JF Ptak Sc
ience Books LLC Post 746 Blog Bookstore
interesting 1946 pamphlet combines tow modern interests in one package: Green’s Ready-Built Homes Present the Solar Home
presented both a prefabricated, well-designed house that was also passive solar
friendly. The architect and engineer was
George Fred Keck (1895-1980) , a true modernist, and designer of one of
the twelve “Homes of the Future” for the
The “solar home” that he offered here used seasonal variations and house
location to regulate heating/cooling, glazing and siding, air movement, and the
storage of thermal energy in building materials—mostly, there were lots and
lots of transfer-friend
ly double-paned windows, all of which were
forward-thinking ideas for 1946. In
addition the house was prefabricated, making construction easier, simpler, and
quicker than any of the stick-built houses being constructed at that time. There was also an impetus for quick, good
construction given the housing shortage caused by the returning WWII veterans.
The prefab idea was also a relatively new one in architecture—though there are
instances of bits and pieces of prefab architecture reaching back hundreds of
years, the first earnest attempts at providing such housing on a mass scale
dates only to the 1920’s. In any event, the double-effort here was a fairly early effort at combining these two ideas–and certainly something that seems to have been about 60 years too early.