The Lustron Next Door

When we first moved in I really didn’t pay much attention to the somewhat hodge-podgey lodge next door.

Shortly there after an issue of Preservation magazine came in the mail, and there on the cover was a house just like it.

Well, just like part of it.

Turns out the original house is a Lustron: the all-steel, post-war, pre-fab homes.

Only about 3,000 homes were fabricated over a two year period, and the remaining 2,000 or so Lustrons are considered endangered species.

From the exterior, the our neighboring Lustron looks to be intact, just bookended by two unfortunate additions.

A few months later, we visited the pre-fab housing exhibit at MOMA and were surprised to see an entire Lustron reassembled inside the museum. It was bit worse for wear, but still interesting to explore.

Fast forward a few more months, and I was invited by Open House NY to tour the house Marcel Breuer built in the MOMA garden as part of a show on post-war housing back in 1948.

A lecture was included as part of the tour package, during which we were told that the Breuer MOMA house was built as a rebuttal to the Lustron’s popularity. Lore has it that Phillip Johnson, then curator of MOMA, used to pass the Lustron model home and showroom on his way to work and it just infuriated him, inspiring a ‘anything you can do, I can do better’ style throw down.

You be the judge.