Prefabricated war. The permanent influence of temporary war housing projects

Abstract

World War II led to hundreds of thousands of men and women leaving their homes in the United States to move to the military manufacturing centers that the government had created throughout the country, a migratory movement that brought with it the immediate need to offer the workers decent housing that would ensure their quality of life and productive capacity. That architectural emergency situation allowed the architects of the moment to investigate and work with the fastest and most efficient construction methods available in the industry of their time. Thus, the prefabrication and mass production systems allowed them to build in a record time hundreds of perfectly urbanized towns whose existence would be limited to the years that the war lasted to later be dismantled once the conflict came to an end. Taking the Los Angeles example as a paradigmatic case, where the prominent presence of the arms industry transformed it into the most important military and productive base of the American West Coast, the main objective of this article is to analyze the influence that the industrial manufacturing mechanisms used in the houses of these ephemeral settlements had in the configuration of a technical and typological logic, as well as offering a different vision of the overlap between the prefabricated construction systems of the war industry and the postwar real estate developments.