–2.

49

30

Home, The New York Times, 6 April 1947. 31

32

Helen Weigel Brown, “A Home from a

Helen Weigel Brown, “How to Convert a

Ruth Ford, letter to Bruce Goff, October 18,

Archives, Ryerson and Burnham Archives,

Beautiful, September 1946, 140–41.

Art Institute of Chicago, Illinois.

Great Lakes Steel Corporations, Stran-Steel

2003, 54.

1948, folder 4.14, box 4, series II, Goff

Quonset to an Emergency Home,” House

33

Quentin Wagenfield, “From Sheds to

50

Jeffrey Cook, The Architecture of Bruce

Chapter 5 The Huts That Wouldn’t Go Away: Alaska Adopts the Hut Chris Chiei

Division advertisement, Saturday Evening

Goff (London: Harper and Row, 1978), 24.

Post, 14 June 1947.

51

The Provisional City, 194.

1

52

Great Lakes Steel Corp., Stran-Steel

Fairbanks Daily News Miner, January 20,

34

Quonsets: The Story of a Building that

“100 Home Units Seen Needed Here,”

Gave America a New Standard of Quality

Division advertisement text, Architectural

1945.

Building Values (Detroit: Great Lakes Steel

Record, June 1947.

2

Corporation, Stran-Steel Division, n.d.).

53

Jan Cohn, The Palace or the Poorhouse:

“Housing Needs Reflected in C. of C.

Study,” Anchorage Daily Times, January 20,

35

Los Angeles Times, September 6, 1991.

The American House as a Cultural Symbol

1945.

36

Thomas Hine, Populuxe (New York: Alfred

(East Lansing, MI: Michigan State University

3

Press, 1979), 238.

Loom,” Anchorage Daily Times, September 3,

A. Knopf, 1986). 37

The Talk of the Town, The New Yorker,

March 1946. 38

John J. Bertin and Michel L. Smith,

54

Alan Dunn, The Last Lath (New York:

“1482 Housing Units Needed, Delays

1946. Annual Report of the Governor of Alaska,

Architectural Record and F. W. Dodge

4

Corporation, 1947).

June 30, 1948:46, Alaska State Archives,

Aerodynamics for Engineers, 2nd ed. (New

55

The Los Angeles Times, September 6, 1991.

Juneau, Alaska.

Jersey, Prentice Hall, 1989), 95, 114, 115.

56

The Los Angeles Times, September 6, 1991.

5

57

Christopher Reynolds, “An Ode to the

Daily News Miner, September 15, 1942.

39

Tim Clark, “Living in a Quonset Hut is Like

“Army to Take Over Hotel Here,” Fairbanks

“Another Hotel Here Taken Over,” Fairbanks

Eating Spam,” Yankee Magazine 44, No. 1,

Forgotten Quonset Anniversary: The corru-

6

(November 1985): 120.

gated metal hut turned 50 this summer. But

Daily News Miner, September 29, 1942.

the ‘fabulous example of American ingenuity’

7

will go unfeted” Los Angeles Times, Sep 6,

Construction Industry,” Anchorage Daily

40

Abigail McCarthy, “The Can-Do Quonset,”

Commonweal, November 8, 1991, 634. 41

Lewis Lapham, “The Boys Next Door,”

1991, 16, Orange County edition.

“List Materials Considered Taboo In

Times, 1 May 1, 1942.

58

The Los Angeles Times, September 6, 1991.

8

Amber Ridington, “History Worth

59

The Sacramento Bee, April 4, 2003.

Daily Times, July, 11 1944.

Preserving—The Quonset Auditorium,”

60

“Brief History,” http://www.xmission.com/

9

Landmark Report, (Bowling Green, KY:

~hta/history.html

Landmark Association of Bowling Green-

61

Warren County, February 2002), 1.

territory,” St. Petersburg Times, May 25, 2002.

Harper’s Magazine, July 2001, 11. 42

“Postwar homes are latest preservation

43

Ibid.

62

The Journal News, March 5, 2001.

44

Tom Quinlan, “The Stat-up Culture,”

63

Fred Williamson quoted in Tim Clark,

“A Stampede to Buy Homes,” Anchorage

United States Department of the Interior,

The Alaska Railroad War Record, August 20, 1945. 10

“Sale of Huts to Aid Housing,” Anchorage

Daily Times, May 29,1945. 11See

Appendix: Hut Types. Reed

http://www.siliconvalley.com/mid/siliconval-

“Living in a Quonset Hut is Like Eating

Construction Company, Pacific Builder and

ley/living/2765031.htm

Spam,” 122.

Engineer, December 1943.

153

Notes

12

See Appendix: Hut Types. James D. Bush,

27, 1947. “No Housing Available for Needy

46

Gretchen Bersch and Findlay Abbott,

Narrative Report of Alaska Construction

28

1941–1944 (Anchorage: Department of the

Transients,” Anchorage Daily Times, May 6,

47

Ibid.

Navy, U.S. Engineer District Alaska, 1984);

1946.

48

Two page advertisement by Oregon

and Civilian Aeronautics Administration, 36 x

29

60' Steeldrome Cowin Huts Erection and

Anchorage Daily Times, 23, October 23, 1946.

Insulation Details (drawing), based on Cowin

30

Company originals, 1944.

Alaska and still is a major corporation and a

Company,” Fairbanks Daily News Miner, April

large employer in Fairbanks, Anchorage, and

23, 1947.

Seward.

50

13

“Army Huts as Housing,” Anchorage Daily

Times, May 31, 1945. 14

“Buildings for Sale,” Anchorage Daily

Times, June 1,1945. 15

“May Put Ban on Quonsets,” Anchorage

Daily Times, June 8, 1945.

31

The Alaskan Railroad was an icon of

United States Department of the Interior,

Export Company, “Your New Home,” Anchorage Daily Times, April 22, 1947. 49

“Packaged Homes to be Sold Here by Selid

Tyler Jones, “Dine in a Quonset hut,”

Anchorage Daily Times, April 8, 1973. Gerry Kirchner, We Found our Spot in

The Alaska Railroad War Record, August 20,

51

1945, 40.

Alaska (Anchorage: Soroptimist

32

“Housing Units to be Placed on

Club), 3.

Government Hill,” Anchorage Daily Times,

52

Ibid., 10–11.

Manufacturing Company, Building a Legacy:

June 13, 1946.

53

Helen Gillette, “Kirchner Sees Gloomy

Butler in the Twentieth Century, Butler

33

Ibid.

Future for the Creative Cook,” Anchorage

Military Quarters brochure (Kansas City, MO:

34

“ARR Granted Whittier Area,” Anchorage

Daily Times, September 11, 1968.

Butler Manufacturing Company, 1941).

Daily Times, July 26, 1946.

16

17

See Appendix: Hut Types. Butler

“Welfare Group Given Quonset,”

interview by Chris Chiei, April 29, 2004.

Anchorage Ordinance No. 157, June 13,

35

“ARR Workers Can Get Huts,” Anchorage

54

Kirchner, We Found our Spot in Alaska, 18.

55

Ibid., 22.

56

Ibid., 20–21.

1945: 41–43, Loussac Library, Alaska

Daily Times, August 21, 1946.

Collection Archives; and “Restrict Use of

36

“Government Hill Project Halted by Lack

57

Ibid., 27.

Quonsets to Two Years,” Anchorage Daily

of Funds.” Anchorage Daily Times, November

58

Ibid., 29.

Times, June 14, 1945.

13, 1948.

59

Helen Gillette, “Kirchner Sees Gloomy

18

“Army Buildings Draw 56 Bids,”

Anchorage Daily Times, June 21, 1945. 19

“Would Erect Quonset Hut,” Anchorage

Daily Times, July 26, 1945. 20

Seward Briefs, Anchorage Daily Times,

“Building and Zoning Code Described,”

Fairbanks Daily News Miner, May 15, 1946. 22

“Dedicated Hut for Boy Scouts,”

Anchorage Daily Times, June 6, 1945. 23

“Drama Group May Get Hut,” Anchorage

Daily Times, August 21, 1946. 24

“Anchorage Men Buy Seward Army

Daily Times, September 11, 1968.

10, 1944.

60

Fred R. Kessler, Real Estate Consultant

Anchorage Daily Times, February 28, 1946.

Bill Kossen, “Garden of Eatin’ Food

61

Land Management, August 5, 1947, Record

Rewards Explorers,” Anchorage Daily Times,

Group No. 270, box 2, Real Estate Disposal

March 31, 1982.

Case Files, 1944–49, National Archives—

62

Ibid.

Pacific Alaska Region, Anchorage.

63

Helve Enatti, “Anchorage Public Schools

39

See Appendix: Hut Types.

1915–1951: A Thirty-six-year School

40

“Farmers Buy Garrison Building,”

Development Study” (master’s thesis,

41

Jessie DeVries, interview by Chris Chiei,

January 25, 2003.

University of Alaska, May 1967), 210, box 1, volume II, Anchorage Public Schools Collection, University of Fairbanks Library.

42

Ibid.

64

Town,” Fairbanks Daily News Miner,

43

Dennis and Cleo Green, interview by

Daily Times, July 17, 1947 and “City Acquires

December 12, 1945.

Chris Chiei, July 10, 2003.

25

26

“Elks Quonset Hut Purchased by Teen

He opposed the statehood of Alaska; he

did not think Alaska was ready.

and Appraiser, to Mr. C. W. Kersow, Bureau of

Ketchikan Alaska Chronicle, October 9, 1945.

“Ask Space for Huts for Teen Town Here,”

Future for the Creative Cook,” Anchorage

Housing,” Anchorage Daily Times, October

38

December 2, 1947. 21

37

“Statement Issued on Closing of Teen

44

Wyman Owens, email message to Sandi

Town Project,” Fairbanks Daily News Miner,

Gerjevic, November 18, 2001.

October 6, 1947.

45

27

“Teen Town Hut Bought as Bus Waiting

Room,” Fairbanks Daily News Miner, October

154

Notes

See Appendix: Hut Types. Progressive

“School Board Can Get Huts,” Anchorage

School Huts,” Anchorage Daily Times, August 7, 1946. 65

Enatti, “Anchorage Public Schools

1915–1951,” 211. “Students Jam School Rooms,” Anchorage

Architecture, February 1943, 25. This hut was

66

designed for Arctic weather conditions.

Daily Times, September 2, 1946.

67

Enatti, “Anchorage Public Schools

1915–1951,” 211. 68

“Army Offers Hospital Units,” Anchorage

Daily Times, December 6, 1947. 69

“New Hospital Assured for Palmer,” The

Genesis, History and Development of the Portable Building Type (New York: Wiley, 2002). 3

Festo Corporation, “Airtecture,” Festo,

http://www.festo.com/INetDomino/coorp_site

Frontiersman (Matanuska Valley, Alaska),

s/en/d948c8ea6f89ec2ac1256b3b004f8f18.htm.

February 26, 1953.

4

70

Cathleen Doyle, interview by Chris Chiei,

July 13, 2003. 71

Bill Green, interview by Chris Chiei,

August 2004. 72

Hank Dubee, interview by Chris Chiei,

July 10, 2003. 73

Jack Roderick, Crude Dreams,

(Fairbanks/Seattle: Epicenter Press, 1997), 73–85. 74

Pastor Richard Benjamin, Sr., interview by

Chris Chiei, April 2004. 75

Louis L Renner, Father Tom of the Arctic

(Portland Oregon: Binford & Mort Publishing, 1985), 105. 76

Ibid., 105.

77

Ibid., 106.

78

Ibid., 105.

79

Ibid., 106–7.

80

Catholic Bishop of Northern Alaska,

“Barrow, St. Patrick Church,” Diocese of Fairbanks, http://www.cbna.info/churches/ barrow.html. 81

“Priest Sadly Missed,” The Yukon News,

August 27, 1993. 82

See Appendix: Hut Types

83

Beat Ledergerber, interview by Chris

Chiei, July 15, 2003. 84

Hank Dubee, interview by Chris Chiei,

July 10, 2003. 85

Jim Griffin, interview by Chris Chiei,

August 8, 2003.

Chapter 6 Quonsets Today: Concluding Thoughts Julie Decker and Chris Chiei 1

Jennifer Siegal, Mobile: The Art of Portable

Architecture (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2002). 2

Robert Kronenburg, Houses in Motion: The

155

Notes

Jim Griffin, interview by Chris Chiei, June

2003. 5

Cathleen Doyle, interview by Chris Chiei,

August 2003.

Image Credits

12 Courtesy of the Rhode Island Historical

Frontmatter i Courtesy of the National Archives, RG 80-G-

World War II, vol. I, (Washington, D.C.:

Quonset Point-Davisville Records, box 3

United States Government Printing

13 LEFT Courtesy of the National Archives,

50407

RG 342-FH-3A-39511

ii–iii Courtesy of the National Archives,

13 RIGHT Courtesy of the National Archives,

RG80-G-201671

RG 80-G-225423

iv Courtesy of the National Archives, RG 80-

14 Courtesy of the National Archives, RG 80-

G-229524

G-209497

v Courtesy of the Navy Historical Center, No.

15 Courtesy of the National Archives, RG 71,

USN 427450

box 774, vol. 4

viii Courtesy of the National Archives, RG 80-

16 Courtesy of the Kimberly-Clark Corporate

G-346021

Archives

xiii Courtesy of the University of Alaska

25 TOP From Building the Navy’s Bases in

Society, Manuscripts Collection, Mss 177,

17 Courtesy of the National Archives,

Office, 1947). 25 BOTTOM Courtesy of Bettmann/CORBIS, No. BE028487 26 Courtesy of Alaska Design Forum 28 TOP LEFT From 90th USN Construction Battalion: Its History and Accomplishments 1943–1945 (Baton Rouge, Louisiana: Army Navy Pictorial Publisher, 1946). 28 TOP RIGHT Courtesy of the University of Alaska Fairbanks, Elmer E. Rasmuson

Fairbanks, Elmer E. Rasmuson Library

Cartographic and Architectural Records,

Library Archives, Floyd Akin Collection,

Archives, Tom Christensen Collection,

NWCS-071-NAS Plan #QN-1-163: NAS

folder 82, box 3, Accession No. 78-133-

folder 20, box 1, Accession No. 79-29-319

Quonset Point RI Quonset Hut Temp. Advan. Facility—Redesign of 16-Ft.x36-

Introduction

Ft./Navy Accession #3722 (02 Oct 1941)

xiv Courtesy of the National Archives, Air

[30 x 42]

Force RG 342-FH-3a3929656

18 Courtesy of Alaska Design Forum 19 From “Japan Attacks U.S.,” Fairbanks

Chapter 1 How the Hut Came to Be Chris Chiei

Daily News Miner, December 7, 1941 20 Courtesy of the Rhode Island Historical Society, Manuscripts Collection, Mss 177,

xviii Courtesy of the Rhode Island Historical Society, Manuscripts Collection, Mss 177,

Quonset Point-Davisville Records, box 3 21 TOP LEFT Courtesy of the University of

Quonset Point-Davisville Records, box 3

Alaska Fairbanks, Elmer E. Rasmuson

2 Courtesy of Alaska Design Forum

Library Archives, Tom Christensen

3 From The George A. Fuller Company, War

Collection, Folder 20, Box 1, Accession

and Peace, 1940–1947, George A. Fuller Company, NY, 1947

No. 79-29-320 21 TOP RIGHT Courtesy of the University of

4–5 Courtesy of the Brandenberger Family

Alaska Fairbanks, Elmer E. Rasmuson

6 LEFT Courtesy of the National Archives,

Library Archives, Tom Christensen

RG 111-SC-138660

Collection, folder 20, box 1, Accession

6 RIGHT Courtesy of the National Archives, RG 111-SC-129337

No. 79-29-319 21 BOTTOM LEFT Courtesy of the University

8 TOP, CENTER RIGHT, and BOTTOM RIGHT

of Alaska Fairbanks, Elmer E. Rasmuson

164 28 BOTTOM Courtesy of Alaska Design Forum

Chapter 2 Quonsets, Alaska, and World War II Steven Haycox 30 Courtesy of the National Archives, RG 342-FH-3a29659 32 Diagram by Clark Yerrington 33 Courtesy of the National Archives, RG 80G-34938 34 TOP Courtesy of the Z. J. Loussac Public Library, Anchorage, AK 34 CENTER Courtesy of the National Archives, RG 111-SC-323196 34 BOTTOM Courtesy of Public Archives Canada; Canada, Yukon Territorial Records, PA 172962 35 Photograph by Ford Relyea Dally. Courtesy of the Anchorage Museum of History and Art, No. B96.35.2

From The George A. Fuller Company, War

Library Archives, Tom Christensen

and Peace, 1940–1947, George A. Fuller

Collection, folder 22, box 1, Accession

Fairbanks, Elmer E. Rasmuson Library,

Company, NY, 1947

No. 79-29-330

Archives, Willie Hodge Drake Collection,

8 LEFT Courtesy of the National Archives,

21 BOTTOM RIGHT Courtesy of the National

RG-71, box 774, vol. 2

Archives, RG 342-FH-3b47102

10–11 Courtesy of the Rhode Island Historical

22 Courtesy of the Kodiak Historical Society,

Society, Manuscripts Collection, Mss 177, Quonset Point-Davisville Records, box 3

Logan Estate Collection

36 LEFT Courtesy of the University of Alaska

folder 6, box 2, Accession No. 92-044126N 36 TOP RIGHT Courtesy of the National Archives, RG 80-G-78164 36 BOTTOM RIGHT Courtesy of U.S. Army Garrison, AK

156

Image Credits

37 TOP LEFT Courtesy of the National Archives, RG 80-G-242074 37 TOP RIGHT Courtesy of the National Archives, RG 80-G-210265 37 BOTTOM Photo by Dmitri Kessel. From “The Aleutians: They are Barren Links Between Two Worlds,” Life Magazine, March 13,1943. Courtesy of Time Inc. 38 Courtesy of the National Archives, RG 80G-311919 39 Courtesy of the National Archives, RG 80G-235328 40 TOP LEFT From Harold Hobbard, Arctic Issue (Alberta: Hamly Press Ltd., Edmonton, 1945) 40 TOP RIGHT Courtesy of Jake Nunn 40 BOTTOM LEFT From Bernard Anastasia,

51 Courtesy of Lucia Eames Demetrios dba Eames Office 53 Courtesy of Eames Office # OA.KWP001 54 Courtesy of the Art Institute of Chicago, Ryerson and Burnham Library, Bruce Goff Archive, E29904 55 TOP Courtesy of the Art Institute of Chicago, Offsite Study Room, Bruce Goff Archive, Accession No.1990.855.1, E29850 55 BOTTOM Courtesy of the Art Institute of Chicago, Ryerson and Burnham Library, Bruce Goff Archive, Series III, Folder 5.7, E29916 56 TOP Courtesy of the Art Institute of Chicago, Offsite Study Room, Bruce Goff Archive, Accession No.1990.819.3 56 BOTTOM Courtesy of the Art Institute of

Oliver Pedigo, and Don L. Miller, Wind

Chicago, Offsite Study Room, Bruce Goff

Blown and Dripping: A Book of Aleutian

Archive, Accession No.1990.819.4

(Aleutian Islands: Privately published,

57 Courtesy of the Art Institute of Chicago,

65 TOP RIGHT Courtesy of the National Archives, RG 80-G-347029 65 BOTTOM Courtesy of the National Archives, RG 80-G-346021 66 Courtesy of the National Archives, RG 80G-51115 67 TOP LEFT From New Pencil Points, December 1943 67 TOP RIGHT From Pencil Points, June 1944 67 BOTTOM LEFT From Architectural Record, February 1944 67 BOTTOM RIGHT From Architectural Record, January 1944 69 Photograph by Ed Clark. Courtesy of Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images, No. 50628556 70 From “Sing Barrel House Blues,” Anchorage Daily Times, April 8, 1946 72 LEFT Leonard Nadel Photo Archives 72 RIGHT Courtesy of Security Pacific

1945). Courtesy of the Anchorage

Ryerson and Burnham Library, Bruce Goff

National Bank Photograph Collection, Los

Museum of History and Art, No.

Archive, Series III, Box 5, Folder 5.25

Angeles Public Library, and Evelyn De

B96.35.4.8 40 BOTTOM RIGHT From Bernard Anastasia,

58 Photograph by Eliot Elisofon. From “The Round House,” Life Magazine, March 19,

Wolfe Nadel 74 TOP From “Converted Quonset for Dr. &

Oliver Pedigo, and Don L. Miller, Wind

1951. Courtesy of Time & Life

Mrs. Morris Felton at Fallen Leaf Lake,

Blown and Dripping: A Book of Aleutian

Pictures/Getty Images, No. 1204682

Calif.,” Art and Architecture Magazine,

(Aleutian Islands: Privately published, 1945). Courtesy of the Anchorage Museum of History and Art, No. B96.35.4.8 41 From Ketchikan Alaska Chronicle, September 29, 1945 42 LEFT Courtesy of the National Archives, RG 80-G-12031 42 RIGHT Courtesy of the National Archives, RG 80-G-12038 45 Photograph by Clark James Mishler

59 Courtesy of the Art Institute of Chicago, Ryerson and Burnham Library, Bruce Goff Archive, Series III, Box 5, Folder 5, 22 60 LEFT Photo by Hans Namuth. Courtesy of

December 1946 74 BOTTOM From Saturday Evening Post, May 15, 1948 75 From “Converted Quonset for Dr. & Mrs.

the Center for Creative Photography, No.

Morris Felton at Fallen Leaf Lake, Calif.,”

CCP_HN_R.Motherwell 1953.

Art and Architecture Magazine,

60 RIGHT Photograph by Max Dupain & Associates 61 Photograph by Gianni Berengo Gardin.

December 1946 76 From “Stop Gap Housing,” Popular Science, March 1946

Courtesy of Renzo Piano Building

77 Cover of Popular Science, March 1946

Workshop.

78–79 From “A home from a Quonset hut,” House Beautiful, September 1945

Chapter 3 War, Design, and Weapons of Mass Construction Brian Carter

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

46 Courtesy of the Library of Congress Prints

62 Coca-Cola advertisement, 1943

and Photographs Division, Washington,

64 From Pencil Points, September 1943

DC, LC-USZ62-121070

65 TOP LEFT Courtesy of the National

48 Courtesy of Loring

Archives, RG 80-G-56522

80 LEFT Stran-Steel advertisement, 1954 80 RIGHT From Saturday Evening Post, February 26, 1949 82 From Saturday Evening Post, September 18, 1948 83 TOP LEFT From Saturday Evening Post, February 26, 1949 83 TOP RIGHT From Saturday Evening Post, November 27, 1948

157

Image Credits

157

83 BOTTOM From Saturday Evening Post,

95 TOP From “Hillside House,” Architectural

June 14, 1947

Forum, August 1950

85 TOP LEFT Courtesy of The Motion Picture

95 BOTTOM From “Bank in Cleveland,”

and Television Photo Archive 85 TOP RIGHT Courtesy of Alaska Design

Architectural Forum, September 1948 96 Photograph by Eliot Elisofon. Courtesy of

Forum

Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images, No.

85 BOTTOM LEFT Courtesy of Alaska Design Forum

1204684 97 Photograph by Eliot Elisofon. Courtesy of

85 BOTTOM RIGHT Courtesy of Alaska

Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images, No.

Design Forum

1204686

86 From Saturday Evening Post, March 26, 1949

98 From Architectural Record, June 1947 99 From Alan Dunn, The Last Lath (New

87 TOP Courtesy of the Yale University

York: Architectural Record and the F.W.

Library, Manuscripts and Archives, New Haven, CT

Dodge Corporation, 1947). 103 Courtesy of Abbey of our Lady of the

87 BOTTOM Courtesy of Bettmann/CORBIS,

Holy Trinity, Huntsville, UT

No. BE029330

History and Art, No. B86.28.2343 120 RIGHT Courtesy of the Anchorage Museum of History and Art, Ward Wells Collection No. C233 121 Courtesy of the Valley Hospital, Palmer, Alaska 122 TOP Courtesy of the Alaska State Library, Juneau, PCA01-4445 122 BOTTOM Courtesy of the Anchorage Museum of History and Art, Ward Wells Collection No. B83.91 124 Photograph by Charles Mobley 126 LEFT Courtesy of Yukon Archives, Yukon Department of Tourism Collection PHO080 Accession No. 77-56 #325 126 RIGHT Photograph by Clark James Mishler

Steel Corporation, Detroit, MI. Courtesy

Chapter 5 The Huts That Wouldn’t Go Away: Alaska Adopts the Hut Chris Chiei

of Alaska Design Forum.

104 Courtesy of Chris Arend Photography

88–89 From Quonsets: The Story of a Building that Gave America a New Standard of Quality Building Values, Great Lakes

90 From Saturday Evening Post, April 12,

106 Headline in Anchorage Daily Times, August 29, 1946

1947 91 TOP LEFT From Country Gentlemen, June

107 Courtesy of the Anchorage Museum of History and Art, No. BL79.2.110

1946 91 TOP RIGHT Courtesy of Alaska Design

109 Courtesy of the Anchorage Museum of History and Art, No. BL79.2.7754

Forum 91 BOTTOM LEFT Courtesy of Alaska Design

110 Article in Anchorage Daily Times, August 21, 1946

Forum 91 BOTTOM RIGHT Courtesy of the Seabee

111 Courtesy of the Anchorage Museum of History and Art, No. B59.X.1.72

Museum and Memorial Park, Quonset Point 92 TOP Courtesy of Joe Marshall

128 Photograph by Bruce Binder 130 Photograph by Clark James Mishler 131 Photograph by Clark James Mishler

Chapter 6 Quonsets Today: Concluding Thoughts Julie Decker and Chris Chiei 132 Photograph by Kevin G. Smith 134 LEFT Photograph by Ignacio Martinez. Courtesy of Oskar Leo Kaufmann and Johannes Kaufmann. 134 RIGHT Photograph by Hiroyuki Hirai 135 From Kimfacts, August 1946. Courtesy of the Kimberly-Clark Corporate Archives.

112 TOP Photograph by Kevin G. Smith

136–37 Photographs by Kevin G. Smith

112 BOTTOM Courtesy of the Anchorage

138 TOP Photograph by Kevin G. Smith

Museum of History and Art, No.

92 BOTTOM LEFT Courtesy of the Country

B59.X.1.22 and B59.X.1.23

Music Hall of Fame and Museum, Nashville, TN

127 Photograph by Clark James Mishler

138 BOTTOM Courtesy of Wolfgang Kaehler/CORBIS, No. WK019441

113 Courtesy of Hal Johnston

139 Photograph by Clark James Mishler

116 Courtesy of the Abbott family

140 Photographs by Kevin G. Smith

and his Rhythm Masters Return to the

117 TOP Courtesy of the Anchorage Museum

141 Photographs by Clark James Mishler

New Quonset Every Saturday Night,”

of History and Art, Steve McCutcheon

142 TOP Photograph by Kevin G. Smith

Park City Daily News, March 21, 1952.

Collection, No. MCC 175

142 BOTTOM Photograph by Clark James

92 BOTTOM RIGHT From “Johnny Maddox

Courtesy of Park City Daily News. 93 Courtesy of the Gerald R. Ford Library,

117 BOTTOM LEFT Courtesy of Duke Russell 117 BOTTOM RIGHT Courtesy of the Anchorage Museum of History and Art

Ann Arbor, MI 94 Photo by Judith Turner. Courtesy of Judith

120 LEFT Photo by Hermann N. Kurriger. Courtesy of the Anchorage Museum of

Turner.

158

Image Credits

Mishler 143 TOP Photograph by Clark James Mishler 143 BOTTOM Photograph by Patrick J. Endres 144 Photograph by Kevin G. Smith

145 Photographs by Clark James Mishler 146 LEFT Photograph by Clark James Mishler 146 RIGHT Photograph by Don Pitcher 147 LEFT Photograph by Don Pitcher 147 RIGHT Photograph by Clark James Mishler

Appendix Hut-type drawings by Shelah Shanks and Clark Yerrington

Cover Front Cover: Courtesy of Bettmann/CORBIS, No. BE029292

Back cover: TOP LEFT Courtesy of Bettmann/CORBIS, No. BE028487 TOP RIGHT Photograph by Ford Relyea Dally. Courtesy of the Anchorage Museum of History and Art, No. B96.35.2 BOTTOM LEFT Courtesy of the National Archives, RG 80-G-311919 BOTTOM RIGHT Courtesy of Bettmann/ CORBIS, No. BE029330

159

Image Credits

Index

Bethlehem Steel Company, 16

Doyle, Cathleen, 121–22, 139

Italics indicate illustrations.

Bishop, William, 123

Dubee, Hank, 123, 130

Abbey of Our Lady of the Holy Trinity (Huntsville, Utah), 101, 103 Abbott, Chuck, 116

Boy Scout Troop 618, 109

Dutch Harbor, Alaska, 42, 42, 43

Bradley, Owen, 87, 93

Dymaxion Deployment Unit (Emanuel

Brandenberger, Otto, 4, 4, 19, 148 resume, 5

Norquist), 52–53 Dymaxion House (R. Buckminster Fuller), 46,

Abbott, Findlay, 114

Brink, Frank, 109

Abbott Loop Church (Anchorage, Alaska),

Buckner, Simon Bolivar, 33, 43

Eagle Plant (Eagle “B”), 49

building industry, 68, 70, 106

Eames, Charles, 52, 53, 54, 64, 65–66

Butler, Hugh, 119

Eames, Ray, 51, 53

Butler huts, 108, 126, 129, 148

Eareckson, W. O., xiv

acoustics, 123, 124

Butler Manufacturing Company, 52–53, 148

Edmiston, Jeremy, 134

Advanced Base Depot, 23

Camp Parks Chapel and Library (Bruce Goff),

Emkay (M-K) hut, 149

124 Aboriginal Alcoholic Rehabilitation Centre (Glen Morcutt), 60

Alaska, x, 14, 31–34, 36, 41–44, 104–30 map, 32

55, 57, 94 Canol Pipeline project, 34, 35

52, 54

Entenza, John, 52 Essai sur l’architecture (Marc-Antoine

Alaska Defense Command, 34, 43

Carnegie-Illinois Steel Corporation, 16

Alaska Design Forum, xi

Carroll, Cornel John E., 125

factories, 49–50

Alaska Highway, 34, 125, 126

Case Study House program, 52

Fairbanks, Alaska, 105–6, 108

Alaska Railroad, 110–11, 118

CB. See Seabees.

Father Tom. See Cunningham, Thomas.

Alaska Railroad Brotherhood of Locomotive

Cedros Design District, 100

Felton House (John Campbell and Worley K.

Firemen and Enginemen, 108

celotex, 148

Laugier), 61

Wong Architects), 74, 75

Albrecht, C. Earl, 110

Chareau, Pierre, 60–61, 94

Festo Corporate Design, 133

Anchorage, Alaska, 106–8, 119

Chase, David, 84

Fitzgibbon, James, M., 95, 96

Anchorage Daily Times, 106, 106, 107, 110

Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints

Ford, President Gerald, 93

Anchorage Health and Welfare Council, 109–10

(Bruce Goff), 57 Cline, Patsy, 92

Ford, Ruth Van Sickle, 96 Foster, Norman, 61

Anchorage Rotary Club, 109

Coca-Cola, 62

FRED (Oskar Leo Kaufmann), 133, 134

Anderson Sheet Metal Company, 7

Codrescu, Andrei, 133

FTL Happold, 133

Andrew Kozak House (Bruce Goff), 59, 59

Cohn, Jan, 99

Fuller, George A. See George A. Fuller and

Architectural Record, 66

Cohoe Studio shed (Cohoe, Alaska), 136

Architecture Forum, 94, 95, 96

Construction Battalion. See Seabees.

Fuller, R. Buckminster, 52

Arend, Chris, 104

Cook, Jeffrey, 98

Garden of Eatin’ Restaurant, 116–19, 117

Armco huts, 126, 149

corrugated metal, 7, 8, 24, 52, 53, 123

Gauthier, Douglas, 134

Armco International Corporation, 149

Cowin and Company, 149

Gehry, Frank, 135

Art & Architecture, 50, 52, 76, 80

Cowin huts, 106, 149

General Motors, 100

Art and the Machine, 71

Crystal Palace, xvi

geometry, 134

Attu Island, 43

Cuff, Dana, 72

George A. Fuller and Company, 1–2, 6, 7, 9,

Ban, Shigeru, 133–34

Culhane, Lee, 135

Banham, Reyner, 54, 60

Cunningham, Thomas, 124–25

Goff, Bruce, 54, 54, 57–60, 94, 96, 98

barrel house (Devil’s Lake, N. Dakota), 68, 70

curling, 121

Gomer Pyle USMC (television show), 84

Base Hospital #3 (Espiritu Santo, South

De Haviland, Olivia, 36

Good Housekeeping-Stran-Steel House, 17

Designs for Postwar Living, 50

Gordon, Alastair, 94

Behlen, Walt, 86

Destroyers for Bases Agreement, 2, 26

Government Hill Housing project (Anchorage,

Benjamin, Dick, 123

DeVries, Jessie, 113, 114

Bersch, Gretchen, 114–15

Dimond, Anthony, 33

Government Hill Youth Club, 109

The Best Years of Our Lives (motion picture), 84

domes, 60

grain elevators, 96

Pacific), 66

161

Index

Company.

16–17, 23, 148

Alaska), 110–11, 111, 112

161

Grandcamp explosion, 73

Joe Marshall and His Rovin’ Ramblers, 92, 93

Great Lakes Steel Corporation. See Stran-

John Campbell and Worley K. Wong

Steel.

Architects, 74

Mobile: the Art of Portable Architecture (Jennifer Siegal), 133 Modernism (architecture), 66–68, 70, 81, 94,

Green, Bill, 123

Johnson, John P., 110

Green, Cleo, 114

Johnston, Hal, 112, 113

Mollett, David, 135

Green, Doug, 114

Kahn, Albert, 49

Moreell, Ben, 3, 9, 13, 21, 26, 27

Greuning, Ernest, 105

Kaufmann, Johannes, 134

Morriset, Eusebe, 126, 128

Griffin, Jim, 130, 135

Kaufmann, Oskar Leo, 133, 134

Morris-Knudsen Company, 149

Gruber, Ruth, 110

Keedoozle (grocery store), 81

Motherwell, Robert, 60, 94

Guam, 65

Kelsey, Louis, 108

Motherwell Studio (Pierre Chareau), 60–61

Hagen, Ardell, 70

Kessler, Fred R., 111–12

Mueller, Francis, 125

Handley, Thomas, 125

Kimberly-Clark Corporation, 16, 63

Murcutt, Glen, 61

Happold, Buro, 133

Kimsul (insulation), 16, 16, 63

“Nashville sound”, 87

Hillside House (Knoxville, Tennessee), 94, 95

Kinkaid, Thomas, 43

National Register of Historic Places, 102

Hines, Thomas, 64, 70–71

Kirchner, Gerry, 116, 118–19

Native Americans, xv–xvi

historic preservation, 101–2

Kirchner, Hans, 116, 118–19

Navy Memorial Chapel (Clark Field,

Hobbard, Harold, 40

kit houses, 54, 115–16

Hobbs, Frank, 148

Komandorski (Commander) islands, battle of,

homes, postwar, 24, 69–71, 80–81, 86, 87, 98, 99, 113–15, 134–35

44 Kwikset House (Charles and Ray Eames), 53,

See also Housing.

54

96

Philippines), 65 New Arch Rib Stran-Steel Hut (SSAR), 23–24, 148 New Pencil Points, 67 Nimitz, Chester, 41–43

Homoja housing program, 24

Kwikset Lock Company, 54

Nissen, Peter Norman, 4, 5

Homoja Village, 25

Lapham, Lewis, 87

Nissen huts, 4–5, 6–7, 6, 13, 47, 48, 49

hook bolts, 49

Ledergerber, Beat, 130

Norquist, Emanuel, 52

Hopkins, D.W., 13

Lend Lease Act, 2, 33

Nunn, Jake, 40

House Beautiful, 76, 80

Levitt, William, 99

oil fields, 123

housing, 50–51, 52–54, 57–60, 63–64, 66,

Levittown, 99

Oregon Export Company, 115

68–73, 98–99, 109–16

Libby Owen Ford, 16

Osenga, Larry, 119

post-WWII shortage, 68–69, 86,

Liebman, Rosanna, 94

Our Lady of Grace Catholic Church (Beaver

98–100, 105–7, 111–19

Little Theatre (Anchorage, Alaska), 109

temporary, 71–76, 76–80, 87, 98, 107,

longhouses, xv–xvi, 63

108, 109–16, 133

Lundquist, Oliver, 50

Junction, Alaska), 126, 126, 127, 128,

See also Homes, postwar.

Malamud, Bernard, 87

129

Creek, Alaska), 129–30, 129, 130 Our Lady of Way Catholic Church (Haines

Hudson Bay Company, xvi

Manning Portable Colonial cottage, xvi–xvii

Owens, Wyman, 114

Huntington, E. S., 7, 13

Marshall, Joe, 102

Pacific huts, 106, 108, 148

“Hutments to Housing” (Architectural

Martin-Alden Precision Cut Homes, 115

Palmer, Alaska, 112–13

Marx Toy Company, 86

Paper Log House (Shigeru Ban), 134

huts, xv, 61, 148–49

Masonite Corporation, 16

Parson, Jack, 108

Iafrate, Frank J., 27

Matter, Herbert, 52

Passive Defense Quonset (PDQ), 21

igloos, xvi

McDonald, Angus, 125

Paulson, Chris, 111

industrial design, 66

McDonnell, Robert, 4, 6, 7

Paulucci, Jeno, 94

insulation, 14, 16

Merritt-Chapman and Scott Corporation, 1–2

Paxson, G. D., 149

Jackson, J. B., 66

Midway Island, battle of, 41–42, 43

Paxton, Joseph, xvi

Jamesway hut, 115, 149

Miller, Don L., 40

Pencil Points, 66

Jamesway Manufacturing Company, 149

Miller, R. V., 3, 9

Piano, Renzo, 61

Jarvis, James Jackson, 96

Mitchell, William, 31

plank houses, xvi

Forum), 71

162

Index

“Planting for the Temporary House” (New York Times), 76

schools, 119–20, 120

80, 81, 88–89, 98, 99

sound studios, 87

Stran-Steel Arch-Rib Home, 98

Plyformed Wood Company, 51–52

sports arenas, 121

Stran-Steel Quonset House (Bruce Goff), 56

portable architecture, xv–xvii, 45, 133–34

stores, 122

Stresskin, 134

Portage Bar (Anchorage, Alaska), 123

transportation of, 27, 28, 29, 113–14,

SYSTEMarchitects, 134

Portaseal hut, 112, 113, 149

125

Teen Town, 109

prefabricated building systems, 2–3, 9, 13, 49,

warehouses, 122

Temporary Aviation Facilities (TAF), 3, 23

50–51, 52, 54, 57, 73, 93, 96, 102,

Quonset Point, Rhode Island, 3

tents, xv, 45

133–34

Quonset Point U.S. Naval Station (Quonset

Terminal News Company warehouse, 122

The Provisional City (Dana Cuff), 72

Point, Rhode Island), 1–2, 2, 3

tipis, xv

Pulos, Arthur, 71

Quonset Redesign, 16–19, 114, 129, 148

T-Rib Quonset, 6, 7, 9, 13, 148

Pyle, Ernie, 101

Quonsets: the Story of a Building that Gave

Tub (nightclub), 93

Quigley, Robert, 100

America a New Standard of Quality

Twining, Nathan F., 121

Quon-Kote (paint), 86

Building Values, 81

U.S. Navy, 3, 17, 24, 41, 43

Quonset Auditorium, 93, 102

Red-river Frame, xvi

Urgo, Dominic, 4

Quonset huts, 8, 25, 30, 33–34, 34, 35, 36, 37,

Renzo Piano Building Workshop (Renzo

Valley Hospital (Palmer, Alaska), 120–21

38, 39, 41, 41, 44–45, 45, 50, 52, 62, 63,

Veterans’ Housing Project, 69

64, 69, 71, 72, 73–102, 104, 106–30, 133,

rock-and-roll, 93

Waldvogel brothers, 98

134–35,136, 137, 138, 139, 140–46

Rodger Young Village, 72, 72, 73, 98, 100

wannigans, 27, 108

advertisements and brochures for, 16,

roofs, 51

Wichita House (R. Buckminster Fuller), 54

63, 64, 66–68, 74, 80–81, 80, 82–83, 84,

Roosevelt, President Franklin Delano, 1, 2

Wind Tunnel (Delta Junction, Alaska), 123

86, 88–91,98

Saarinen, Eero, 50, 51

Wolfman Jack, 93

as American icon, 73, 76, 80–81, 84,

Sam and Ruth Ford House (Bruce Goff), 58,

World War II, x, xi, 1–2, 21, 24, 26–27, 31–33,

100, 101, 102, 139

59–60, 96–97

41–44, 50

auditoriums, 87, 92, 93

Saunders, Clarence, 81

economic impact, 36, 41, 44

bars, 123

Schock, Bert, 111

encampments, 64–66

campaign headquarters, 93

Scio, Ohio, 73

camps, 14, 14, 106, 110–11

Seabees, 26–27, 64

Wyatt, Wilson W., 70

campus, 86, 98

Secondino, Tomasino, 4

Yamamoto, Isoruku, 41, 43

car dealerships, 81

Selid, Ove, 115

Young, Rodger, 72

cartoons about, 4, 99, 135

Selid Construction Services, 115–16

churches, 57, 65, 123–26

Seward City, Alaska, 108

clubhouses, 109

714th Engineer Railway Operating Battalion,

commercial use, 116–119

106

design of, xviii, 3–4, 6, 7, 9, 10–11, 12,

Sherwin Williams, 86

13, 13, 16–17, 19, 20, 23–24

Shockley, William Bradford, 93–94

erection of, 21, 22, 26, 27, 65

Siegal, Jennifer, 133

farms, 81

sleds, 27

hospital, 121

Snake Ranch (Anchorage, Alaska), 106, 107

houses, 59–60, 114–15, 135

Soroptomists Club, 109

interior space, 134

splints, 51, 51

manufacture of, 21, 23

St. Patrick’s Catholic Church (Barrow,

origin of name, 13, 15 offices, 93–94

163

Piano), 61

Alaska), 123 steel framing, 17, 17, 18, 66

restaurants, 116–19

“Stop Gap Housing” (Popular Science), 76–77

safety of, 120

Stran-Steel, 17, 17, 18, 19, 23, 64, 66, 67, 74,

Index

Japanese strategy, 32, 41–42

Contributors

165

Brian Carter is dean and professor of archi-

Julie Decker, Ph.D., has authored three publi-

Tom Vanderbilt is a writer whose work has

tecture at The State University of New York at

cations: Icebreakers: Alaska’s Most Innovative

appeared in many publications, including The

Buffalo. A graduate of the Nottingham School of

Artists (University of Washington Press, 1999),

New York Times Magazine, Wired, The London

Architecture and the University of Toronto, he

Found & Assembled in Alaska (Todd

Review of Books, NEST, The Baffler, and The

has worked as an architect in practice, most

Communication, 2001), and John Hoover: Art

Nation. He is also the author of The Sneaker

recently with Arup Associates in London. From

and Life (University of Washington Press, 2002).

Book: An Anatomy of an Industry and An Icon

1994–2001 he was chair of the architecture

She has curated numerous exhibitions on

(New Press, 1998) and Survival City: Adventures

program at the University of Michigan. His work

contemporary art as owner of the Decker/Morris

Among the Ruins of Atomic America (Princeton

has been published in numerous international

Gallery and the Center for Contemporary Visual

Architectural Press, 2002).

journals including The Architectural Review,

Art of Alaska, as the director of the International

Architectural Design, Casbella, and Detail, and

Gallery of Contemporary Art, and as a guest

he is the author of several books, including

curator of the Anchorage Museum of History

Patkau Architects: Selected Projects 1983–1993

and Art. Decker teaches courses in art history

(Tuns Press, 1994) and Johnson Wax

and writing for the University of Alaska and at

Administration Building and Research Tower

Golden Gate University, in San Francisco. She is

(Architecture in Detail) (Phaidon Press, 1998). He

also a regular contributor to the Anchorage Press

has also curated a series of exhibitions on the

and has written for New York Newsday and

work of Eero Saarinen, Peter Rice, Charles and

American Indian Art.

Ray Eames, and Albert Kahn. Stephen Haycox is an American cultural hisChris Chiei is the artistic director for the

torian at the University of Alaska, Anchorage

Alaska Design Forum, a nonprofit multidiscipli-

where he teaches Alaska history, history of the

nary arts organization serving the Alaskan com-

American West, and American environmental

munities of Anchorage, Fairbanks, and Juneau,

history, specializing in the relationship of Alaska

and is a practicing architect in Anchorage.

to the history of the American West. He holds

Chiei, born in New York and raised in New

graduate degrees from the University of Oregon

Jersey, earned a Bachelor of Architecture from

and has published widely on Alaska Native

the Pennsylvania State University and served for

history. His two most recent books are Frigid

two years as a member of Jersey Devil Design

Embrace: Politics, Economics, and Environment

Build Group prior to moving to Alaska in 1995.

in Alaska (Oregon State University, 2002), and

He is the project director and lead researcher for

Alaska: An American Colony (University of

the Quonset and its accompanying exhibition

Washington Press, 2002). He is the recipient of

and has contributed more than eight years of

the Alaska Governor’s Humanities Award (2003)

research to the project. He is a frequent lecturer

and the University of Alaska Edith R. Bullock

on the subject.

Prize for Excellence (2002); he was named Alaskan Historian of the Year by the Alaska Historical Society in 2003.

165

Contributors