Quonset hut : metal living for a modern age

Published byPrinceton Architectural Press37 East Seventh StreetNew York, New York 10003

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© 2005 Princeton Architectural PressAll rights reservedPrinted and bound in China09 08 07 06 05 5 4 3 2 1 First edition

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Every reasonable attempt has been madeto identify owners of copyright. Errors oromissions will be corrected in subsequenteditions.

Publication of this book is supported by theAnchorage Museum of History and Art, theAnchorage Museum Association, the AlaskaDesign Forum, and their grantors, sponsors,and volunteers.

Editing: Linda LeeDesign: Deb Wood

Special thanks to: Nettie Aljian, DorothyBall, Nicola Bednarek, Janet Behning,Megan Carey, Penny (Yuen Pik) Chu, RussellFernandez, Jan Haux, Clare Jacobson, JohnKing, Mark Lamster, Nancy Eklund Later,Katharine Myers, Lauren Nelson, JaneSheinman, Scott Tennent, JenniferThompson, Paul Wagner, Joseph Weston,and Deb Wood of Princeton ArchitecturalPress —Kevin C. Lippert, publisher

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication 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 AnchorageMuseum Association and the Alaska DesignForum”—CIP t.p.

Includes bibliographical references andindex.

ISBN 1-56898-519-3 (hardcover : alk.paper)1. Quonset huts. 2. Buildings,

Prefabricated. 3. Architecturalmetal-work. 4. Temporary housing. 5. Dwellings—Alaska—History—20thcentury. I. Decker, Julie. II. Chiei, Chris. III. Anchorage Museum of History and Art.IV. Anchorage Museum Association. V.Alaska Design Forum.

NA8480.Q66 2005720'.48—dc22

2004024738

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

Metal Living for a Modern Age

Quonset Hut

Preface Julie Decker x

Acknowledgments xii

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

How the Hut Came to Be Chris Chiei 1

Quonsets, Alaska, and World War II Steven Haycox 31

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

After the War: Quonset Huts and TheirIntegration into Daily American LifeTom Vanderbilt 63

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

Quonsets Today: Concluding Thoughts Julie Decker and Chris Chiei 133

Appendix: Hut Types 148

Notes 150

Image Credits 156

Index 161

Contributors 165

Introduction

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Quonset Hut: Metal Living for a Modern Age is a project thatbegan half a decade ago when architect Chris Chiei took note ofthe presence of Quonset huts throughout Alaska—more than halfa century after the huts were sent around the world as temporaryshelters for World-War-II soldiers, forming a major part of the infra-structure of war.

Until now, the impact of Quonset huts in post–World War IIlife has not been documented in a comprehensive way. Quonsethuts are referenced in a variety of publications, and everyoneseems to be able to conjure up an image of a semicircle when theyhear the word “Quonset,” but its story has not yet been told. Whilethe subject of Quonset huts can be serious––wartime and postwarhousing shortages are not lighthearted topics––it is also one thatcan claim a certain levity. Quonset huts have entered into manylove-hate relationships with their dwellers who both embracedand resisted the simple geometry of the form. Quonset huts havestaked their claim on the built environment throughout theworld––and the unbuilt world in the case of such remote places asAlaska, Hawaii, Guam, and the South Pacific. Just as Alaskansclaim duct tape and bunny boots as their own, they also claim theQuonset hut, since Alaskans, throughout their relatively short his-tory, have recognized the temporary and durable nature of the hut,tolerated its industrial nature, and chuckled at their unexpectedpermanence––a proud, though aging, part of the everyday land-scape. Mention Quonset huts to almost any Alaskan you run intoand they will have a personal story about living in, working in, orjust seeing one. Although not entirely an endangered species of

Julie Decker x

PrefaceJulie Decker

Alaska’s, or other far-flung places’, built environment, the numberof existing Quonset huts has dwindled to the point that most chil-dren and newcomers to these strategic World War II places arecompletely unaware of the dense Quonset camps that once stoodat the center of their own communities.

Contributing writers to this publication look at the Quonsethut in a variety of ways, from its inception in World War II, itspivotal 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 nonprofitorganization of architects, artists, and designers formed tobroaden the range of discussion about the design of the built environment. Quonset will also be a traveling exhibition organizedby 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 afterthe war. The Quonset hut has long been tolerated, at timesignored. This project aims to give the Quonset hut a pat on itsrounded back for being the best building it could be. If nothingelse, it was persistent.

Quonset was born out of the work of numerous volunteers.Without their generous donation of time and energy, this projectcould not have been realized. They, too, should be recognized fortheir persistence.

Prefacexi

Acknowledgments

This project would not have been possiblewithout a number of individuals, businessesand organizations. Thank you to the following:

Publication Research SponsorsNational Endowment for the ArtsNational Endowment for the HumanitiesAlaska Humanities ForumAlaska Association for Historic PreservationAmerican Institute of Architects, Alaska

ChapterKoonce Pfeffer Bettis ArchitectsThe Graham FoundationAnchorage Historic PropertiesAnchorage Museum of History and ArtAlaska Design Forum

Research and Project DevelopmentVolunteers Ron Bateman, Catherine Williams, JulieDecker, Chris Chiei, John Pearce, ClarkYerrington, Leone Chiei, Lewis Santoro,Charles Mobley, Seth Brandenberger, RobertBrandenberger, Bruce Merrell, SharonFerguson, John Biggs, Erica White, AmyTomson, Leslie Marsh, Isobel Roy, LauraWinckler, Patty Peirsol, Buck Walsky, ChrisCole, Jesse Flores, Ric Martinez, DukeRussell, David Mollett, Karen Larsen, MattJohnson, Amber Ridington, Howard Brown,Petra Sattler-Smith, John Weir, DavidHayden, Evelyn Rousso, David Porter, SusanElliott, Mary Richards, Don Decker, MichelleDecker, Michael Morris, Joe Senungetuk,Don Mohr, Sheila Wyne, Wendy ErnstCroskrey, Mike Croskrey, KN Goodrich, DonHenry, Ted Herlinger, Carol Crump Bryner,Chris Arend, Marie Ringwald, ElaineWilliamson, Kristofer Gills

Project ConsultantsTrevor Boddy, Donald Albrecht, MikeDunning, Steve Haycox

PhotographersClark James Mishler, David Gellotte, PatrickJ. Endres, Kevin G. Smith, Bruce Binder

The Staff at the following ArchivesAnchorage Museum of History and Art(Dianne Brenner, Mina Jacobs, Walter VanHorn), National Archives—Pacific AlaskaRegion, University of Alaska AnchorageConsortium Library, Z. J. Loussac PublicLibrary (Bruce Merrell), University of AlaskaFairbanks Elmer E. Rasmuson Library (RoseSperanza), Alaska Film Archives at Elmer E.Rasmuson Library (Dirk Tordoff), Alaska StateArchives (Larry Hibpshman), Alaska StateMuseum, Alaska State Library, TongassHistorical Museum, Kodiak Historical Society(Marian Johnson), National Archives II,(Sandy Smith), National Archives I, TheLibrary of Congress, The Ben Moreell Library(Deborah Gunia), Navy Art Collection (GaleMunro), U.S. Army Center of Military History(Renee Klish), Yukon Archives, NationalArchives of Canada, Canadian War Museum(Maggie Arbour-Doucette), National Galleryof Canada, The Art Institute of Chicago (KateButterly, Lori Boyer, Mary Woolever), RhodeIsland Historical Society (Rick Sattler, DanaSigne K. Munroe), Phillips Memorial Library,The History Factory (Alexandra Brisen),Quonset Point Seabee Museum (JackSprengel), Masonite Corporation (PastyMyric), Butler Manufacturing Co. (AndreaHanson)

Special Thanks to:Barnes Architecture, Alaska Private Lodging,Charles Bettisworth & Co., McCool, CarlsonGreen, Architects, The Center for Visual Artof Alaska, Mayer Sattler-Smith, NorthernLand Use Research

xii

Portable architecture was the first fully man-made and inhabited form of architecture.Over millions of years, it has evolved and hasalso often been rejected in favor of perma-nent buildings. Today architecture and permanence are treated as synonyms. The Great Pyramids of Giza are listed as one ofthe Seven Wonders; medieval cathedrals arecelebrated in art history books. These struc-tures are admired because they are grand,and because of their longevity.

The first forms of architectureresponded to temporality and, often, portabil-ity, serving the mobility of nomadic peoples.Man’s earliest ancestors sought protectionfrom the elements and predators in naturalshelters such as caves and rock overhangs.Gradually, they learned to improve theircaves with inlaid stone floors, walls at theentrances, and fireplaces. But man was ahunter-gatherer and needed to follow hisfood. So man invented the hut—a small,humble dwelling of simple construction witha simple roof. Evidence of a wooden hut wasfound at Terra Amata near Nice in France,dating back to the Mindel Glaciationbetween 450,000 and 380,000 BCE. The hutincluded a hearth and fireplace and wasmade by bracing upright branches within acircle of large and small stones. Multiple-family huts from the Stone Age (ca. 10,000BCE) have also been discovered. Two huts atthe Kostienki site near Alexandrova in theUkraine accommodated the entire extended

family, one of them measuring more than ahundred feet in length and containing tensmall hearths in a row.

The basic hut then remained virtuallyunchanged for a million years. In the 1600shuts were still used all around the world. Thesheepherders of the Sahara Desert built newhomes every time their animals moved to anew place. Native Americans in the seven-teenth and eighteenth centuries wereexperts at building structures from readilyavailable materials that provided sophisti-cated, and sometimes moveable, shelter.Some nomadic Native Americans who inhab-ited the Great Plains lived in portable cone-shaped structures called tipis, from ti, whichmeans “dwelling,” and pi, meaning “usedfor,” in the Sioux language. The dwellingswere built by stretching tanned buffalo hidesaround a frame, which was made of long,vertical poles that leaned inward and joinedat the top. When the buffalo migrated, thetribes, following their food source, took downthe tipis; domesticated dogs dragged the tipipoles and the skin coverings to the next loca-tion—not an easy task.

The Iroquois tribes in central NewYork state, along the St. Lawrence River andthe northern shore of Lake Ontario in the sixteenth century and beyond, called them-selves Haudenosaunee (“People building alonghouse”). Several families lived in a long-house with separate family units connectedby a continuous passageway. Over time,

Introduction The Hut That Shaped a Nation

Julie Decker and Chris Chiei

Bomber pilots receiving

instruction from Col. W. O.

Eareckson, Umnak Island,

AK, August 20, 1942

xv

longhouses could be extended as needed,with new family sections added at each end.Some excavations of former Iroquoian townsites have revealed longhouses measuring aslong as four hundred feet. Longhouses werebuilt of saplings—large ones served as posts,flexible ones formed the rounded roof.

From the end of the last Ice Age to theearly nineteenth century, when lumber andmetal were favored for most structures, thebest-known temporary house type of theArctic region was the igloo, derived from theInuit word igdlu meaning “house,” a winterhouse built of the area’s most common mate-rial: snow. Snow is packed and cut intoblocks for stacking in rows in an upwardspiral. The spiral slopes inward toward thetop and is capped by a single block. Entry isthrough a short tunnel made of snow blockswith a rounded roof.

Of all the native dwellings of NorthAmerica, wooden plank houses of the north-west coast most closely resembled Westernarchitecture, combining aesthetic considera-tions in addition to functional ones. Built inthe eighteenth and nineteenth centuries oflong boards of cedar, the plank houses had arectangular shape with a sloping roof andfaced the sea or river. The direction of thefacade was a typological requirement for thedwellers because they wanted to face thewater, which was a source of life—providingfood and other basic needs—for them. Buteven plank houses were temporary, used onlyfrom fall to spring. In summer, when commu-nities moved into the forests for fishing andberry gathering, people removed the planksand carried them inland to make temporaryshelters there.

In the 1860s the Hudson BayCompany built a chain of retail stores inBritish Columbia and Alaska to serve minersduring the Gold Rush. In doing so, theyinvented a building form. The Hudson BayCompany building was a log structure calledthe Red-river Frame, which adopted the logcabin design that, rather than post-on-sillconstruction, used logs with dove-tail cor-ners that ran the full length of the wall. Thewalls were generally twelve to fifteen roundshigh, which, combined with a steep-pitchroof, allowed for a spacious attic, often usedfor the storage of furs and as sleeping quar-ters for the clerk. These buildings weredesigned to be erected in remote places.

In 1851, British engineers produced a building called the Crystal Palace, whichwas designed around prefabricated anddemountable modules. The Crystal Palacestructure was relocated from the site of the1851 Great Exhibition in central London toSydenham in Kent, where it was locateduntil its destruction by fire in 1936. Designedby gardener Joseph Paxton, the CrystalPalace has been called “proto-modern archi-tecture” and was widely imitated in Europeand the U.S. Though not unanimously cele-brated in its own time—it was nicknamedthe “glass monster”—it made pioneering useof cast-iron structure, prefabricated units,and an antecedent glass curtain wall. It covered nineteen acres of ground and waserected in just nine months, a feat thatwould have been unthinkable just a decadebefore. Even after one hundred and fiftyyears, this achievement has not been dupli-cated. Britain also innovated a smaller-scaleportable building in the nineteenth century.

Julie Decker and Chris Chieixvi

The Manning Portable Colonial Cottage wasthe first example of a mass-market, demount-able building. It was prefabricated, modular,relatively easy to ship, and easy to erect.These buildings were transported all overBritain and into North America, and werealso converted into prefabricated churches,hospitals, banks, and other facilities. NorthAmerica didn’t keep the Cottages for long—the model was abandoned in favor of designsdeveloped and sold via the Sears mail-ordercatalog, such as the Rudolph house plans(1930–32).

Then came the Quonset hut, a keyplayer in the chronology of portable,demountable architecture. The Quonset hutis not unlike its predecessors: for example, it resembled a longhouse, except thatQuonsets were metal-clad. But the Quonsethut was not considered architecture. Theywere created to service the military and thewar effort. Particularly after the stress of war,Americans wanted permanence and distancefrom reminders of the war. They wantedsome guarantees. Sure, a Quonset hut pro-vided needed shelter, but few people namedit as their first choice for housing. TheQuonset hut and its postwar cohort themobile home were economic solutions. Theywere less than the Dream.

While the world’s remaining nomadicsocieties still live in portable structures—Bedouin tents, Mongolian yurts (which onlytake an hour to erect or dismantle), Tuaregmat huts, and Cambodian “houseboats”—Americans do not embrace the concept.Motor homes, perhaps, but only if one canreturn to bricks and mortar after the drive.While a quarter of all new homes in the U.S.

are mobile homes, Americans have alwayswanted to see these types of structures, likethe Quonset hut, as temporary fixes untilsomething better came along. To keep themwould mean failure. After all, you can paint apicket fence on the side of a Quonset hut, butit still looks like a pop can lying on its side.

Today, however, it appears there mightbe a revival of appreciation for portablearchitecture. A wide range of forms and sizesare being used in mobile buildings. There arestructures that can seat ten thousand peopleand be erected and dismantled in days.There are tiny structures that celebratedesign at the same time that they celebratesimplicity and mobility. Although relativelyfew industry-produced portable buildingshave been designed for a dedicated userwith specific needs in mind, and fewer makeuse of design precedents (like the Quonsethut), recent advances in materials technolo-gy and construction techniques have refash-ioned and repopularized portable architec-ture. And with the demand for lower-costalternatives to escalating housing prices inthe U.S., many contemporary architects haveresponded favorably to this trend.

The Quonset hut is the portable build-ing that has dominated the twentieth centu-ry in the U.S. It may even be said that theQuonset hut is making a comeback, albeitwith a facelift. As leading designers todayhave increasingly incorporated new, low-tech, prefabricated, and portable structuresinto their architectural vocabulary, it is notpreposterous to suggest that, if inventedtoday, the Quonset hut would be given adegree of seriousness, respect, and perma-nence absent during its initial appearance.

The Hut That Shaped a Nationxvii

George A. Fuller and Company (hereinafterreferred to as Fuller) was one of the largestconstruction contractors in the U.S. Foundedin Chicago in 1882, Fuller led the construc-tion of some of the most important buildingsof the twentieth century, such as the FlatironBuilding (1902) in New York, an icon of earlysteel-framed high-rise structures, whichserved as their headquarters. Fuller also leadthe construction of a number of significantWashington landmarks, including theLincoln Memorial (1918) and the U.S.Supreme Court Building (1933). Fuller’s port-folio also includes significant modern iconssuch as SOM’s Lever House (1952), Meis vande Rohe’s Seagram Building (1957), andHarrison, Abramovitz & Harris’s UnitedNations Building (1953).2

The Merritt-Chapman and ScottCorporation (hereinafter referred to as Scott)grew from the mergers of three small salvageoperations, the Coastal Wrecking Company

(later reorganized as Merritt’s WreckingOrganization), the Chapman Derrick &Wrecking Company, and T. A. ScottCompany. Headquartered in New York City,they established themselves early on as lead-ers in marine salvage and wrecking opera-tions.3 Following the war, they were involvedin such projects as the Throgs Neck Bridge(1961), the Chesapeake Bay Bridge andTunnel in Virginia (1964), and the GlennCanyon Dam (1966).4

Together, Fuller and Scott took on theresponsibility for the construction of the baseat Quonset Point—their first joint-ventureproject. This 1,192-acre air station eventuallyincluded all necessary facilities for two air-craft-carrier groups and two long-range air-patrol squadrons, as well as facilities forcomplete plane and engine maintenance.Normally, such a project was given two yearsfor completion, but due to the urgent need for additional shore-based naval aviation

Chapter 1 How the Hut Came to Be

Chris Chiei

In 1937, President Franklin D. Roosevelt, despite the isolationist sentimentwithin the population at large, began to prepare the United States for war.Congress authorized an increase in naval appropriation in anticipation, andthe Naval Board, in response, recommended the development of twenty-fiveadditional air bases, both in the U.S. and overseas. Included in that list wasthe shore-based aviation facility at Quonset Point, Rhode Island. The Navy’sBureau of Yards and Docks began construction on the facility on July 16,1940. The contract for this work, NOy-4175, was awarded to two organiza-tions—the George A. Fuller and Company and the Merritt-Chapman andScott Corporation.1

Isometric drawing of T-Rib

Quonset hut, May 10, 1941

1

facilities, the project was finished in less thanone year.5

While the base was being raised atQuonset Point, the British Royal Navy waslosing a large number of supply vessels toGerman U-boats. Convoys carrying suppliesfrom North America to Britain desperatelyneeded antisubmarine escorts, but RoyalNavy vessels were in short supply. In a boldstep to further break America from its isola-tionist position, President Roosevelt acted onhis own authority to negotiate the Destroyersfor Bases Agreement with Britain (1940). Theagreement included the transfer of fifty over-age U.S. World War I destroyers in exchangefor 99-year leases on British naval and airfacilities in the Bahamas, Jamaica, St. Lucia,Trinidad, Antigua, and British Guiana. Basesat Newfoundland and the islands of Bermudawere included as gifts. The President justi-fied his actions to Congress, stating: “It is anepochal and far-reaching act of preparationfor continental defense in the face of gravedanger.”6

Fuller and Scott were informed thatconstruction of the base at Argentia,Newfoundland, and provision of equipmentto other bases named in the Destroyers forBases Agreement would be added to thecontract already in place for the constructionof Quonset Point. The added value of workwould essentially double the original con-tract sum, reaching a projected cost of over$52 million.7

By March of 1941, the Allies werereaching financial crisis on all fronts.England declared that by June they wouldno longer be able to purchase supplies and

arms provided by the U.S. Bound by theNeutrality Act of 1939, the U.S. was not per-mitted to release arms to any warring coun-try except on “cash and carry” terms.Circumventing this legislation would provecritical to sustaining U.S. allies and would benecessary for continued preparation for whatappeared to be the inevitable involvement ofthe U.S. in World War II. President Rooseveltcrafted the Lend Lease Act, a bill empower-ing the president to “sell, transfer title to,lend, lease or otherwise dispose of [articles ofdefense to] the government of any countrywhose defense the President deems vital tothe defense of the United States.”8 The billalso empowered the President to set theterms of repayment as “in kind or property, orany other direct or indirect benefit which thePresident deems satisfactory.”9 With littleresistance from Congress, the bill passed onMarch 11, 1941. Seven billion dollars wereappropriated for its initial funding.

Soon thereafter, Great Britain trans-ferred ownership of properties at Garelochand Stanraer, in Scotland, and Londonderryand Enniskillen, in Northern Ireland, to beused by the U.S. as forward bases (FOB).10

Since material resources and local labor wereall but drained from the British Empire, theU.S. military had no other choice than tosupply prefabricated building systemsshipped from the U.S. to house their troops.Quonset Point was selected as the assemblyport for all supplies and materials requiredfor the construction of these bases.11

At that time, the base at QuonsetPoint was nearly complete and Fuller andScott’s work on supplies for Argentia was

Chris Chiei2

Pamphlet from Quonset Point

U.S. Naval Air Station,

ca. 1945

moving forward.12 Admiral Ben Moreell, chiefof the Bureau of Yards and Docks, called ameeting with representatives of Fuller andScott and Captain R. V. Miller, officer-in-charge of construction at Quonset, andrevealed the Navy’s desire to develop and pro-duce a new prefabricated hut system to shel-ter troops abroad.13 These buildings wouldneed to be designed for mass production, ableto be portable, erected and knocked downquickly and easily, adaptable to any climateand geography, and provide soldiers with themost protection and comfort possible.14 Themass production of these units and delivery ofall other equipment to these advanced bases(AOB),15 were added to the NOy-4175 con-tract, now under the title of TemporaryAviation Facilities (TAF). The project, nowestimated at $20.5 million, was officially set inmotion, and the first shipment of huts andsupplies needed to be ready by June 1.16

Fully aware of the deadline at hand,the contractors and the Navy moved quicklyto discuss possible locations for the massproduction and shipment of building units. Itappeared that there were no facilities atQuonset Point that could handle or housesuch a large operation. With the pier atQuonset Point nearing completion and therailroad spur linking the pier to WestDavisville, Rhode Island, now complete, thelogical solution was to place the factory out-side the existing base at a point along thetracks. This would allow raw materials toarrive via the adjacent New Haven railroadline and the completed units to be shippedacross land by rail and overseas by barge.

Designing the HutOn March 30, 1941, the Navy gave the offi-cial go-ahead to proceed with work on TAF.With an 85-acre tract of land purchased in

How the Hut Came to Be3

View from above: the

factory at West Davisville,

ca. 1942

West Davisville, Fuller’s Engineering teamdove into the design of a one-story factorybuilding. According to Fuller the “plans werequickly created, construction gangs wereorganized, production lines laid out, and stor-age areas developed. Within forty-eight hoursboth equipment and material were rollinginto the site. Nine days later the first portionof the plant was put into operation.”17

While factory walls were rising atWest Davisville, Fuller was assembling anarchitectural design team to work specifical-ly on the hut design. Otto Brandenberger, theonly licensed architect in the group, wasselected as the team leader. The other threemen, Robert McDonnell, TomasinoSecondino, and Dominic Urgo, would bedesign and production support.18

Brandenberger was, by all accounts, aleader. Born on March 9, 1894, he was thesecond of nine children born to OttoBrandenberger, Sr., a police officer, andLouise Knecht. He studied architecture at theZurich Technical Institute (several of his rela-tives had been architects) and, following hisolder cousin Ernest Strassle, also an archi-tect, immigrated to the U.S. in 1913.19

In 1917 Brandenberger enlisted in theU.S. Army in Philadelphia; he reenlistedthree years later and eventually attained therank of sergeant. During the Depressionyears, he worked for the Works ProgressAdministration (WPA), generating andreviewing architectural plans of historic NewJersey buildings and the Empire StateBuilding, respectively. He also designed afew residential and small-business buildingsin New Jersey before going to work for Fuller.

McDonnell described Brandenbergerand the Quonset design team as “a close knitgroup and each . . . was equally talented.”20

The four members of the team worked onnearly every phase together. McDonnelldescribed Brandenberger as the team’s trueleader: “We did what he told us to do. If any-body gets the credit, it should be OttoBrandenberger.”21

The team was directed to use theBritish Nissen hut as the starting point fortheir design. Invented by Lt. Col. PeterNorman Nissen (1871–1930) of the BritishRoyal Engineers, the Nissen hut representeda more suitable alternative to the tent inWorld War I as it could be used for a varietyof functions and was a bit more imperviousto weather. Though simple in concept, itsconstruction was more labor intensive thanwas practical at times.

The genesis of Nissen’s semicircularhut system is said to have been in 1916,while he was a soldier at a military camp inYpres, Belgium. Inspired by a similar struc-ture that enclosed a hockey rink at Queen’sCollege in Ontario, he drew a series ofsketches showing how the principles of thatedifice could apply to a military hut. Uponapproval of his ideas by his superior officer,Nissen was transferred to the Twenty-ninthCompany Royal Engineers’ general head-quarters where he began work on his design.After three major prototypes, input from hissuperiors, and modifications made after fielduse, a 16' x 27’, semicircular, steel-archedstructure with corrugated metal claddinginside and out was finalized. This hutbecame known as the Nissen Bow Hut.

Chris Chiei4

ABOVE: Otto Brandenberger,

ca. 1963; OPPOSITE: Otto

Brandenberger’s resume,

ca. 1953


Nissen also created a 20' x 60' hut known asthe Nissen Hospital Hut. More than a hun-dred thousand Nissen Bow Huts and tenthousand Hospital Huts were fabricated tosupport British troops during World War I.22

In some circles, these huts are believed to bethe first complete, mass-produced building.23

The Nissen hut was considered the leader ofhut technology used by either side in WorldWar I and was so successful that it becamethe only hut mass-produced by the Britishgovernment toward the end of the war.

Nissen was given full credit for hisdesign by the British Army and, as policypermitted, he patented the hut in numerouscountries including Great Britain, the U.S.,Australia, Canada, New Zealand, Russia,Argentina, South Africa, Belgium, andFrance. However, in the years that followed,disputes arose over the small royaltiesoffered by the British Government, who latersold these huts to other countries without theconsent of, or compensation to, Nissen.24

Brandenberger’s team used theNissen hut as their starting point. The Navyhad instructed them to comply with only two

conditions: the new huts had to be archshaped, for strength and deflection of shellfragments, and able to be quickly and simplyassembled.25 While factory walls were risingto house the production of the new huts, theteam worked around the clock on the devel-opment of the original version of the Quonsethut, later identified as the T-Rib Quonset.According to Fuller and McDonnell, the teamanalyzed Nissen’s design and immediatelyabandoned all but its general shape. Fullerclaimed, “The British had been on the righttrack but too many gadgets slowed erection;and with no insulation between inner andouter metal shells the Nissen huts were hotin the summer and cold in the winter.”26

Fuller’s assessment was correct, butFuller and McDonnell’s claim of an almostcomplete redesign of the hut is slightly exag-gerated; there were striking similarities inthe structural system and materials used inboth. Where Brandenberger’s team trulyadvanced beyond the Nissen hut was in thedesign of the hut’s interior. Both systemswere built from the inside out—first layingthe interior wall against the inner flange of

Chris Chiei6

LEFT: Men in Ireland erect

a Nissen hut, March 25,

1942; RIGHT: U.S. Troops

march by Nissen huts,

Ireland, February 1942

the T-Rib arch and then working out to thecorrugated metal exterior. The last version ofNissen’s design utilized an interior wall sur-face of corrugated metal panels with ribs ori-ented horizontally. The panels were strappedtight to the arch flange by metal cables runradially over the top. Corrugated metalstrips, nicknamed “the slide,” were also usedto join and seal one panel to the next. Thisassembly was deemed overly complicated byBrandenberger’s team. Furthermore, theinsulating qualities of Nissen’s hut dependedsolely on the air space remaining betweenthe inner and outer metal sheet. This mayhave been an acceptable solution for a warfought in the temperate climates of centralEurope, but it would not adapt itself well tothe arctic cold of Newfoundland or the desertheat of the Sahara. Brandenberger’s teamproposed a thin, lightweight pressed-woodlining of 3/16-inch Masonite held to the ribflange with a attachment clip, and then over-laid with a one-inch-thick layer of wadingpaper insulation. According to Fuller, the“new designs were worked out and experi-mental huts were made by hand, erected,tested, revised, and improved until, by thetime the first section of the plant was ready,a light, easily crated and easily erectedassembly had been perfected.”27 The firstknown construction drawings for the T-RibQuonset were submitted by Brandenberger’steam on April 4, 1941.28 Although the officialdrawing title read “16' x 36' Hut,” the con-tract correspondence accompanying thedrawing described the enclosure as a“Nissen type hut for Temporary AviationFacilities.”29

On April 10, 1941, the Bureau of Yardsand Docks, in the Partial Summary ofEquipment, officially authorized an order of2,488 “Nissen” huts for the Scotland andNorthern Ireland bases.30 Not long after,Lieutenant Commander E. S. Huntingtonincreased the order to 4,000 huts, then againto 8,000 huts. In order to keep pace with thegrowing requests for huts and the shorterturnaround time allowed to produce them,Fuller placed large quantities of buildingcomponents on order while design refine-ments were still being tested and approved.One production detail of particular concernwas the corrugated-metal siding of the hutexterior. The team wanted to orient the ribsof the corrugation parallel to the radius ofthe building as in the Nissen hut. This was alogical decision for shedding water, but aproblematic one for production. At that time,techniques for bending sheet metal in onedirection, as in the case of the corrugatedsheet, was commonplace. To bend that samematerial, once again, at an angle perpendi-cular to the first, required a level of con-trolled deformation that proved difficult toexecute. The problem was finally solved by aFuller subcontractor, the Anderson SheetMetal Company of Providence, who proposeda system in which the sheet metal waspassed through large rollers multiple times.Although the solution was a success, thesound generated from the process resulted inone of the least desirable work environmentson the production line. McDonnell recalled,“The noise it made! All kinds of torturedsquealing! You’d go bananas if you didn’tkeep 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 drawingswas submitted by Brandenberger’s team onMay 15, 1941. All drawings were examined,approved by Captain Miller, and returned aweek later with signatures affixed, ready torelease for fabrication.32 These approvalsseem to have been a formality consideringthat the production line was already up andrunning.

On June 11, 1941, the vessel EmpireGull docked at the Quonset Point pier. A totalof 450,000 cubic yards of materials and sup-plies, of an estimated value of almost $1.2million, was prepared for loading. Includedwere a number of crates containing the firstrun of huts to leave the assembly line. In lessthan one month’s time, Fuller had created afully operational, mass-production facilitygenerating huts on a scale that representedan annual output of $22 million per year.33

Specialty HutsBrandenberger’s team subsequently adaptedthe T-Rib Quonset huts to specialized func-tions. Each specialized hut plan indicatedthe building modifications necessary to makethe conversion and the location of equipmentnecessary for that particular design. Includedwere provisions for interior partitions, dormerwindows, and concrete floors. Adjustmentswere made for huts sent to tropical climatesin the form of increased venting, water-collection troughs, and overhangs created byinset bulkheads. In the tropical unit, the oilheater and vent stack were replaced by athird ventilator. Additional components forspecialized huts were crated separately andshipped along with standardized units as

required. In total, forty-one design variations,including a dispensary/surgical hut, a labora-tory, laundry facility, pharmacy, dentalfacility, hospital ward, barbershop, morgue,guard house, and tailor shop, served a multi-tude of needs for the military’s forwardbases. Each hut cost between $800 and$1,100 to produce.34

In addition to specialized designs,numerous field modifications were commonlymade to Quonset huts once they arrived attheir destination. In Alaska, residual framinglumber was often used to create arcticentries, separate enclosed entrances thattrapped the cold air from entering theQuonset hut itself, while in the tropics,numerous configurations for venting andshading were adapted as necessary.Although the huts were conceived as struc-tures requiring no foundation, foundationswere sometimes added, varying greatlydepending on the slope of the site, the condi-tions of soils, the availability of local materi-als, and the urgency of construction. Whenbuilt as part of larger facilities, huts wereused in part, in whole, or in multiple units.Earlier versions rolled off the assembly lineunpainted; later versions would include afactory-applied coat of olive-drab paint. Toreduce the chance of being spotted from theair, most all were painted or repainted on-site to blend with the local landscape.35

Design RefinementsOn May 23, 1941, Admiral Moreell forwardedsix full sets of construction drawings of theT-Rib Quonset, under the heading “NissenHuts,” 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 hutsbe fabricated and shipped to various MarineCorps bases throughout the country.37

Twenty of these huts were requested as 16' x 20' “Nissen” huts; the remainder were16' x 36'.38

While that first shipment of huts wassailing East across the Atlantic, huts fabri-cated for the U.S. Marines were alreadybeing erected at Quantico and Parris Island,South Carolina. Feedback from the field, suchas the memorandum issued by Major D. W.Hopkins at the Training Center for theMarine Barracks at Quantico thatcommented on various aspects of the erec-tion of the huts like the ideal number ofbuilders (ten) and the storage needs of thematerials, coupled with lessons learned onthe production line prompted continuedimprovements in the detailing, fabricating,and crating of T-Rib Quonset huts.39 Theoriginal crating process, for example,required twelve crates, which, even withoutthe 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 compo-nents and a waterproof paper wrap for insulation. The revised process eliminated all but three of the original twelve crates.40

A Hut Gets A NameThe soon-to-be armada of these huts, assembled throughout the world, did not yet have an official name. AlthoughBrandenberger’s drawings were only titled“Standard Hut,” for the original 16' x 36' andthe 16' x 20' Quonset designs, numerous contract correspondences continued to referto 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 officiallyembraced and enforced the name “Quonsethut”: “In order to avoid possible difficulties,which might arise over the continued use of thedesignation ‘Nissen’ Huts, in view of existingpatents, it is requested that in the future the hut be referred to as the Quonset Hut onall 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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

Planning Instructions for Quonset Camp

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


Contract corre-

spondence giving

the Quonset hut

its official name,

July 18, 1941

conversations.”41 There were approximately8,200 T-Rib Quonset huts produced by Fullerbefore the end of 1941.42

Guidelines—a few points from whichare outlined on page 14—were establishedby the Navy for the proper planning of aQuonset hut camp.

Giants in the Building IndustryA number of giants in the building industrywere called into service in the production ofall versions of the Quonset. Among themwere Carnegie-Illinois Steel Corporation and

Bethlehem Steel Company, suppliers of steel-arched tees; Masonite Corporation, providerof tempered presswood; Kimberly-ClarkCorporation, developer of an insulation prod-uct named Kimsul; and Libby Owen Ford,outfitter of shatter-proof panes for bulkheadwindows used at each end of the T-RibQuonset.

Quonset RedesignFuller’s team continued to generate additional designs for specialized T-RibQuonsets. While doing so it became apparent

Chris Chiei16

LEFT: Kimsul logo, ca. 1945; RIGHT: Western Union

telegram from Rear Admiral Ben Morrell to Kimberly-

Clark Corporation expressing appreciation for the

performance of Kimsul insulation supplied for

Quonset huts

that equipment placed along curving wallswould result in a loss of valuable floor space.Since the arch of the Quonset extended tothe floor, furniture such beds, sinks, andwashing machines had to be moved inwarduntil they abutted the curve at the top edgeof the unit. Even tall cabinets designed forfield construction were not significantlyadapted to the Quonset’s shape. Reclaimingthis space would necessitate changing theoverall form of the building.

Exactly when the Navy and/or Fullermade the decision to redesign the T-RibQuonset is unclear. A correspondence issuedon September 23, 1941 by the Chief of theBureau of Yards and Docks includes purchas-es to be made for 2,000 Stran-Steel hutframes, with the option to increase the orderto 4,000.44 This is the first record found indi-cating a completely new direction in design.At that time, Stran-Steel framing was alreadybeing specified for building extensions addedto T-Rib Quonsets.45 It is possible this wasdone to test the efficiency of the materialbefore embracing it as a central componentin a redesign.

Stran-Steel’s framing system is essen-tially two lightweight steel channels that aretack welded back to back to form an I-shaped member. The gap between channelsserved as their patented nailing groove, ser-pentine in shape, into which nails were driv-en and deformed until clinched by friction.Revolutionary in concept, the system elimi-nated the need for the numerous bolted con-nections typically associated with steel fram-ing of the era. Lighter in weight and faster toerect, Stran-Steel quickly outperformed theT-Rib frame when field tested.

The company, Stran-Steel, a sub-sidiary of the Great Lakes Steel Corporation,had established itself in the market of light-weight steel framing prior to World War II.Intended for residential applications, thisproduct made its international debut at theChicago World Fair in 1933. In the Homes ofTomorrow exhibit, the Good Housekeeping–Stran-Steel House served as testimony that alightweight steel framing system “could bemore flexible than wood, lighter, and twiceas strong.”46 As a premium-priced material,it found limited acceptance in the construc-tion of high-end homes. Although a numberof residential clients could afford the advan-tages of this dimensionally stable, fireproofsystem, the runs of material were too smallto take advantage of greater efficienciesaccomplished by mass production.Expansion of their market to include multiplehousing projects increased their total produc-tion numbers, which, in turn, led to a moreaffordable product. When fully embraced as


Detail of Stran-Steel Rib,

1941

the central component of the redesign, Stran-Steel would shift its market almost entirelyto the military.

A single drawing of the redesign, sim-ply titled “Redesign of 16' x 36' QuonsetHut,”47 was approved in late October of 1941.In the title block, the initials O. B.—assumedto be those of the team leader, OttoBrandenberger—appear as both the designerand draftsman. This new version utilizingStran-Steel framing clearly illustrated aground-up revised design that wouldadvance the Quonset hut beyond the shadowof its Nissen predecessor. The basic strategykept the 16' x 36' footprint of the T-Rib designbut introduced a segmented arch with four-

foot vertical sidewalls. The new arch, assem-bled in two sections instead of three,reduced erection time, weighed less, andrequired fewer fasteners.

Exactly when the T-Rib Quonset wasphased out, and the Redesign introduced, isnot clear. According to the Navy, details forthe new design were tested by erecting unitsnear the factory. At some point in the closingmonths of 1941, the new system must havebeen accepted and a leap of faith made forfull-blown mass production. This version ofthe Quonset hut cost just more than $1,300to produce. A larger variation of theRedesign, 24' wide with varying lengths, wasalso produced.


Front-page headline of

Fairbanks Daily News-

Miner, December 7, 1941;

OPPOSITE: Stran-Steel

advertisement

Construction drawing of 16' x 36'

Quonset hut Redesign, approved

October 21, 1941


WarOn the morning of December 7, 1941, theJapanese military led an unprovoked attackon Pearl Harbor and nearly destroyed theHawaiian base. Four battleships were sunk,fifteen others were severely damaged, and2,403 people were dead. The following daythe U.S. officially declared war on Japan;three days later Germany declared war onthe U.S.

After three days passed, AdmiralMoreell authorized an account of $10 millionto insure uninterrupted purchase of materialsfor advanced bases. The Passive DefenseQuonset (PDQ) account would place funds at

the discretion of the officer-in-charge of con-struction.48 With new funds available,demands soon followed. By mid-Januaryrequests for Quonset huts, made by AdmiralMoreell, increased from forty units to one-hundred-fifty units per day.49 Expecting pro-duction to continue through June, leadersauthorized the purchase of materials toexpand the operation: the first plant wasenlarged and a second plant was erected atWest Davisville. According to Fuller, new pro-duction demands were met within a week.Had the first Redesign huts rolled off theassembly line in that third week in January,it is conceivable that 23,850 huts could have

Erection of Quonset

Redesign, Nome, AK, ca.

1944; BOTTOM RIGHT:

Newly completed Quonset

Redesign, Ladd Field (Ft.

Wainwright), Fairbanks, AK,

ca. 1942

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 mili-tary estimates that 25,000 of the Redesignwere produced in total.50

In early 1942, TAF and Quonset Pointwere struggling to meet demands for materi-als and trained personnel for advancedbases. The production of huts alone farexceeded the capacity the Navy wished to orcould handle internally. A new program,Advanced Base Depot (ABD), was estab-lished on February 27, 1942, absorbing thefacility at West Davisville and expanding theoperation north and west of Naval AirStation (NAS), Quonset Point. New emphasiswas placed on the purchasing, storing, andshipping of materials and equipment for theconstruction of advanced bases; also empha-sized was training and outfitting men forconstruction battalions. The role of manufac-turing would be phased out altogether atQuonset Point.51

The manufacturing of Quonset hutswas dispersed to factories throughout thenation. For example, a purchase order, datedJuly 24, 1942, relating to procurement ofcomplete Quonset units, indicates a sourceother than the factory at West Davisville.Outlined on Fuller/Scott’s order form is afour-page specification for the New ArchedRib Tropical Stran-Steel Hut, the 20' x 48' ver-sion of the Quonset to follow the Redesign, tobe designed and manufactured by the Stran-Steel Division of the Great Lakes SteelCorporation.52

It is no surprise that Stran-Steel wasawarded the contract to take over productionof the Quonset hut. By the beginning of 1942,their steel had established itself as an insep-arable component of the design, and they,

unlike Fuller and Scott, were fully immersedin the business of mass production. By sub-contracting the hut, Fuller and Scott couldnow focus on the construction of bases atABD and general contracting supplies for for-ward bases. And, freed from the business ofmanufacturing, the Navy could dedicate thatenergy toward military duties and procurehuts the same way they would any otherpiece of equipment.

Fuller produced a total of 32,352Quonset huts (both the T-Rib and theRedesign) at the West Davisville factorybefore turning the reins over to Stran-Steel.At its peak, Fuller’s factory employed 3,000men, most recruited from building trades atQuonset Point.53 According to Fuller,“improvements in production methods weremade constantly and costs were steadilyreduced. After fifteen months, the initial costwas reduced sixty percent, and the shippingweight about thirty-five percent.”54 By theend of 1942, the knowledge and experiencein Quonset hut construction acquired byFuller were fully handed over to Stran-Steel,and the factory was reclaimed as a ware-house.

The new Stran-Steel design, nowcalled New Arch Rib Stran-Steel Hut (alsothe SSAR Hut), continued to be identified as“Quonset hut.” In addition to its expandedfootprint, the most visible difference betweenthe Stran-Steel hut and its predecessor, theRedesign, was the shape of the arch—theStran-Steel hut reverted back to the full-arched rib present in the T-Rib Quonset.Although some usable floor space was com-promised, the ease of fabrication and erec-tion, its small size when crated (270–325

Chris Chiei24

cubic feet versus the 450 cubic feet requiredfor the Redesign), and lighter shippingweight (Stran-Steel’s structural system waspushed to reduce the overall steel weightfrom four tons to three tons) justified the larg-er size.55 Like the T-Rib Quonset, the Stran-Steel hut was clad with curved corrugatedmetal applied vertically to the arch. A newcladding system was shortly introducedusing the factory-curved panel at the ridgebut with sheets oriented horizontally alongthe remaining sidewalls. Although not anideal solution for shedding water and snow,these flat, corrugated sheets could beacquired from stock, cut, and, without facto-ry modification, shipped to a site in smallbundles.

Finally perfected, the military nowhad a structure in the Stran-Steel hut thatcould be put up in one day by ten men andwas able to be erected with hand tools; itrequired no special skills to construct, andwhen crated, it was lighter and took up lessshipping space than canvas tents with wooden floors and frames that housed anequal number of soldiers.56

By the end of World War II, approxi-mately 120,000 Stran-Steel huts had beenproduced and shipped to almost every corner of the globe. Designed to serveeighty-six official uses, and applied to manymore, these huts represented a refinement inthinking that spanned two world wars.When counted with Brandenberger’s T-RibQuonset and the Quonset Redesign, therewere more than 153,000 lightweight, prefab-ricated units of the Quonset deployed anderected in support American troops in WorldWar II.57

Quonsets on the Home FrontDuring the war, the separation of soldiersfrom their families while on leave from com-bat resulted in a significant morale problemfor the Navy. After the attack on PearlHarbor, the U.S. government shifted its hous-ing priority to civilian workers relocated todefense production facilities. During thisperiod, naval ships periodically returned tothe U.S. for repair, but military personnelwere often assigned to full-time advancedtraining—the second, specialized stage ofmilitary training within a chosen MilitaryOccupational Specialty (MOS)—making itimpossible for them to travel to see their fam-ilies. The men who had family visit them atthe base quickly realized that available hous-ing was often substandard and alwaysexpensive. The Navy acknowledged the needto provide family housing for these soldiersand for returning soldiers who were assignedto shore duty or in need of rehabilitation.58

In response to this situation, theSecretary of the Navy approved the construc-tion of the first thousand family units of theNavy’s Homoja housing program onSeptember 27, 1943.59 The Quonset hut wasselected as the standard single-family build-ing unit for the program. In order to accom-modate transient naval personnel and theirfamilies, each hut was converted into a fullyfurnished two-bedroom home complete withkitchen, toilet facility, and bath. Huts wereerected in communities on naval basesthroughout the U.S. Most were built on theWest Coast where the need was the greatest.From September 1943 until V-J Day, August6, 1945, the Navy completed 6,285 Homojahuts at a total cost of over $21 million,

OPPOSITE TOP: Homoja

Village served as quarters

for married naval person-

nel and was built to

accommodate one hun-

dred 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.

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

We Build, We Fight: The SeabeesPrior to World War II, the Navy dependedalmost solely upon civilian contractors tobuild and supply military installations inplaces outside of the U.S. This became prob-lematic as bases were erected in locationswhere civilians had the potential to beharmed. Not only were these men unarmedand inexperienced in military action, as civil-ians they were forbidden to take up arms byinternational law. If they were capturedwhile contributing to the defense of a mili-tary facility, they were likely to be treated asguerrillas and executed. This, unfortunately,

occurred at Wake Island in the North Pacific,Cavite Island in the Philippines, and Guam.61

Following the passage of theDestroyers for Bases Act in 1940, a signifi-cant amount of advanced-base constructionwas soon underway. With the JapaneseImperial Army advancing on the Pacific andthe German Army moving through Europe, itwas clearly unwise to continue with civilianlabor at installations abroad.62

On December 28, 1941, AdmiralMoreell wrote a letter to the Navy’s Bureauof Navigations requesting the authority torecruit men from various building trades toform a naval construction battalion. Thesemen would be trained for military action as well as in specialized skills necessary for the construction of advanced bases.

Chris Chiei26

Postcard of Seabees

erecting a Quonset hut

at Camp Endicott, RI,

ca. 1942

Authorization was granted.63 These men, atthe request of Admiral Moreell, were giventhe name Seabees, a phonetic pronunciationof the initials of Construction Battalion (CB).Their insignia, an angry fighting bee wield-ing tools and weapons, was designed byFrank J. Iafrate, an engineering clerk atCamp Endicott, Davisville. Their officialmotto was Construimus Batuimus, Latin for“We Build, We Fight.”

The Seabees recruited men betweenthe ages of 17 to 38, of all trades.64 It was theNavy Seabees that acquired responsibility forbuilding Quonset huts throughout the world.A simple erection manual was part of eachQuonset shipment, and each Seabee wastrained in proper erection procedure. InJanuary of 1942, the construction battalionBOBCAT became the first Seabee unit to betrained in Quonset hut fabrication proce-dures at Quonset Point. Immediately follow-ing training, they were shipped to Bora-Borato construct a fueling station.65

Huts on the GoThe Seabees, much like other constructiongroups, developed their own methods oferecting, transporting, and adapting huts tovarious climates and conditions. TheNinetieth Seabees, for instance, developed atime-saving method of pouring concreteslabs at one location, erecting hut frames atanother, and then hand carrying huts to theirfoundation; the Ninetieth Seabees success-fully used this method at Pearl Harbor66 andIwo Jima.67 In Alaska, a civilian contractorfor the Navy developed a sled system to helptransport fully erected Quonset huts to

remote drilling sites near the Naval ArcticResearch Laboratory in Barrow. A series ofsled runners was bolted through the hut’sfloor to a temporary truss that spanned andsupported its full length. Once dragged tothe final location, the runners and truss wereremoved, returned, and reused.68 When hutsremained on sled runners as mobile camps,they were referred to as “wannigans.” Someof these systems incorporated empty oildrums as pontoons for crossing streams.

The Marines also had to be clever insolving problems related to the transporta-tion of Quonset huts. In 1948 at CampPendelton, California, orders were given tobegin dismantling nearby Camp DeLuz. Themaintenance battalion at Camp Pendeltonwas charged with relocating ten of itsQuonset huts. Under the direction of ColonelC. H. Shuey, Master Sergeant Kenning andhis maintenance staff developed a reusablesteel semi-trailer system for the transport of20' x 48' huts. Using stock steel componentsand wheels from a heavy-equipment vehicle,a team of four welders fabricated the semi-trailer system in eight days. The first test runtook place on October 7, 1948. Using a 20-Bcrane, a complete hut was lifted and securedto the trailer. When pulled by a KR-10 tractor,the whole assembly cruised to its new loca-tion at an average speed of twenty to twenty-five miles per hour. This first trial run wassuccessfully completed in five hours.69

Whether they were relocated or left where built, the Quonset hut became afixture of war. Soldiers, especially, were familiar with the arched structure that housedthem and served as places for strategizing,


working, worshipping, training, eating, andmore. While many Quonset huts were sentwith soldiers to serve abroad, many wereshipped to bases in the homeland—to helpsoldiers prepare for war and to protect theU.S. from foreign attack. This was the begin-ning of a long history of Quonset huts inAmerica—one Otto Brandenberger and histeam could not have imagined when theyfirst 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 cus-

tom bobsled, Barrow, AK, 1946; Stran-Steel Quonset Huts

moved by custom-made trailer, Camp Pendleton, CA,

October 11, 1948

Few episodes in Alaska’s history have had amore profound impact in shaping the territo-ry’s development and character than WorldWar II. Preceding the war, Alaska was an isolated wilderness populated by thirty thou-sand native Alaskans and thirty thousandnon-natives living in more than two hundredwidely separated and remote villages, mostwith no road access. There, they pursued atraditional lifestyle, including substantialharvesting of subsistence resources andbuilding a new society on the last frontier—mainly in scores of small towns scatteredacross the Alaskan landscape, far removedfrom the American mainstream.

The war brought fundamental eco-nomic change to Alaska. Vastly increasedfederal spending injected ample new moneyinto the region, creating jobs and attracting asubstantial new non-native population.During the war, the United States militaryspent nearly $3 billion in Alaska. Three hun-dred military installations were constructed;300,000 military personnel served in the ter-ritory, 150,000 of them full-time soldiers. Tensof thousands of civilians also moved to theregion to work for the military. At the same

time, numerous federal agencies increasedthe 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 spend-ing became the major aspect of Alaska’s economic base, usurping salmon canning,which was the most important economicactivity in Alaska before the war.

Apart from a rare few individuals—foremost among them, William “Billy”Mitchell of the Army Air Service—militaryand political leaders did not foresee a majormilitary role for Alaska before World War II.Alaska, far from the traditional theaters ofwar and politics and physically difficult toaccess, seemed strategically insignificant.Events occurring far from Alaska in distanceand time determined its unexpected andhistoric role in the war.

In the aftermath of World War I, worldleaders sought means for preventing furtherwar and alternative methods of resolvinginternational conflict. A number of interna-tional agreements followed, including theFive-Power Treaty, a naval disarmamenttreaty that emerged from conferences

Pilots and navigators leaving

their hut, Umnak Island, AK,

ca. 1943

31Chapter 2 Quonsets, Alaska, and World War II

Steven Haycox

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

in Washington, D.C., in 1921 and 1922.According to the agreement, the U.S., GreatBritain, France, Italy, and Japan establisheda naval armament ratio between themselvesof 5:5:3:3:1, respectively, with Japan allowedonly 20 percent of the naval-arms capabilityof the U.S. To persuade Japan to accept thisdisadvantageous relationship, the U.S.agreed not to fortify or militarize Alaska.

After World War I, Japan embarked ona course of imperialist expansion, using bothdiplomatic and military means to exert con-trol over parts of the Asian mainland. Japanincreasingly began to see itself as the protec-tor and champion of Asian interests againstthe West, inevitably conflicting with theWestern powers. Japan’s conquest ofNanking by 1938 and Hitler’s violation of theMunich Pact (signed September 29, 1938) inearly 1939 persuaded many American mili-tary leaders that the U.S. must prepare forpossible war. Among other activities, the U.S. Navy reevaluated its position in theAleutians and drew up proposals in 1938 forconstruction of naval bases at Sitka, Kodiak,

and Dutch Harbor. Little was done, however,until in September 1939, when, following thesigning of a nonaggression pact with theSoviet Union, Germany invaded Poland.Moreover, the deliberate violation of Poland’ssovereignty and England’s necessary decla-ration of war against Germany suggestedthat all the world’s nations would inexorablybe drawn into the maelstrom. Adjusting tothese contingencies, the U.S. military beganthe remilitarization of Alaska and shatteredthe illusion of Alaska’s lack of strategic con-sequence.

The swirl of war in Europe and con-flict in Asia confirmed the wisdom of thedecision to remilitarize Alaska. The U.S.Army proposed construction of a major landbase near Anchorage, a network of air basesin the territory, and troops to protect the newnaval bases. In 1938 the Army began build-ing additional air bases, a submarine base,and two Army posts throughout Alaska.Large numbers of civilian workers werebrought into the territory to build these facili-ties by such major construction companiesas Morrison-Knudsen, West Construction,and Sims-Drake. It was at this time, in late1941, that large numbers of Quonset hutsbegan to arrive in Alaska.

While the attack on Pearl Harborshocked most Americans, it inspired terror inAlaska. Acting with cautionary prudence,the U.S. military did not inform Alaska civil-ians of the level of danger to the territory. Noone knew if Alaska might also be targeted,particularly the southern ports of Ketchikan,Sitka, and Juneau. Such anxiety had beenpartly forecasted in prewar arguments by

Steven Haycox32

Locations of military installa-

tions in Alaska during WW II

Alaska’s lone delegate to Congress, AnthonyDimond, who had argued that fortification ofHawaii without the militarization of Alaskaamounted to defending one door to Americawhile leaving another one wide open.

Alaskans had grown accustomed tothinking of their territory as an AmericanPacific bastion. The pace and magnitude ofmilitary construction in 1940 and 1941 rein-forced such perceptions. Reports in Tokyothat Japanese air raids had killed 3,000 inFairbanks exacerbated the rumors andaccompanying fears. So, too, did the direc-tive ordered by Brigadier General SimonBolivar Buckner, the head of the AlaskaDefense Command, an authority recentlycreated by the Army to direct the Alaskanwar efforts and to rotate military dependentsout of the territory as soon as transportationcould be arranged. Alaskans started toassume an attack was imminent and the mil-itary’s preparatory actions only served toreinforce the fear.

Alaska went on a war footing immedi-ately. Buckner ordered all defenses strength-ened, and construction accelerated on allprojects underway. Seward, the principaltransportation entrepot, became a beehive ofdefensive and anticipatory activity. At thesame time, the military appropriated about25 percent of Alaska’s land area for the wareffort. Part of that endeavor involved theLend-lease program. Tons of supplies were tobe moved to Russia from the United States.At the same time, the U.S. committed hun-dreds of ships and submarines to protect theshipping lane along the west coasts ofCanada and Alaska. Aircraft provided to the

Soviets were flown across Canada andAlaska to Fairbanks where they were transferred to Russian pilots who flew them across the Bering Strait to Siberia and toEuropean Russia.

Also brought in were tens of thou-sands of Quonset huts. It is difficult to imag-ine World War II in Alaska without theQuonset hut. When military troops and civil-ian workers flooded into the territory in 1940,there was insufficient housing for such apopulation. Housing was needed for workersduring construction, for Army and Navy per-sonnel who needed quick, temporary struc-tures, and for quasi-permanent facilities onmost of the three hundred military installa-tions established in the territory during thewar. This need fostered the ubiquity of theQuonset hut during World War II. Theyappeared throughout the territory wheretroops were stationed. One estimate

Quonsets, Alaska, and World War II 33

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 numberhighly likely but impossible to verify; theiruse can be documented in nearly all bases.The first units likely came to the territorysoon after the attack on Pearl Harbor, whenthe Corps of Engineers ordered 16,000 forAlaska. Most went to the Aleutian Islands.Thousands of these were sent to Anchorage,the headquarters of the Alaska DefenseCommand and all Army deployment in theregion. Some were shipped surreptitiously:the shipping labels of some of the Quonsethuts sent to a secret base on Umnak Islandwere marked “Blair Packing Company” and“Saxton Canneries,” fictional companiesinvented to disguise the contents of thecrates.

The Alaska Defense Command includ-ed within its purview two other huge WorldWar II construction projects, the AlaskaHighway and the Canol Pipeline project. TheAlaska Highway would run from Fort St.John, British Columbia, to Fairbanks, Alaska.It was constructed principally as a militarycontingency, in case the sea-supply routealong the coast should be interdicted, and toservice the string of airfields used for thelend-lease aircraft being flown to Fairbanksfor consignment to the Soviet Union. It wasnever conceived as a primary supply corridorfor Alaska. Thousands of troops worked on

Steven Haycox34

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

construction of the highway, and Quonsethuts and Quonsetlike structures were a com-mon sight up and down the road and still are today.

The Canol Pipeline project broughttwenty-five hundred men north to constructthe line between 1942 and 1944. The Corpsof Engineers constructed an oil pipeline fromNorman Wells on the Mackenzie River inCanada’s Northwest Territory to Whitehorse,Yukon Territory, a distance of over seven-hundred miles across mountains andmuskeg. The military hoped oil from NormanWells could be refined in Whitehorse for useby both the Army and Navy in Alaska. As ithappened, the sea route was completely reli-

able throughout the war, and Norman Wellsturned out to be a disappointing oil deposit,far smaller and lower in quality than initiallyestimated. The line operated for thirteenmonths before being decommissioned.Again, Quonsetlike structures were commonly used along the Canol route.

In total, thousands of civilian workerspoured into the territory to work construc-tion, labor as longshoremen, and to helpoperate the many new facilities brought onby the Quonset huts. None of Alaska’s townswere prepared for the onslaught, and generalservices were intolerably strained. Housingwas inadequate; water, sewer, power, andtelephone systems were swamped. At the

Steven Haycox36

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

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 Adakian-

Adak, Alaska’s military

newspaper

same time, permanent residents and busi-ness owners experienced an economic wind-fall as prices rose rapidly and money flowedas never before. For Alaska, war fueled asuperheated economic engine.

The Quonset hut was an acutelyfamiliar sight for those serving in World WarII in Alaska, Hawaii, and abroad. Theyworked in them, lived in them, ate in them,recreated in them. Quonset huts were themilitary’s bunks, cafeterias, hospitals andwar rooms. Soldiers made efforts to human-ize their surroundings. They posted pin-upsalong the curved walls of the huts, some-times covering every square inch of the inte-rior with photos of home and photos fromgirlie magazines.

Alaska was in no immediate danger ofattack or invasion following the attack onPearl Harbor, but the Japanese military com-mand would soon change that. The JapaneseNavy had determined that its strategy in thePacific War mandated the conquest ofMidway Island at the far west end of thethousand-mile Hawaiian archipelago. TheJapanese sought to use the island, nearly atthe midpoint of the Pacific Ocean betweenJapan and mainland U.S., as the anchor for aforward, north-south defensive perimetersecuring Japan’s Pacific interests. Midwaywas a U.S. possession, and Admiral IsorukuYamamoto sought to lure the U.S. Pacificfleet into battle there, not only capturing theisland, but destroying what remained of theU.S. fleet following the blow inflicted at PearlHarbor. Yamamoto staked the future of thePacific war on the battle, for Midway wouldbe the start of the U.S. Navy’s steady thrust

westward toward Japan and Southeast Asia,and he knew the Japanese Navy would notbe strong enough to prevail if Japan did notstop the thrust before it began.

Alaska was an important part ofYamamoto’s strategy. Yamamoto calculatedthat a Japanese attack there, againstAmerican sovereign soil, would generatepolitical pressure to repel the invasion. Thiswould divert a vital component of U.S. AdmiralChester Nimitz’s Pacific Navy, thus weaken-ing the force Nimitz would have available todefend Midway. A Japanese Aleutian attacktimed to coincide with the move against


A newspaper illustration

utilizing Quonset huts to

quantify the number of U.S.

Naval troops stationed in

the Pacific, 1945

Midway could have devastated Nimitz’sforces and won the Pacific war for Japan. Inits totality, Yamamoto’s was an audaciousand daring gamble, equal to his extraordi-nary gamble at Pearl Harbor, and while therewas considerable opposition to the schemewithin the Japanese general staff, Yamamotolikely carried the day because of his successin Hawaii. But at Midway, the outcomewould be much different.

Initially, Japan scored a pyrrhic victo-ry. On June 3, 1942, without warning, aircraftfrom a Japanese carrier task force attackedDutch Harbor on Unalaska Island. Thoughthe attack was a complete surprise to theU.S., the Japanese bombers inflicted onlymoderate damage, partly because of theweather. They returned two days later, thistime bombing the U.S. Army barracks at Ft.Mears, destroying an oil tank farm, damag-ing the radio station and the hospital, andsinking ships and planes moored at themajor dock. Simultaneously, other units ofthe Japanese force landed 1,200 men on Attu

Island at the far end of the Aleutian chain,capturing the island and its only village.

The Americans had known for at leasttwo months that the Japanese were likely tostrike the Aleutians. American cryptologistshad broken Japanese military codes, andradio intercepts provided enough informationto alert the Americans that an enemy forcewas gathering for a move north. But theAmericans did not have sufficient informa-tion to know where or when the attackwould take place, nor its exact nature. At thesame time, military planners detected andbegan to position themselves for the comingdrive against Midway. American plannershad to decide how to counter the JapanesePacific grand strategy: how to prepare forsimultaneous attacks against Midway, thekey to the Pacific War, and the Aleutians, adiversionary aside designed to divideAmerican forces. The Japanese haddestroyed about 40 percent of the AmericanPacific fleet at Pearl Harbor. As a conse-quence, Nimitz could not afford any substan-

Steven Haycox42

LEFT: Japanese attack on

Dutch Harbor, Alaska, June 3,

1942; RIGHT: Quonset rebuilt

on bombed site, Dutch

Harbor, Alaska, June 17, 1942

tial dividing of his remaining forces. Heordered most of his ships and air forces tothe battle of Midway. He did deploy a tokengroup, the North Pacific Force, to theAleutians, which Admiral Theobold stationedsouth of Kodiak Island, far east of where theJapanese chose to attack, but well posi-tioned to protect the lend-lease shippinglane. They were unable to defend DutchHarbor.

The battle of Midway began on June3, 1942, and lasted four days. It was a mile-stone in naval warfare; none of the shipsinvolved were ever within sight of eachother: the entire battle was fought from theair. When it was over, the Japanese had losthundreds of planes and four of the six air-craft carriers they committed to the battle.The Americans had lost three of their four.The Japanese strategy for the mid-Pacificwas in shambles and the Japanese empirelay exposed to the American Pacific navy. Itwould take more than three years for the U.S.to dislodge the Japanese from their individ-ual holdings in their Pacific empire, but asAdmiral Yamamoto noted after the battle ofMidway, it was but a matter of time.

But while American strategists under-stood Japan’s defensive position, they alsounderstood that it would take persistent,well-supplied campaigns to force theJapanese from their “sphere of influence”and back to their home islands. Intensefighting with high casualties lay in store forthe 1.5 million American troops who wouldfight the Pacific War. One of the bloodiest ofall the battles in that war would be thereconquest of Attu Island in the Aleutians.

The bombing of Dutch Harbor threwthe Alaska Defense Command into a frenzyof reactive and cautionary preparations. Theimmediate concern was whether other portsmight be targeted. General Buckner com-mandeered every aircraft he could find, mili-tary and civilian, to rush forces and suppliesto Nome, which he anticipated was the nexttarget. Emergency defenses were rapidlyerected around the small town near the tip ofthe Seward Peninsula and Bering Strait.When it became clear that the Japanese didnot have the capability to move beyond theirisolated island outposts, Buckner devoted hisefforts to protecting his aircraft, shoring uphis defensive vulnerabilities, and planningfor the expulsion of the invaders. First, hetemporarily moved all aircraft to inland basesuntil he was certain the Japanese offensivewas concluded. Then he began the construc-tion of still more bases in the Aleutians, fromwhich General Butler hoped his air forceswould fend off the Japanese planes.

By August he had Fort Morrow (PortHeiden) and Davis Field (Adak) operational.Work proceeded at breakneck speed at facili-ties on Umnak, at Cold Bay, and on AtkaIsland. U.S. bombing raids from Atka keptthe Japanese forces on Kiska isolated. At thesame time, U.S. submarines sunk threeJapanese destroyers in Reynard Cove onKiska. In the meantime, Admiral ThomasKinkaid, who replaced Theobold, establisheda loose naval blockade south and west of theAleutians and undertook the occupation ofuninhabited Amchitka Island, only fortymiles from Kiska. The blockade cut off easyJapanese resupply of the two conquered


islands, forcing the troops there to rely onsupplies from submarines.

Perhaps the most significant prepara-tory action for the coming fight for the west-ern Aleutians, however, was the Americansuccess in the battle of the Komandorski(Commander) Islands in March 1943. Thestrategic importance of this fortuitousAmerican victory was immense, for now theJapanese troops on Attu and Kiska werewithout provisions and could not rely onbeing resupplied by future drop shipments.The reconquest of the Aleutians was aboutto begin. The Americans engaged in whatwas one of the costliest battles of World WarII. While the actual invasion force totaledabout 14,000 men, nearly 100,000 wereinvolved in staging and supportingthe invasion.

After the restoration of Americansovereignty in the Aleutians, Alaska playedlittle role in World War II. Airmen flying frombases on Amchitka and Shemya (near Attu)Islands carried out numerous, dangerousraids against bases in the Kuriles, onHokkaido, and the main Japanese island ofHonshu. But throughout the rest of theislands, and on the Alaska mainland, therewas little for American forces to do but waitout the war. In August 1944, the Americanhigh command ordered a general troop with-drawal from Alaska, reducing the force thereto 50,000. For Alaska, the war was over.

The economic impact of the war inAlaska, already noted, was but a manifesta-tion of the war’s impact across the country.The war was a boom time for the workerswho produced the carriers, airplanes, tanks,

and other war material that made the U.S.the dominant force in both Europe and thePacific. Wages were high; unions made “nostrike” pledges in return for good pay, work-ing conditions were good, and the govern-ment attempted to hold down prices to main-tain the economy. Near war plants, ram-shackle housing developments sproutedovernight to meet the demand. Nevertheless,other needs could not easily be met, andmany families were forced to do withoutbasic household items and facilities. Womenbraved the condescension of male workers,taking jobs in heavy industry both for themoney they needed to provide for theirfamilies while the men were fighting the war and to demonstrate their patriotism. At this time, Roosevelt issued an executiveorder forbidding discrimination in employ-ment by the government and in defenseindustries. All of these new conditions were felt in Alaska where few civilians leftthe territory, preferring to brave electricalblackouts and other supply shortages inorder to maintain their homes and takeadvantage of high-wage jobs.

The legacy of Quonset huts in Alaskais remarkable. As with any architecture, thespace people live and work in is integrallyrelated to how they define and understandthemselves and how they perceive the world.The Quonset may be an elegant or inelegantdesign. Certainly, after World War II the cityfathers of Anchorage found the buildingsinelegant, but Alaska would not have beendefended in the war without Quonset huts.The many housing and operational needs ofthe American military personnel and civil-

Steven Haycox44

ians of Alaska could not have been providedfor with the normal temporary tents that pre-vailed before the creation of the Quonset.Tents did not provide sufficient protection inAlaska against wind, snow, ice, and the cold;standard building materials, wood framestructures on cement foundations, was costprohibitive and difficult to transport. Over30,000 Quonset huts were sent to and uti-lized in Alaska because they were an appro-priate, applicable solution to a critical need.The millions of dollars expended in materialsacquisition, in operations, and in payroll

were expended in a context made possibleby the ubiquitous presence of Quonset huts.We take for granted such elemental aspectsof our endeavors as housing. PerhapsQuonsets are a tangible lesson in why we shouldn’t.


Abandoned anti-aircraft

artillery site, Fairbanks, AK,

2003

At the same time, other structures were builtto fulfill immediate needs for equipment thatcould be mass produced, easily transportedover long distances, designed to respond torapidly changing needs, and deployed innumerous different settings. Presented withthese urgent challenges, teams of soldiers,architects, industrialists, and engineersworked together to develop a range ofdesigns that have created unique and experi-mental structures.

The outbreak of World War I and theadvent of mechanized warfare saw theassembly and movement of larger and moreelaborately equipped armies than everbefore. With more than 3.7 million Germanand English troops mobilized on the WesternFront by 1917, the demand for shelter wascritical. The Nissen Bow Hut quickly became

the building that was most widely used bythe allied forces, and its sudden appearanceprompted 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 crea-

ture . . . in a week or two you

would find a valley covered with

them . . . the name of this creature is

the Nissen hut. It is the solution of

one of the many problems that

Chapter 3 War, Design, and Weapons

of Mass Construction

Brian Carter

The last hundred years have seen increasing amounts of time, energy, andmoney dedicated to war and defense. While much of this effort has beendirected toward the development of new weapons and equipment, it hasalso radically influenced the design of buildings. The criteria for the designof buildings for war differ significantly from those that are traditionally asso-ciated with architecture; preoccupations with “firmness, commoditie anddelighte”1 are set aside in favor of the pragmatic—the development ofstrategic defensive systems and facilities that can be improvised quickly.Governments, politicians, and military leaders, prompted by these unusualcircumstances, have frequently commissioned massive site-specific installa-tions, extensive defenses and constructions embedded in the landscape.

R. Buckminster Fuller,

Dymaxion Deployment Unit,

ca. 1940

47

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 pro-

tection from summer heat and win-

ter cold. All these conditions are

fulfilled by the Nissen hut.2

Although in shape and form itrecalled the primitive huts of indigenous peo-ples, the Nissen hut was a structure thatmade use of contemporary materials and thelatest industrial technologies. Designed on asix-foot-nine-inch grid and with a T-sectioniron frame, the simple semicircular form ofthe 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 founda-tions or footings, it was built on two longitu-dinal sleeper joists and designed to touch theground lightly. In addition, all connectionswere devised to be fabricated by using ahook bolt—an innovation that made it possi-ble to assemble the entire building with justa wrench. The finished structure had alsobeen designed so that each component couldbe carried by two men and the entire kit ofparts could be loaded onto a single truck.Capable of being assembled by a team offour men in four hours, the Nissen hut con-

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 tocreate a larger structure, the Nissen Hospitalhut, which could be used as a hospital ward,dining room, storage building, office, orrecreation hall. A year after it had beendesigned, it was estimated that 20,000Nissen Huts were already in use and thatnumber was to increase significantly beforethe war ended.

While there were numerous examplesof mass-produced building components andsystematized methods of construction thathad been developed before 1916, the Nissenhut proved to be one of the most extensivelyused of these early comprehensive construc-tion systems. Utilizing modern materials anddesigned as a series of components thatcould be prefabricated in a factory, easilytransported, and assembled quickly, it was abuilding that became an important piece ofmilitary equipment and one that, albeit indi-rectly, was to have an impact on the develop-ment of modern architecture.

In the same year, prompted by thesame war effort that necessitated the massproduction of the Nissen hut in England, thedesign and construction of a new factory inAmerica also significantly influenced indus-trial production and the evolution of modernarchitecture. Eagle Plant (aka Eagle “B”), oneof many factories designed by Albert Kahnbetween 1900 and 1940, was built in Detroitin 1917 as a place where new steel sub-marines could be constructed for the U.S.Navy. As such, this was also a place where

War, Design, and Weapons of Mass Construction49

Isometric drawing of Nissen

Bow Hut, 1917

numerous technical innovations were to bemade with regard to the construction ofanother type of metal structure that was sub-sequently used in a variety of extreme set-tings. However, the vast, single-story steel-framed building that was designed to housethese activities also established an entirelynew setting for industry—a context thatmade it possible to create uninterruptedindustrial assembly lines and advance massproduction at unprecedented levels. Definedas the place where “the open-purpose shedwas born,”3 this radical breakthrough pre-ceded some of the most advanced industrialstructures in Europe, such as the bold factorydesigns by German architects like PeterBehrens and Walter Gropius, by more than adecade. The factory building and the site atRiver Rouge, where many more factoriesdesigned by Kahn were eventually built,were places where an increasing output ofcomplex new equipment designed for warwas to be manufactured during World War Iand later for World War II. It was also theplace where, in peacetime, Henry Ford wasto mass produce that ultimate machine—the automobile.

America’s preparations for World WarII raised questions of how to move even larg-er, fully equipped military forces quickly andefficiently around the world; the attack onPearl Harbor suddenly made these concernsa reality. The first camps constructed forAmerican soldiers in Europe were built usinglocally available materials. The brick, concrete, asbestos-cement, and steel build-ings that were constructed in England were, as one observer noted, “all of British

design . . . and we are merely going to usethem.”4 As the war progressed, however, theAmericans developed their own alternativebuilding systems. While many made use ofwood—the most plentiful resource availablein America at that time—others, like theQuonset, utilized metal. Inspired by theNissen hut, it had a similar arched form of curved and corrugated metal sheetsattached to semicircular T-section steel ribs,but with a prefabricated floor of plywoodsupported on a raised metal frame.

It was an example of the potential ofnew materials and innovative productiontechniques that were being advanced as apart of the war effort and that were alsoinspiring architects and designers. Promptedby government agencies, publishers, andentrepreneurs, and as a result of a series ofdemonstration projects, commissioned arti-cles, and design competitions, building pro-fessionals were encouraged to develop ideasand make proposals that used this newknowledge and capitalized on America’srapidly expanding industrial capacity.Designs for Postwar Living was a competi-tion to design new forms of housing that was sponsored by California Arts andArchitecture in 1943 in collaboration with agroup of twenty-two materials manufactur-ers. It attracted hundreds of submissions anda wide range of ideas, and the three selectedschemes were published in the journal Art &Architecture.

The winning proposal, submitted byarchitects Eero Saarinen and OliverLundquist, capitalized on industrial advancesin the construction of metal buildings, like

Brian Carter50

the Quonset, to propose a series of standard-ized, prefabricated-metal residential units.Claiming that “the economic and socialdemands for postwar housing must be metby extensive utilization of our assembly-linepotential,” they devised two basic housingtypes. Each was defined as a “pre-assembledcomponent” (PAC), where “the biological andmechanical functions of the home—sleeping,dressing, bathing, cooking, washing, heatingand cooling—are standardized and incorpo-rated into PAC’s ‘A’ and ‘B.’” They went on tosuggest that “by attaching these units to theliving space (which can form a single houseor row housing, motels or even a tent) a max-imum adaptability is achieved. Because thePAC’s can become standardized for a widevariety of climates and income groups, it isestimated that PAC can answer 80% of post-war housing demands.”5

These ideas were to provide the basisof a second design by Eero Saarinen, whichoriginated under the aegis of the NationalHousing Association. Prepared in 1945, thisdesign proposed an “unfolding house” thatmade use of prefabricated units with curvedlightweight metal skins but also introduced aflexible, clear spanning roof to create a housethat could be enlarged as needed. Exploringsimilar ideas of lightness and optional adjust-ments that had been developed in the designof the Quonset, Saarinen’s proposal for thisunfolding aluminum roof that connectedpackaged housing units was a response to the varying needs of families and thedemands of building on different sites acrossthe country. While neither of these projectswas built, they helped to promote the trans-

fer of ideas, materials, and construction tech-niques developed in wartime for peacetimeuse—ideas that directly connected industryand design to project a view of architectureas equipment, an extension of the machine.

Eero Saarinen also worked closelywith Charles Eames. Their explorations intothe potential of molding wood in furnituremaking, started at Cranbrook Academy ofArt in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, beforeWorld War II, were further pursued byCharles and Ray Eames after they movedfrom Cranbrook to California in 1941.Prompted by the war effort and advancedunder the auspices of the U.S. Navy, theEameses also used this experience to designa series of molded-wood splints and litters for servicemen who had been injured in thefield. The Navy placed its first order for 5,000splints in November 1942, and the requestprompted the designers to establish the


Eames plywood leg splint,

1943

Plyformed Wood Company, where the splintwas mass produced and where they couldconduct design research into other molded-plywood techniques and products in a devel-opment laboratory. It was work that led tothe design and fabrication of stretchers andlarger curved-wood blisters for use in the construction of aircraft and gliders.Advanced through improvisation and thesubsequent intensive testing of materials,models, and large-scale mock-ups, thesestudies strengthened the connectionsbetween design and industry.

In 1943, Charles and Ray Eames col-laborated with John Entenza, BuckminsterFuller, and Herbert Matter on a special issueof Art & Architecture that was devoted to theimpact of prefabrication, industrialization,and mass production on the design of hous-ing. Published in July 1944, at a time whenthe production of the Quonset hut was in fullswing, it was a response to an anticipatedpostwar housing shortage and sought to cap-italize on new industrial technologies andways of working. It presented the housealongside conspicuous images of other mass-produced domestic products—the toaster,iron, telephone, and pressure cooker—aswell as production lines of trucks and air-plane parts. “The architects of the prefabri-cated house,” it suggested, “must be thestudent of human behavior, the scientist, theeconomist and the industrial engineer.”6 Inthe same issue, the magazine also highlight-ed the Quonset hut in a review of emergencyshelters that encouraged a new approach todesign. In a subsequent December 1946issue, Art & Architecture urged its readers to

“look at the Quonset again with a more ana-lytical attitude and an open mind...let’s stopthinking of the Quonset as a stop-gap emer-gency shelter or as a poor relation to a realhouse.”7 These ideas continued to influenceCharles Eames, Eero Saarinen, and numer-ous other designers, and in 1945 a group ofarchitects were commissioned to design aseries of steel-and-glass houses for the CaseStudy House program initiated by JohnEntenza and Art & Architecture. Althoughthe houses that were designed and built inCalifornia as a part of this program now havethe status of cult objects, at the time theywere viewed as “capable of duplication andin no sense be an ‘individual’ performance.”8

Buckminster Fuller had exploredduplication and the use of prefabricatedmetal components to construct lightweightbuildings prior to the outbreak of World WarII. His design for the Dymaxion House in1927, which proposed a hexagonal-shapedmetal structure suspended from a centralmast that also housed all of the equipmentfor the kitchen, laundry, and servicing of thehouse, advocated the use of factory-mademetal components. His belief in the poten-tial of industry to assist in the production ofhouses was further advanced through hiscollaboration with Emanuel Norquist of theButler Manufacturing Company, the largestgeneral metal sheet fabricator in America at the time. They developed the DymaxionDeployment Unit (1940), a low-cost housethat was designed to capitalize on thepotential of metal and to benefit from theexpertise that the Butler ManufacturingCompany had acquired since its founding in

Brian Carter52

1902. Butler Manufacturing Company’sexperience with the use of corrugated metalsheets and pressed metal panel systems, aswell as the urgent need for wartime housing,inspired designers and industrialists todevise and build a prototype for what wouldbecome the Dymaxion Deployment Unit. Theprototype passed final government inspec-tion in 1941, and three plants were commit-ted to produce 1,000 Dymaxion Units daily,

each at a cost of $1,200. Unfortunately,because the government was unable todivert enough steel from the war effort forthe project, the few hundred units that werebuilt were used by the U.S. Army to housethe 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


Charles and Ray Eames,

Model of Kwikset House

Project (unbuilt), 1951

curved corrugated metal sheets created anenvelope that also served as the structure.

There were numerous other efforts byarchitects and industrialists to utilize thenew advancements that became availableduring World War II. Louis Kahn, I. M. Pei,Richard Neutra, Edward Larabee Barnes,Ralph Rapson, Henry Dreyfuss, and manyothers developed projects that were aimed atcapitalizing on this knowledge by using dif-ferent materials and creating new buildingsystems. Later designs, like the prototype forFuller’s Dymaxion Wichita House, built in1947, were developed in an attempt to usenew materials—predominantly metal—andredirect the expertise and facilities of formerwartime factories and assembly plants. Eachof these schemes—preoccupied by lightness,improvisation, materials, and processes—advanced ideas for prefabricated housing inways that sought to create innovative, mass-produced and inexpensive models for thefuture.

A few years later, Charles Eames wascommissioned by the Kwikset Lock Companyto design another low-cost prefabricatedhouse. It adopted some of the ideas embod-ied in the design of the Quonset hut butexplored the properties of wood rather thanmetal. Envisaged as an assembly of simple,off-the-shelf parts made possible and afford-able by industrialized mass production, thehouse was marketed as a kit. A modular sys-tem was devised to create a single-storyhouse with a large plywood-skin roof sup-ported by curved and laminated plywoodbeams left exposed internally. The openinternal space and the extruded building

section of the Kwikset House recalled theQuonset. The design was clearly founded onthe material studies and fabrication tech-niques that Charles Eames had seen and pio-neered in his collaborations with industrialcompanies and that he and Ray Eamesadvanced in the design for their experimentalhouse at Pacific Palisades, California(1945–49), which made extensive use of read-ily available factory-made components.

In a discussion about the ideas thatshaped midcentury modernism in America,the late design critic and theorist ReynerBanham highlighted a group of designerswho, he suggested, were influenced byCharles Eames, “the Mr. Fixit of the nitty-gritty, not to say grass roots, tradition of theAmericans who ‘got learned mechanickingdown on the farm.’”9 He went on to identifytwo particular people who, in their very dif-ferent ways, epitomized these “down-home,do-it-yourself aspects of America better thanmost others.” Both, Banham claimed, had “asort of hot-rodder attitude to the elements ofbuilding, ingeniously mating off-the-pegcomponents, specials, and off-cuts from othertechnologies.”10 Charles Eames was one ofthese architects. The other was Bruce Goff.

Never formally trained as an architect,Goff underwent military training in RhodeIsland and Mississippi in 1942 and wasassigned to serve on a Navy ConstructionBattalion later that year. While on duty in theAleutians, he designed a series of militaryinstallations—several of which incorporatedQuonset huts. However, it was not until Goffwas transferred to Camp Parks near SanFrancisco in 1944 that he had an opportunity

Brian Carter54

Bruce Goff in Navy

Uniform, ca. 1943

TOP: Bruce Goff, Aerial per-

spective of Camp Parks Chapel

and Library, Dublin, CA, 1945;

BOTTOM: Bruce Goff, Camp

Parks Chapel and Library,

Dublin, CA, 1945

Brian Carter56

Bruce Goff, Elevation

Studies for Stran-Steel

Quonset House project

(unbuilt), 1945–46

Bruce Goff, Perspective of

Church of Jesus Christ of

Latter Day Saints, Cody,

WY, 1946


to ingeniously mate “off-the-peg compo-nents” with “specials and off-cuts” fromother technologies. After first working on aseries of projects involving the renovation ofexisting buildings, he was asked to design anew chapel at Camp Parks; this promptedhim to look again at the Quonset hut.Responding to a set of particular require-ments, he developed a design for the chapelthat connected two “elephant” Quonset huts,each 40' x 100', to form a 200' long enclosure.A third, smaller Quonset housed offices with-in an adjacent connected wing. These largeprefabricated metal structures were integrat-ed together with two thick masonry wallsthat intersected the main vaulted spaces.Both of these walls were hollowed out toform a series of rooms and ventilation ducts;one also incorporated a large concrete cross,supported a canopy, and formed a backdropto a semicircular reflecting pool at the mainentrance. Goff’s design for the Camp ParksChapel utilized the ready-made but, byadding other unique elements, transformed it

to create a building of significance withinthe setting of the camp.

Following his discharge from the Navyin July 1945, Bruce Goff opened an office inBerkeley where he designed a series of otherbuildings that further explored the potentialof the Quonset hut. He adopted the samefamiliar arched form in a house and studiofor himself but sought to exploit the largeopen volume that it created by inserting aseries of mezzanines linked by ramps andbridges. While his design for the Camp ParksChapel had combined the simple metalenclosure with masonry walls, this schemejuxtaposed the precise factory-made compo-nents with several other elements construct-ed of masonry and wood to create a morespatially complex and eclectic ensemble.

Other designs examined the sameprefabricated construction system to createmodest and affordable houses immediatelyafter World War II. Developed for Stran-Steelas well as individual clients, including Mr.and Mrs. G. E. McCabe and L. A. Wilson,

Bruce Goff, Interior of Ruth

Ford Residence, Aurora, IL,

1947–50

Goff planned two- and three-bedroom houses, each around 1,000 square feet, withina single Quonset hut. A second similar adja-cent structure provided a covered parkingarea and an enclosed space that could beused either as a guest room or workshop.Aiming to provide new inexpensive housing,the designer investigated different internalplan configurations and alternative eleva-tional treatments.11 These included the addi-tion of large sculptural fireplaces built inconcrete and masonry as well as elaboratescreen walls, louvered facades, and shadedroofs in response to environmental needs,while site plans proposed layouts for groupsof Quonset houses each with an acre of garden and a shared play area for children.

In 1946 Goff also designed schemesfor the Jesus Christ of Latter Day SaintsChurch in Cody, Wyoming, and the KozakHouse in Sleepy Hollow, California, using thesame set of industrially fabricated compo-nents designed for the Quonset. The KozakHouse was planned for a large site on asouth-facing slope in Marin County, and thetwo schemes that Goff developed exploredthe creation of different forms by reassem-

bling pieces of the Quonset frame. The firstscheme was a long thin house; the subse-quent proposal turned the Stran-Steel ribsand connected them to create a series ofcurving frames that defined a linear spacethat was low on the north side but increasedin height on the south. Enclosed by a tall tilt-ed glazed wall to the south facade, this housewas to be built on a heavy masonry floor andwith louvered panels at both low and highlevels to promote natural ventilation. It was ascheme designed to realize the potential of anow-familiar kit of parts but at the same timeassemble them in a new way and addressparticular environmental concerns.

However, like the earlier, more modestschemes, this project was not built, and itwas only when Goff was commissioned bySam and Ruth Ford in 1947 to design a housein Aurora, Illinois, that he was able to fullydeconstruct the design of the Quonset andreassemble selected pieces of it to make avery different building. The Ford house wasbuilt using a modified assembly of structuralribs combined with an eclectic collection ofmaterials including cedar shingles, coal, andacrylic canopies salvaged from an aircraft.


Bruce Goff, section drawing

for L. A. Wilson house

(unbuilt), CA, 1945

This expanded kit of parts was configured toform a series of domes constructed using twotypes of structural steel ribs—the Quonset 20and 24. The main living spaces were plannedwithin one large dome, arranged around asunken central kitchen under a saucerlikemezzanine cantilevered from a central chimney. Two bedrooms were containedwithin an additional, partially domed struc-ture connected to the space under the centerdome; the entire structure was clad in glassand shingles. The house was completed in1950. Banham applauded the “the wit withwhich elements of other structures and othertechnologies have been deployed”12 andwent on to suggest that “in his ability tomould the off-cuts of standardized America,”Goff was “an even more radical hot-rodderthan Eames.”13 A second house, radically different but also based on the Quonsetstructure, was designed for the Fords by Goffin 1948 but was never built.

The studio that Pierre Chareaudesigned for the American artist RobertMotherwell also adopted and reconfiguredthe Quonset, though in a different way.Chareau, an expatriate European architect,delighted in the beauty of the ordinary—interests that had been clearly demonstratedby his inspired transformation of standardindustrial components in his design for theMaison de Verre in Paris in 1931. Confrontedwith an even wider range of standardizedproducts in the U.S., he adopted them muchmore freely in his design for the MotherwellStudio. Unlike Goff’s design for the FordHouse, Chareau modified the form of theQuonset only minimally and, by combining it with other materials and systems of con-struction, created a large open studio andsmaller workspaces. The scheme married the light openness of the frame structurewith masonry construction, randomly pierced windows, and a large piece of

Brian Carter60

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

glazed wall salvaged from a commercialgreenhouse to create an adhoc and ungainlyhybrid of a building. Planned for a site onLong Island, this twentieth-century primitivehut, completed in 1947, provided living spacewith a kitchen and a free-standing fireplacealongside column-free areas whereMotherwell could work on his increasinglylarge canvases.

In his Essai sur l’architecture of 1753,Marc-Antoine Laugier highlighted the signif-icance of the primitive hut in architectureand noted how it established the first princi-ples of design and building. He suggestedthat “the parts that are essential are thecause of beauty, the parts introduced bynecessity cause every license.”14 Developedfor use in times of war, the Quonset hut was,

of necessity, comprised of the essential parts.Adopted to make a shelter that was easy andquick to build, it captured the spirit of themachine as well as the simplicity and obvi-ousness of the vernacular—qualities thathave continued to inspire architects such as Glen Murcutt, Norman Foster, and Renzo Piano.

More than sixty years after it was firstconstructed, the Quonset hut remains asignificant project. It embodies unlikely com-binations of invention and the elemental, ofpragmatism and of timelessness, and of alightness achieved without actual trans-parency. But perhaps it is most compellingbecause it represents a design that emergedfrom a fundamental demand for mobility andof stasis, war and peace.15


Renzo Piano Building

Workshop, IBM Exhibition

Pavilion, 1982–84

In the background of the ad, on the edge ofthe glacial baseball diamond, lay anotherAmerican icon, one that was also beingspread through the incidental globalizationof World War II. Along with Coke, chewinggum, the Jeep, the Kilroy was Here logo, andany number of other field-deployed accou-trements of the U.S. military campaign, it,too, had become a kind of symbol forAmerican ingenuity, can-do pluck, and ubiq-uitous cultural influence. There, in the ad,low-slung on the horizon, lies an instantlyrecognizable, arch-like and half-barreled,form: the Quonset hut.

While the Quonset hut could claimany number of literal or metaphoric prede-cessors, ranging from the cylindrical “long-houses” of the local Narragansett tribe (inwhose language, coincidentally, Quonsetitself means “long place”1) to the BritishArmy’s Nissen hut, it was, in effect, a histor-ical hybrid, melding the traditional housingforms typically adopted by nomadic peoples

with the latest advances in materials andprefabrication technologies. Its lines wereclean, its facade unadorned, but it spokeless about modernism than wartime contin-gency (which is not to say the two are unre-lated), 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 onehundred thousand Quonset huts made andshipped overseas to the network of coastaldefenses that guarded our shores againstthe possibility of enemy attack.”2

With the Quonset, housing was aweapon. An September 1946 advertisementfor Kimberly-Clark (makers of Kimsul, aninsulation used in Quonsets) shows a“recently declassified” photo of a vast collec-tion of sleek Quonsets; the accompanyingtext states: “A massive Naval installation onNew Guinea gives a better idea of theQuonset’s contribution to the winning of thewar.” It was a kind of heroic icon—“A new

Chapter 4 After the War: Quonset Huts and

Their Integration Into Daily American Life

Tom Vanderbilt

In a Coca-Cola advertisement from 1943, a group of soldiers are depictedenjoying an impromptu baseball game at a remote Alaskan militaryencampment. Several are shown cheerfully hoisting Cokes, renderedinstantly legible by its iconically ribbed, green glass bottle. “From Atlantato the Seven Seas,” declares the ad text, “Coca-Cola has become the highsign between kindly minded strangers, the symbol of a friendlier way of living.” Coke, the ad implied, was home in a bottle. “The pause thatrefreshes works as well in the Yukon as it does in Youngstown.”

Coca-Cola advertisement, 1943

63

Jeep in the military field,” as a Stran-Steel (adivision of the Great Lakes Steel Corporation)ad put it, part of the same massive industrialcomplex that was churning out bombers andmunitions.3 Its appearance on some PacificAtoll represented not just an advance oftroops, but a virtual outpost of America, a

home away from home, a Coca-Cola of thelandscape. In an age prior to McDonald’s or the corporate Holiday Inn, the Quonsets,as they sprang up, arranged in miniatureInstant Cities—“the world’s largest housingproject,” as another Stran-Steel ad4 went—from the Aleutians to the Ardennes, prom-ised standardization and efficiency, the soon-to-be buzzwords of the commodifiedAmerican landscape. They were standard-bearers of sorts, although of exactly what ithad yet to be seen. As the design historianThomas Hine writes: “As American forcesmoved island by island across the Pacific,[the Seabees] proved to be the most giftedscroungers of all . . . There was something joyous in the surprising things they did withoil drums and Quonset huts that seemedthen to open the door to industrial materialsand forms used in unexpected ways.”5

War, despite its overwhelming air ofdestructiveness, is also a creative force. Thevery process of waging war requires, for eachage, new design solutions, new products.That so many useful products and technolo-gies are bred from war is not only a conse-quence of the increased expenditures forresearch and development in such a period—the utter massing of talent and assets towardan overarching goal of victory—but also acondition of the very lack of resources avail-able—whether time, money, or materials. For a designer such as Charles Eames, theconstraints of the war represented an oppor-tunity: to look again at commonly acceptedobjects, to find new ways of doing thingswhen previous materials and methods were unavailable. The Quonset, indeed,

Tom Vanderbilt64

Stran-Steel advertises the

new “Jeep,” Pencil Points,

1943

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

was created in the spirit of the Eamesiandeclaration, “design should bring the most ofthe best to the greatest number of people forthe least,” to which only need be added thecaveat: and do it in three months or less.

War, as the landscape historian J. B.Jackson once noted, also presents its ownlandscape; or, rather, “the military landscapeand military society are . . . both in essenceintensified versions of the peacetime land-scape, intensified and vitalized by one over-riding purpose.” The temporary militaryencampment could be as real a landscape asa city park, a “place where men and environ-ment were in harmony with one another andwhere an overall design was manifest inevery detail.”6 The Quonset hut expressedperfectly the logic of this landscape: speed,economy, efficiency. And yet the mobilizationof World War II represented for America notonly a mass deployment of troops and equip-ment, but a symbiotic mobilization of thehome front as well, a reordering of thedomestic landscape that uprooted hundredsof thousands of workers and created vast

overnight industrial complexes that would,for the most part, be shuttered once the wardrew to a close. The Quonset was a subtlesymbol of this reordering: it was, in essence,performing double duty, housing both sol-diers abroad and relocated workers and mili-tary personnel at home.

It is interesting to note, then, that asearly as 1943—when the end of the war was not easily foreseeable—the Stran-Steel Division of the Great Lakes SteelCorporation, the manufacturers of theQuonset, were already positing the potentialrole of the Quonset in the postwar world.“There is little doubt that the high point ofindustrial efficiency achieved during thesewar years will prove an important holdoverin the days of peace,” read the ad for Stran-Steel in the December 1943 issue of thearchitectural journal Pencil Points. “Servingthe needs of progressive industrial design-ers,” ran another Stran-Steel ad, appearing a year later in Pencil Points. In a series ofadvertisements in the February 1944 issue ofArchitectural Record, Stran-Steel unveiledits most ambitious pitch for a place in thepostwar world. Having helped to win thewar with its Quonset huts, the ads implied,Stran-Steel’s steel framing systems wouldsimilarly help win the peace. SupportingStran-Steel was nothing short of, as the adput it, a “Responsibility for Democracy.”“What means will be taken to accomplishslum clearance in the post-war world havenot yet been determined,” the ad text read, below a before-and-after photo thatcontrasted dingy brick row houses and factories against a series of gleaming steel-

Tom Vanderbilt66

Base Hospital #3, Espiritu

Santo, South Pacific,

April 22, 1943

CLOCKWISE FROM

TOP LEFT: Stran-Steel

advertisement, New

Pencil Points, 1943;

Stran-Steel advertise-

ment, Pencil Points,

1944; Stran-Steel adver-

tisement, Architectural

Record, 1944; Stran-

Steel advertisement,

Architectural Record,

1944

and-glass boxes (with attached Quonsetgreenhouses) set amidst swaths of vegeta-tion—the embodiment of Frank LloydWright’s Radiant Cities.7 “Industry goesrural,” went another ad, showing a crispQuonset factory in some presumptive EdgeCity, “the engineering know-how that gavethe armed forces their ubiquitous ‘QuonsetHut’ and other Stran-Steel utility buildingswill be applied to the varied needs of indus-trial development.”8

Great Lakes Steel, like many otherwar contractors, was no doubt attempting tosecure a foothold in the postwar world byadapting its products to peacetime use. Butits ads, present well before the end of thewar, speak to a larger, anticipatory renderingof just what the postwar world would looklike—a kind of “premature modernism” thatwas played out primarily in museum exhibi-tions and the pages of architectural journals.Just as European modernist architectsviewed the Second World War as a certainforce of “creative destruction” that wouldsweep away the dead hand of the past andclear the way for tomorrow’s utopian cities,the seeming promise of Allied victory in thewar, coupled with the massive expansion ofproductive capacity and unprecedentedadvances in technology, augured an incipientsense of a postwar America brimming withpromise and vitality.

A preeminent question was housing.It was expected that some twelve millionmen would return to private life—and anynumber of men and women would be relo-cated once their war-manufacturing employ-ment ended. Millions of new homes would

be required in the U.S. to accommodatethem. The end of the war brought a curioussituation to America: a sense of wild opti-mism, on the one hand, and the economicrealities of materials shortages, a housingcrunch, and a flooded employment market,on the other.

At the end of World War II the UnitedStates came face to face with an acute hous-ing shortage that rivaled the demands of thewar itself. The housing industry, still reelingfrom the Great Depression, had been furtherdiminished by a wartime shortage of materi-als and labor. When coupled with a high rateof wartime marriages, a trend of migrationfrom rural areas to urban areas, and a popu-lation increase of eight million in five years,housing starts would consistently lag behindthe need for housing as it had every yearsince 1932. Furthermore, unions representingbuilding trades inadvertently compoundedthe problem by maintaining excessively longapprenticeships and by imposing “makework” rules that decreased efficiency andadded hours to extend the duration of scarcejobs. Their actions, in part, slowed construc-tion and inflated costs.9

When veterans returned home by thehundred thousands, there was no place forthem to live. As a result, an estimated onemillion families were forced to double upwith other families in homes and apartmentsacross the nation. Before the end of 1946,that estimate would triple10—a figuregreater than that of all the families in NewYork, Chicago, and Philadelphia combined.Other families would resort to any structurethat could be made livable. At Devil’s Lake,

Tom Vanderbilt68

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

North Dakota, an army veteran purchased a barrel-shaped hamburger stand and joyfullyconverted it into a two-story home. InAnchorage, Alaska, a 6' x 9' beer van wasconverted into a makeshift apartment andrented to families for $30 a month.11 In SanFrancisco, a family of four happily took overa renovated mortuary. A classified advertise-ment in an Omaha newspaper read: “Bigicebox 7x17 inside. Could be fixed up to live in.”12

Desperate times obviously called fordesperate measures. In the postwar years, itwas not uncommon for apartment hunters tovisit funeral parlors in hopes of findingaddresses of recently vacated apartments.Families could also try their local HousingTout who for $50 would supply tips on avail-able housing. And as a last resort, whenhotels were filled, all-night establishmentssuch as Turkish baths could suffice for anight’s stay.13

To prevent the situation from worsen-ing, President Roosevelt called upon Wilson

W. Wyatt to take on the role of national-housing expeditor. Five weeks after accept-ing the position, Wyatt presented the presi-dent with a report estimating that 3.5 mil-lion homes were needed in 1946.14 To fillthe gap, he set a goal of 2.7 million housingstarts by the end of 1947. In 1924, the besthome-building year to date, only 937,000had been constructed. Although it was con-ceivable for the U.S. to finance and buildapproximately 1.26 million homes per year,to have done so would have required a com-plete overhaul of the building industry. AsLife magazine pointed out, “the averageU.S. house, except for certain componentslike the heating and electrical system, is theonly major commodity largely unaffected bythe industrial revolution. To a great extent itis built now as it was built in 1700—byhand, outdoors, slowly, laboriously and inefficiently.”15

This was the brief window forAmerican modernism, a desire, driven byeconomic necessity, to find new ways ofdoing things with new materials, newdesigns, and new technologies. But just whatphysical shape this would take was open toquestion. In 1945, a Saturday Evening Postpoll revealed that only 14 percent of the pop-ulation wanted to live an apartment, or a“used house.”16 As one historian put it, “Thepostwar buyers wanted a new house, withmodern floor plan, up-to-date materials, andthe latest appliances.”17 The postwar homebecame an object of collective desire andspeculation. As Thomas Hine wrote, therewere some assumptions about what shape itwould take:

Tom Vanderbilt70

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.

After the War71

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 occa-

sional restored eighteenth-century

Connecticut farmhouse or hundred-

year-old barn with modern insides,

older houses virtually disappeared

from home and decorating maga-

zines until well into the 1960s.18

But just how adventurous would theAmerican consumer be in this quest for“modern living,” and what means would theyhave to achieve it? Those visionary architectswho saw in airplane factories a way to massproduce houses simply assumed that theoverwhelming desire for the new, aided bythe industrial dynamism of an economytuned to a wartime hum, would enable thoseassembly lines to simply switch from arma-ments to habitation. This, after all, wasAmerica, land of automation and air condi-tioning, which had lured European mod-ernists with its shimmering technologicalfrontiers. 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 tomachines 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 atairplanes and automobiles, but that did not

necessarily mean they wanted to live inthem. Zoning regulations often preemptedattempts to build novel housing forms. Andnot all architects embraced such modernconcepts as prefabrication. As the architec-tural historian Arthur Pulos put it, “Althoughmass production was being welcomed inevery other realm, the thought of housesrolling off production lines was too much formost architects.”20

It was into this rather muddled, nas-cent scene that the Quonset hut, the objectof our study and an almost accidental agentof modern architecture, entered the domesticlandscape en masse, demobilized with thetroops and looking for a postwar occupation.Oddly enough, it seemed to straddle bothends of the contradictory picture: it was seenas a stop-gap means to manage the logisticalconundrum of housing the returning soldiers;it also, if its marketing is to be believed, wasa harbinger of high-tech, postwar modernism—Quonset hut advertising brims with wordslike “progressive,” “flexible,” and “efficient.”The idea of using Quonsets as housing ina nonmilitary setting had been raised mid-way through the war and, by its conclusion,had escalated into a steady drumbeat. AFebruary 1944 article in Architectural Forum,titled “Hutments to Housing,” postulated anumber of civilian uses for Quonsets (e.g.,garages, greenhouses), noting: “Such a struc-ture could be erected by the owner himself,with the help of his neighbors, particularlyif they all had military experience settingup huts.”

And, more often than not, it seems,they did have experience. For veterans most

Tom Vanderbilt72

acutely felt the effects of the housing short-age when they returned and, under a federalPublic Housing Authority program, Quonsetsettlements were established in any numberof communities, from New York City’sManhattan Beach to Los Angeles’ RodgerYoung Village. In July 1946, a newspaperaccount noted that when 811 surplusQuonset huts were to go on sale at PortHueneme; more than a thousand veteranscamped out, some for three days, in order tobuy “their little Quonsets [for $295] andsweat out the housing squeeze for a year or two.”21

In Los Angeles, where nearly 200,000wartime industrial workers had lost their jobsby 1945, and nearly 100,000 returning veter-ans loomed on the horizon, the city housingauthority, in 1946, created the RodgerYoung22 Village, described as “the largestand first temporary veterans’ housing projectin the nation.”23 On some 112 acres of formerNational Guard airstrip land in Griffith Park,the village, consisting of 750 corrugated

Quonsets, was erected in April 1946, justsixty days after the funds were approved.24

With each containing two units, nearly 1,500veterans’ families—some 5,000 people—werehoused in what virtually became anovernight community with a medical center,chapel, library, even a malt shop. As DanaCuff writes in The Provisional City, althoughthe layout of this Quonset village was over-seen by architects, there was not necessarilya bold architectural ambition at stake inplaces 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 effi-

ciency, technological advance,

material resourcefulness, and

alacrity counted for more than tra-

ditional associations of home. Not

LEFT: “Freedom Train” at

Rodger Young Village, 1945;

RIGHT: Row of Quonset

homes at Rodger Young

Village, 1945

that residents liked the temporary

trailers they might be lucky enough

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 Aleutiansdescribed it in a Kimberly-Clark ad: “Whenwe first arrived we slept in tents. With thetemperature around 10 degrees below, andthe wind about 130 knots, it was prettytough. Finally we got some Quonset huts and it was like moving into a mansion. They were snug and warm.” With the samespirit of frontier self-sufficiency they hademployed in their far-flung Quonset homes,veterans remobilized in places like RodgerYoung Village, drawing their Quonsetsaround the campfire of a temporary commu-nity. As one magazine account described thecommunity:

The Quonset huts out on the rim of

the city in Griffith Park are no man-

sions. 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

most of the families they are a

haven and a shelter.26

Sometimes Quonset huts were calledin for housing shortages of a different sort.Always the hut of crisis, Quonset huts wereused to house those made homeless by natu-ral and other disasters, such as the TexasCity fire in 1947. The fire triggered theGrandcamp explosion, the worst industrialdisaster in the U.S. resulting in, until 2001,the largest number of industrial-accident-related casualties in American history. One-third of Monsanto’s (the site of theGrandcamp disaster) homes were con-demned, leaving 2,000 persons homeless andexacerbating the already-serious postwarhousing shortages.27 Another similar situa-tion took place in the small Ohio town ofScio, which was also destroyed by fire in1947, taking out the town’s lone industry, apottery plant, and leaving 800 of its 1,200people jobless. But a Quonset hut, the onebuilding in the town that had not burneddown, was what convinced one local resi-dent that Quonsets were what should beused to rebuild the town. Three hundredworkers toiled through a rainy night to rig upemergency wiring so that reconstruction ofthe town could go forward on a 24-hourbasis. Quonset huts were rushed to Scio byspecial trains, and some were even flown inby air. Men and women formed constructioncrews to erect the Quonset huts and thetown was saved. Its main plant was rebuiltand residents, again, had shelter.28

In the architectural press, the Quonsethut was seized upon not only as an expedient

After the War73

Tom Vanderbilt74

TOP: John Campbell and Worley K. Wong Architects, Felton cabin, Fallen Leaf Lake,

CA, ca. 1946; BOTTOM: Stran-Steel advertisement, Saturday Evening Post, 1948

John Campbell and Worley K. Wong Architects, Felton cabin, Fallen

Leaf Lake, CA, ca. 1946

Tom Vanderbilt76

solution to the housing shortage, but for thesame kinds of clever prefabrication andrational use of materials praised in suchefforts as the Case Study Houses. “Let’s lookat the Quonset again with a more analyticalattitude and an open mind,” counseled Artand Architecture in December 1946, “Let’sstop thinking of the Quonset as a stop-gapemergency shelter or as a poor relation to areal house.” The magazine showed a contem-porary home, in Fallen Leaf Lake, California,that had been created out of a convertedQuonset. “Adapt the Quonset to its site andthe climatic needs. Don’t start out with arestricted point of view. Think of it in terms offullest use. It can be adapted to nearly any

site.” Aesthetically, the best choice for theQuonset was, essentially, to leave it as is.“Keep the form simple. Avoid dormers withorthodox roofs, period balustrades, unrelatedforms. The Quonset can be accented withtrellises.”29 The New York Times, in a 1947article titled “Planting for the TemporaryHome,” wrote: “Temporary housing like theQuonset huts to be seen near New York Cityhas a bare look that fairly cries out for somekind of planting. Using just annual flowers,which are quick to grow and abundant tobloom . . . transformations can be made in theappearance of these small properties.”30

Others were less boosterish, but stillintrigued by the flexibility of the Quonset.

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

After the War77

“House Beautiful doesn’t consider a Quonsetan ideal house,” wrote the magazine in itsSeptember 1946 issue, “but it’s available,and is one practical answer to an acutehousing need, if you have land zoned to permit such an unconventional structure.The home shown here, made from an Armyprefab unit of wood, similar in design to themetal Quonset, suggests how a Quonsetcould be made homelike and livable.”31

Where Art and Architecture advised readersto emphasize the form of the Quonset itself,House Beautiful viewed the Quonset more asa template out of which to create one’s ownstatement: “Quonsets, despite their assem-bly-line nature, lend themselves to variation.

The above [pictured Quonset], used as avacation house near Mansfield, Ohio, omit-ted the usual corrugated steel sheetings onone end wall, substituted novelty logsiding.”32

A little log cabin was far from whatGreat Lakes Steel had in mind in its barrageof Quonset advertising immediately after thewar. The ads did stress the flexibility of theQuonset: “Dress it up . . . .Or use it straight,”went one slogan, showing a standard Quonsetcontrasted with one that had been given anopen, glass-paneled facade. But more subtly,and more profoundly, the ads suggested thatthere was something inherently valid and pro-ductive in the structure’s shape:

Tom Vanderbilt80

LEFT: Stran-Steel adver-

tisement, Country

Gentleman, 1954

RIGHT: Stran-Steel

advertisement, Saturday

Evening Post, 1949

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: TheStory of a Building That Gave America a NewStandard of Quality Building Values, GreatLakes extols its part in meeting the postwarbuilding shortage, declaring “the clean linesof the Quonset have won nationwide accept-ance, and with a minimum of care the basicQuonset will maintain its good appearancealmost indefinitely.” Illustrating the brochureare a number of buildings that have beenfashioned from Quonsets, from the RazorbackCafeteria to a Houston multiple-dwelling unitframed with Stran-Steel. “This gay hillsideretreat was once a basic Quonset 20,” thebrochure notes, declaring that “America hasfound the answer to its building needs.”34

The Quonset was positioned less as abuilding than as an instrument of modern-ization, a machine not just for living but forshopping, banking, and farming. “The farmbuilding of today has become a ‘workingtool’ in the operation of the farm unit,” stateda 1947 Stran-Steel ad. “In order to functionproperly for the farmer, it must be engineeredto meet his needs for greater efficiency and

reduced labor.” Not surprisingly, the Quonsetwas the best working tool. “Cows feed them-selves on this modern Quonset dairy farm,”trumpeted a Stran-Steel ad in the September1954 issue of Country Gentleman. “Increasedmilk production is the direct result of ourQuonset loafing barn.” In a Saturday EveningPost advertisement from September 18, 1948,a Stan-Steel ad depicted the Poier MotorsChevrolet and Oldsmobile Dealership inSnohomish, Washington. The gently sweep-ing contours of the roofline of a series ofQuonsets strung together, fronted with glass,matched the aerodynamic styling of the newcar models parked outside: “These stream-lined buildings strike the right note in archi-tectural design . . . just as the sleek new carson salesroom floors strike the right note inautomotive design.”

Given the perceived modernity of theQuonset, it was perhaps no surprise thatwhen businessman Clarence Saunders(founder of the Piggly-Wiggly grocery chain)opened the Keedoozle, his “push-button” grocery store in Memphis, Tennessee, thebuilding of choice was a Quonset. A 1949Stran-Steel advertisement shows a womanstaring in wonder as groceries are whiskeddown a conveyor belt, as patrons are showngaily exiting down a swooping ramp. Again,the ad copy brimmed with the most forward-looking language of the day: “Both representadvancements in their respective fields. Bothare efficient, time and labor saving, economi-cal. And both the Keedoozle and the Quonsethave the modern functional beauty, the pur-poseful arrangement that symbolizes today’sarchitecture . . . today’s business . . . today’s

After the War81

CLOCKWISE FROM

TOP LEFT: Stran-


Saturday Evening

Post, 1949; Stran-


Saturday Evening

Post, 1948; Stran-


Saturday Evening

Post, 1947;

OPPOSITE: Stran-

Steel Advertisement,

Saturday Evening

Post, 1948

Tom Vanderbilt84

progress.” No more cluttered corner gro-cery—all that inefficiency was swept awayin the streamlined, corrugated confines ofthe Quonset.

The Quonset was arguably the quin-tessence of the postwar American landscape,a building-in-a-box that arrived, just in time,to meet the needs of a society that was eagerto get back on track. As National BuildingMuseum curator David Chase described it,the Quonset represented “a fabulous exam-ple of American ingenuity and can-do spiritand productive power. It’s an example ofwhat this nation can achieve when it gets itsducks in a row.”35 House Beautiful, in 1953,would counsel its readers (then on the cuspof the “long 1950s” economic boom): “Youwill have a greater chance to be yourselfthan any people in the history ofcivilization.”36

But in the mid-to-late 1940s, theAmerican dream still had to surmount aflooded labor market and a postwar materialsshortage. And so just as the Quonset hadsprung up in distant military outposts assome harbinger of victory, it also ranged outacross the domestic scene as the advanceguard of a culture in the making. “The amaz-ing versatility of Quonsets was first shown inWorld War II,” went one 1950 Stran-Steel ad,“After V-J Day their fast erection and econo-my of material helped speed the nation’squick return to peacetime prosperity.” Thecircumstances in which the Quonsetemerged are captured most memorably inthe 1947 film The Best Years of Our Lives—the first film to deal with the end of the warand the strains of readjustment for returning

veterans. In one scene, former Air Forcebombardier Fred Derry is strolling among adesert “bone yard” of former planes, nowarrayed in endless rows, ready to besalvaged. Climbing into a plane, Derrybegins to relive his combat experiences.After the yard boss commands him downfrom the plane, Derry, who has had troublefinding work, learns that the planes arebeing converted to “prefabricated housing”and is subsequently hired. In this version ofswords into plowshares, the products of thewartime productive apparatus are beatendown into the armaments of a new struggle:the remaking of domestic America. In thismoment, as with America itself, there was anentwined sense of haunting remembranceand industrious optimism, undershot with asense of temporal urgency.

Like the frontier shacks of the nine-teenth-century American westward expan-sion, Quonsets marked the newly evolvingfrontier of the postwar suburban spread.Quonsets, known a few years earlier only astemporary housing for soldiers, could containany incipient expression of the postwardream, from dancehall to dining room. “Nowthat they are on the market,” The New Yorkerwrote in 1946, “enterprising civilians oughtto be able to think of many other uses, some of them sensible.”37 “Quonset hutswere becoming as familiar a part of the American landscape as they had been inNewfoundland or Guam,” observed HouseBeautiful in 1946.

The Quonset form rippled throughoutpostwar visual culture. It no longer neededexplaining; 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

On television shows like Gomer Pyle, USMC,the action played out on a stage set domi-nated by the horizontal lines and half-circleforms of the Quonset. The Marx ToyCompany, creator of the Yo-Yo, released a yellow “Construction Office” Quonset toy.Sherwin Williams, playing to the evolvingmarket, developed, in conjunction withStran-Steel, a special paint called Quon-Kote,whose can was festooned with rows ofQuonsets. “Quon-Kote dresses up yourQuonset, gives it a trim, well-kept look thatis an important business asset.” One can

even find a lasting example of the Quonsetinfluence, oddly enough, in an engineeringtextbook, where the Quonset was picturedwith a halo of arrows and numbers. The typi-cal exercise posited the situation thus: “Youare to design Quonset huts for a militarybase in the Mideast. The design windspeedis 100 ft/s.” Problem-solving questionsincluded, “What is the net drag force actingon the Quonset hut?”38

The Quonset seemed ubiquitous inany sector of life; indeed, it even played apart as ideal fallout shelters in proving-grounds tests and elsewhere (e.g., in PalmBeach, Florida, a buried Quonset-type struc-ture served as a temporary shelter for thevacation home of President Kennedy) aspostwar peace and optimism were quicklyovershadowed by the threat of atomic war.Indeed, Quonsetlike structures, designed byentrepreneurs like Nebraska’s Walt Behlen,were even submitted to test atomic explo-sions at the proving grounds in Nevada. Civildefense officials were intrigued by the dome-like profile for the same reasons as engi-neers—the way the wind, or the force of anatomic blast, moved across its surface.

On college campuses, where enroll-ment had soared as returning veterans tookadvantage of the GI Bill, Quonsets mush-roomed as temporary classrooms and studenthousing. “It was a lifesaver for all of usbecause housing prices in New Haven wereout of sight,” one veteran told YankeeMagazine, “We had to wait three semestersto get a Quonset hut.”39 In Kalamazoo,Indiana, the Quonset community wasreferred to as a “genteel slum”—one veteran

Tom Vanderbilt86

Quon-Kote advertise-

ment, Great Lakes Steel

Corporation, Saturday

Evening Post, 1949

remembered the walls being so thin he couldhear his neighbor asking for bread. AnotherQuonset resident recalled the instant neigh-borly bonhomie that seemed to arrive withthe huts: “We enjoyed our neighbors, hadpeople to dinner and sherry parties, and a lotof drop-in visitors from the campus and fromthe neighboring college where I was stillteaching . . . We tackled the insufficiencieswith enthusiasm.”40 Bernard Malamud wassaid to have written a number of his shortstories in a Quonset at Oregon StateUniversity in 1948. The writer LewisLapham’s recollections of a job interviewwith the Central Intelligence Agency a yearout of college involved a Quonset: “The inter-view took place in one of the Quonset hutsnear the Lincoln Memorial that had servedas the Agency’s temporary headquarters during World War II. The military design of abuilding hastily assembled for an urgent purpose imparted an air of understated glory,an effect consciously reflected in the studiedcarelessness of the young men asking thequestions.”41

But Quonsets were hardly limited tocampus. Their geography and end-use wasas varied as the Quonsets themselves werestandardized. In Nashville, Tennessee, thelegendary producer Owen Bradley built hisfirst studio in a surplus Quonset hut. To offset the poor acoustics of a half-circlebuilding, Bradley used inexpensive soundabsorption materials. This Quonset-imposeddeformity resulted in a major bump in theupper middle range that added a boost ofwhat producers call “presence” and helpedcreate the distinctive aural effect that would

After the War87

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

Tom Vanderbilt88

After the War89

Stran-Steel brochure, 1948;

FOLLOWING PAGE: Stran-

Steel Advertisement,

Saturday Evening Post,

1947; PAGE 91: Stran-Steel

brochures, ca. 1950; PAGE

91 TOP LEFT: Stran-Steel

Advertisement, Country

Gentlemen, 1946

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, heinstructed engineers to design it with thesame acoustics as his old Quonset studio.Today, a small segment of curved Quonsetroofline juts out from Sony’s Nashvilleoffices, which were built around the originalQuonset.

In Bowling Green, Kentucky, a localband named Joe Marshall and his Rovin’Ramblers built, in 1946, a music venuedubbed the Quonset Auditorium. The band,looking to replace a previous venue calledthe Armory, turned to Quonsets because, asone band member put it, “they were prefabbuildings, you could put them up quick.”42

Over the years, the Quonset Auditoriumplayed host to such musical performers asJames Brown and Little Richard, while, in alater incarnation as a professional wrestlingvenue, it was visited by Gorgeous Georgeand Andre the Giant. Like many Quonsetprojects, it received some window-dressing: a false front of bricks and glass curved in anArt Moderne style.43 It also had an unfortu-nate architectural modification that wasmore social in nature: separate entrances forwhite and African-American patrons. As ithappens, the legendary disc jockey WolfmanJack worked in the 1960s in a nonsegregatednightclub called the Tub, in Shreveport,Louisiana, that was also housed in aQuonset. The Quonset, a ramshackle build-ing on the edge of town, was the perfectvenue for the fledgling rock-and-roll style,which had not yet attained the kind ofstature or respectability afforded to more

mainstream theatrical engagements. Just asthe Quonsets themselves were an example ofthe design ingenuity and novelty—the boldreenvisioning of new materials in newways—unleashed during the war; rock androll, too, represented an urgent refashioningof forms, and of society.

In 1948, a young political neophytenamed Gerald Ford set up his congressionalcampaign headquarters in a Quonset (embla-zoned with his portrait) in Grand Rapids,Michigan. It is not clear whether Ford wastrying to tap into postwar patriotism byadopting the “fighting Quonset”—a replica ofwhich sits in a museum dedicated to hislife—but it is clear that the Quonset, with itsrelatively low cost and easy assembly, wasthe ideal vehicle for start-up ventures of allsorts. “Do you want to start—or expand—abusiness? Are you holding back because ofhigh building costs and long buildingdelays?” asked Great Lakes Steel.44

Foreshadowing Bill Gates’ garage founding

After the War93

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 BradfordShockley, in 1955, set up his fledgling andpioneering semiconductor company—the cre-ative spark that ignited what would becomeSilicon Valley—in a Quonset in California,near Palo Alto. In 1947, a food companysalesman named Jeno Paulucci opened hisnovel business—what would become theChinese food giant Chun-King—in a Quonsetnear Duluth, Minnesota. Great Lakes activelypitched such uses: “You’re in business Fasterand for Less money with a Quonset.”

Quonsets were giving an instantshape to postwar economic ambition. But notall Quonset projects were intended to betemporary or motivated by short-term logis-tics. A number of renowned architects turnedto the Quonset, inspired by modernism’sembrace of new materials and innovativebuilding methods. The Oklahoma City archi-tect Bruce Goff, while serving in the Navy’sSeabees during World War II, first came tonational attention with his Quonset chapelat Camp Parks, California. While not occlud-

ing the Quonset form, Goff used a number ofarchitectural effects to both heighten anddownplay the Quonset’s distinctive geomet-ric shapes. The blank facade was replacedwith a blue-tinted glass wall, broken up byvertical steel columns. Goff used masonrywalls to intersect the Quonset and intro-duced light through a slot notched at theapex of the roof.

In East Hampton, Long Island, theartist Robert Motherwell turned to the archi-tect Pierre Chareau for a house that AlastairGordon describes as “an improvisation con-jured up from the most readily availablematerials of the period.”45 Motherwell pur-chased a pair of Quonsets for $3,000—oneintended as a residence and the other as astudio. Despite the low-cost materials andpresumed ease-of-use of the Quonsets, costson the building site ranged well above esti-mates. “I wasn’t trying to make a manifesto,”Motherwell said, “I was just trying to makesomething that suited me.”46 Still, the use ofa structure associated with military encamp-ments proved revolutionary in a domesticsetting. “The house brought Modernism tothe Hamptons,” noted architectural historianRosanna Liebman. “It was a marriage of theneeds of the moment—a tight budget and ascarcity of building materialism—and thedesire to do something daring with industrialmaterials.”

Other Quonset adaptations, by lessrenowned architects, flitted throughout thepages of architectural magazines—a bankhere, a hillside house there. In a Quonsetadaptation in Knoxville, Tennessee, the mag-azine Architectural Forum hinted at a kind of

Tom Vanderbilt94

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

essential Americanness at work: “A constantfactor in American life is the Yankee tinker,who hooks up a pump motor to cartwheels tomove himself around, who makes lightingfixtures out of pie tins or furniture out of plowhandles. Architect Fitzgibbon used this kindof skill in producing his oddly graceful housein the form of a cascading doubleQuonset.”47 The Quonset, in this analysis,was something akin to the American grainelevator, and its spirit of ingenuity, that had so captivated European modernists like Le Corbusier. James Jackson Jarvis, anineteenth-century observer of the grain elevator, wrote:

The American, while adhering

closely to his utilitarian and eco-

nomical 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-

motives, and some of his machin-

ery and tools combine that equilib-

rium of lines, proportions, and

masses, which is among the funda-

mental causes of abstract beauty.48

Goff married the kind of wartime tech-nological imperative that had produced theQuonset with the Yankee tinker tradition inhis 1948 Ford House in Aurora, Illinois.Described by Architectural Forum in April1951 as a “fine spangling lustrous toy” and a“Hollywood fantasy,” the structure was sup-ported by a series of Quonset ribs freed fromtheir half-barrel orientation and refashionedas a series of circular extensions radiatingfrom a central mast. And yet there wasanother force underlying Goff’s desire toreconfigure the Quonset form: the client’sdislike of the Quonset. In a letter to Goff,Ruth Van Sickle Ford wrote: “I am sorry I feelas I do about quansit [sic] huts, but too I feelthey are not your design. They were some-thing conceived for war time living and gives

Bruce Goff, Ruth Ford

Residence, Aurora, IL,

1947–50; OPPOSITE: Bruce

Goff, Interior of Ruth Ford

Residence

Tom Vanderbilt96

[sic] me this same feeling as a prefabricatedhouse does . . . I have a terrible aversion tothat half tubular shape which is like a halfpiece of pipe chopped off in convenientlengths.”49 As architectural historian JeffreyCook noted, Goff, in his experimentation withthe Quonset form, created a “counterpoint to

what would otherwise be a ruthless enclo-sure” and made “architecture out of Quonsethuts, one of the most efficient and most hatedprefab systems of the twentieth century.”50

The client’s averment of the Quonsetform was not an isolated sentiment.Architecturally, there was a long-standingslight against such structures, as epitomizedby the critic Nikolaus Pevsner’s prounounce-ment: “A bicycle shed is a building; LincolnCathedral is a piece of architecture.”

Popularly, as well, there were biasesagainst the Quonset. Indeed, to the thou-sands of veterans forced to occupy the sameform of prefab housing they had enduredduring the war, or to those who had occupiedthem as temporary wartime housing, theQuonset represented a familiar way of life,but also the American dream deferred. Thepersistence of Quonsets at campuses into the 1960s was seen as a source of embar-rassment, not pride. The New York Timesreported in 1965 on the survival of Quonsetswithin the State University of New York system: “World War II veterans probably feelat home in such buildings, but young fresh-man are shocked when they first see them.”The article quoted a student: “They are acampus joke.” At the Rodger Young Village inLos Angeles, as historian Cuff noted, “a com-mon goal of the residents was to stay longenough to pay off debts and save $500 for adown payment on a house.”51

The Great Lakes Steel Company, how-ever, thought there was nothing wrong withthat first house being a Quonset. TheQuonset 20—with 960 square feet of livingspace, was promoted at the end of the war

Tom Vanderbilt98

Stran-Steel advertisement,

Architectural Record, 1947

as a housing solution; Waldvogel Brothers inNew York sold the 20 for $1,048, plus ship-ping. Design refinements were made to stan-dard Quonsets, and more domesticallyfriendly huts entered the marketplace. Stran-Steel’s “Brighton” model home, billed not asa Quonset but as a “Stran-Steel Arch-RibHome,” was “eligible structurally for FHAmortgage insurance . . . Never before have youbeen able to design homes that are so trulymodern in the best sense . . . and see thembuilt for $4,000 to $6,000!”52

And yet despite their modern materi-als and streamlined forms, consumers didnot gravitate in significant numbers towardthe Quonset. Instead, public desire shiftedtowards places like William Levitt’s new,eponymous suburban development, which,ironically, was inspired by the same wartime

drive for prefabrication and mass assemblythat had produced the Quonset. As Jan Cohnnotes in her study of American housing, ThePalace or the Poorhouse, “William Levitt’s useof modern technology made Levittown, butmodern technology strikes no chords of tradi-tion and association. Therefore, in the stylingof Levitt’s houses, contemporary technologywas masked with imagery that served up theAmerican idea of home.”53 Levittown wasmodernism with a neocolonial face: while ittoo may have been in effect a mass mobiliza-tion of instant housing, erected as quickly assome Aleutian base during the war, itsmetaphoric intent was not to dazzle the eyewith space-age forms but to impart a senseof instant tradition and permanence, twoqualities that no doubt appealed to thosehaving just come through the dislocations of

After the War99

Alan Dunn, Quonset

hut comic, ca. 1947

Tom Vanderbilt100

wartime. A photograph of a Quonset home atRodger Young Village hints at the psychicdiscomfort some had with the huts: the inte-rior features lace curtains on the windows(despite the curved walls) and a child play-ing with a dollhouse of the most traditionalvariety. A 1947 cartoon showing a storemarked Quonset Hut Furniture Companythat featured furniture with curved backsillustrated the stylistic gap between the modern form of the Quonset and blocky andsquare traditional home furnishings, whichwere hardly compatible with “life in the half shell.”54

There were those brave pioneers,however, for whom Quonsets represented ahousing choice that, as Robert Venturi oncesaid of the suburban strip, was “almost allright.” One California Quonset resident, noting that the Quonset represented for himfirst and foremost an affordable home, citedsome 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 motorwhen it’s cooling down.”55 Another Quonsetresident, in response to skepticism heendured from friends and passersby, said:“Don’t knock it until you’ve tried it. In homes they’re building now, there’s waterrushing in the roof, cracks in the slab and all the rest.”56

If Quonsets never caught on as theideal American house, they proved quitepopular in other capacities, and the ironytoday is that a building intended to be tem-porary should still be so pervasive in the

landscape. In a 1991 Los Angeles Times article on the Quonset’s unnoticed fiftiethanniversary, the writer, mentioning theQuonset-housed military museum at PortHueneme, commented on the preponderanceof 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 jumbo-

sized 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’sQuonset experience: “It used to be a militarybarracks, I guess. I talked to one guy whosaid this building was built for thePhilippines, that it would withstand a 200mile-an-hour wind. I believe it. It’s a goodbuilding. I’d like to have another one and justbolt it onto the end.”58

In the Solano Beach neighborhood ofSan Diego, a group of Quonset huts built in1949 to house an aerial reconnaissance andphotography company have been restoredunder the auspices of the Cedros DesignDistrict and are now home to boutiques, alleries, and restaurants. The Quonset motifhas proven so strong that when the trans-

After the War101

portation authority set about to build a newtrain station for Solano Beach, the San Diegoarchitect Robert Quigley responded with adesign that actually echoes the distinctiveQuonset form. In 2003, it was reported thatGM, in its rollout of dealerships for the newlyrevamped “Hummer” brand—another mili-tary veteran retooled for the domestic mar-ket—would feature a giant “H” made of steelgirders and a curved metal roof, a “designinspired by Quonset huts on U.S. militarybases.”59 In Dana, Indiana, two Quonsetshouse the museum dedicated to renownedwar correspondent Ernie Pyle. In Ogden,Utah, sits the Abbey of Our Lady of the HolyTrinity, housed in a Quonset. As the Orderexplains,

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 war-

surplus 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 simplysurvived through benign neglect or because

their functionality and low-cost have yet tobe eclipsed, they have also at times beenthrust into the spotlight of architecturalattention, in both positive and negativeterms. As the entire built landscape ages,the attention of preservationists and archi-tectural enthusiasts has begun to focus onbuildings from the 1940s and 1950s, histori-cizing a period that not so long ago was toocurrent to be considered historical. In WestPalm Beach, Florida, for example, a numberof Quonsets, which were used first by themilitary and later by industry, have beenadded to the National Register of HistoricPlaces. “I’m looking forward to a wholeQuonset hut historic district in West Palm,” a historic preservation official explained.“We’ve got a whole street of them!”61 Andyet Quonsets, precisely because of their age-related decay, and lingering associations ofthe era of wartime scarcity, are often per-ceived as unloved, outmoded eyesores. InCarmel, New York, a Quonset hut that hadserved as a movie theater and bank storagefacility was demolished in 2001 after nearlythirty years of efforts to do so. Stationed nextto the town’s courthouse, a Greek Revivalstructure that had been renovated in the1980s for several million dollars, was aQuonset hut, described thus: “The corrugat-ed metal is peeling away in some areas, andyellow insulation oozes out of the crevices.Graffiti is visible on the building.”62

Historic preservation, perhaps bynecessity, skews toward older buildings,those that read most historic. And yet newerstructures, like the Quonsets, can find them-selves in jeopardy—paradoxically not

Tom Vanderbilt102

because there are so few examples butbecause there are so many examples. “Youcan talk all you want about Greek Revivaland such,” said one preservation official,“but to people my age, who were of draftage during World War II, the Quonset hutis as familiar as a hot dog.”63 Their mass-produced ubiquity lends the impression thatthere must always be a Quonset lurking insome nearby landscape. Familiarity breedsneglect. Yet as a National Trust for HistoricPreservation official wrote in 1996, “TheQuonset has been disappearing at an alarm-ing rate since its nomination to the NationalRegister in 1977, and no comprehensivecultural resource surveys have been under-taken to determine how many are left.”64 InNovember 2003, the Quonset Auditorium inBowling Green, Kentucky, was demolished.Joe Marshall, the longtime “Rovin’ Rambler,”wrote afterwards, “I attended the funeral andcried. The Quonset is now buried. It had nosoul, so it will never be resurrected.”65

The Quonset was not the only formof housing deployed by the U.S. forces inWorld War II; it did not represent the onlypre-fabricated house to grace the postwarscene, nor was it an entirely novel housingform without historical precedent. For anumber of reasons, however—its innovativeengineering, the logistics of wartime, anenergetic manufacturer, and a postwarAmerican landscape open to low-cost, flexible alternatives to traditional buildingforms—the Quonset emerged as the mostpopular choice and the one that lodged mostfirmly in the public imagination (whereas acomparable few would be as familiar with

the profile of, say, Buckminster Fuller’sDymaxion house). The Quonset also repre-sented the advance deployment of large-scale prefabrication in the American environ-ment; having proven itself in wartime, itgained a new respect on the domestic front.The building industry is now rife with prefabrication, with the rapidly growingmanufactured-housing sector offering unitspreequipped with kitchens and bathrooms.In the year 2000, more than 1,900 churcheswere built using prefabricated metal sys-tems. “Do metal buildings raise visions ofrusty Quonset huts or machine sheds?”asked Your Church magazine. “If so, you’ll besurprised to know that yesteryear’s ugly-duckling structures are now re-engineeredand redesigned into today’s beautiful metalbuildings.”66

The Quonset’s greatest legacy, however, does not reside in its design orengineering, but in the fact that, in all its“understated glory,” it transcended its func-tional attributes and became a symbol—like the Coke bottle or the Jeep. From theYukon to Youngstown, it is enshrined as amythically resonant object in the postwarpantheon of American iconography.

Quonset hut monastery,

Abbey of our Lady of the

Holy Trinity, Huntsville, UT,

interior

Before long, the headlines once reserved forwar were replaced with accounts of housingshortages that grew to epidemic proportions.A January 20, 1945, article in the FairbanksDaily News Miner indicated at least two hun-dred of Fairbanks’ families were living inshacks for lack of better housing;1 a surveyreleased by the Anchorage Chamber ofCommerce declared that there were thirteenfamilies in Anchorage alone that hadsearched for a place to rent, without success,for five months or more.2 By September 3,1946, an estimated 1,482 families inAnchorage would be homeless.3 The severityof this crisis at its peak is aptly summarizedby Governor Ernest Greuning in his AnnualReport of the Governor of Alaska:

The problem of housing in Alaska

has now grown to such serious pro-

portions 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 sub-

standard 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 begin-

ning of the defense and military

activities of World War II, the short-

age of homes became a serious

problem. With the beginning of

peace and the arrival of the perma-

nent settler, the shortage has

become catastrophic.4

When military build up was needed inAlaska—at the recommendation of the 1939Hepburn Board report—it was in no way prepared for the influx of soldiers and privatecontractors who would arrive in droves. Notlong after the military arrived in Fairbanks inSeptember 1942, housing needs for the Armygrew so rapidly that it required militaryoccupation of the Fairbanks Pioneer Hotel.5

Chapter 5 The Huts That Wouldn’t Go Away:

Alaska Adopts the Hut

Chris Chiei

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

Chris Arend, Fresh Crop,

2003

105

That same week, Northwest Airlines, whoduring World War II flew military equipmentand personnel from the continental UnitedStates to Alaska, likewise took possession ofthe Fairbanks International Hotel.6 The civil-ian population housed in these establish-ments was forced to find other options—a consequence that placed an even greaterstrain on Fairbanks’s marginal housing market.

In Anchorage, the first real signs of ahousing shortage appeared in 1942. It wasan ever-present and slowly growing problemthat took a backseat to the immediate issuesof war. Long before the matter made head-lines, factors responsible for the shortagewere well in place. In the 1930s theDepression extended its reach into the terri-tory, slowing what little development wasthere. Furthermore, a ban on “non-essential”construction materials that followedAmerica’s entry into the war added to thelimitation on the territory’s fledgling con-struction industry and the availability ofhousing.7 Unfortunately, action to alleviatethe escalating shortage was, in part, delayedby a misconception that the territory’s popu-lation would return to prewar levels as soonas peace was declared.8

Between 1942 and 1945, the people ofAnchorage seemed to live in harmony withtheir Quonset neighbors. It was as thoughthey had accepted these structures for theirpart in the war effort. One Quonset campwas erected in the railway yard at ShipCreek, the very birthplace of Anchorage’soriginal tent city. Huts were laid out nearlyend-to-end in long rows. Called the SnakeRanch, this camp was the home of the SevenHundred Fourteenth Railway OperatingBattalion, a military contingent deployed toassist the Alaska Railroad in efficient trans-portation of military supplies. Having servedthe territory for twenty-five months, the bat-talion was relieved of duty on May 7, 1945.They were shipped out three days later. Leftbehind was a village of Quonset huts thatstood silent amid the desperate cries of ahousing shortage.9

The silence ended on Tuesday, May29, 1945. That morning, the front page of theAnchorage Daily Times featured the head-line, “Sale of Huts to Aid Housing”—Anchorage’s first large-scale military surplusannouncement.10 In addition to one- andtwo-story wood-frame buildings and miscel-laneous other equipment, the list includedQuonset huts, Pacific huts,11 and Cowin

Chris Chiei106

Headline in Anchorage Daily

Times, August 29, 1946

huts.12 It was announced that bids for indi-vidual huts would be favored over blanketbids—a clear message that persons orgroups were discouraged from attempting topurchase huts for resale at a profit.

Two days later an editorial appearedin the Anchorage Times regarding the sale ofarmy huts to the general public. Althoughthe article hailed the surplus as immediaterelief from the housing shortage, it also cau-tioned that “these buildings will add little tothe beauty of the city. They will have manyproblems of health, safety, and welfare as theyears go on. They may cause values on adja-cent properties to drop because of their merepresence . . . If we approve of the use of thesestructures during the emergency (housingshortage) [would] we have to have them inour community permanently?”13 In the case

of Quonsets, tolerance was apparently bettersuited for the impermanent. Although littlewas said about the appearance ofAnchorage’s Quonset camps while theyserved America’s war machine, the merethought of them as a permanent neighborwas greeted with unrest.

On June 1, 1945, the announcementfor bids was made official.14 Bids would beaccepted on June 20. If Anchorage officialswanted to stop the movement of Quonsetsinto the city, they would have very little timeto do so.

Anchorage’s first official public actionagainst 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

The Huts That Wouldn’t Go Away107

Housing for the 714th

Engineer Railway Operating

Battalion (nicknamed the

Snake Ranch), Ship Creek,

Anchorage, AK, May 31, 1943

contended that many of the frame buildingspermitted in the city are “worse than thehuts.” Others clearly felt that the suggestedpermanence of the temporary structureswould insure “future headaches.” The cityengineer, who had already reviewed the hut drawings, asserted that the structuresmet all the requirements of the currentbuilding code and could only be forbiddenif an amendment was adopted. The cityattorney confirmed that such an amend-ment would be legal.15 Exactly one weekbefore the bid opening, the fate of theQuonset hut was sealed. Although notbanned outright, the huts were covertlyentangled in red tape so thick that even the most ambitious Quonset bidders wouldthink twice about placing their bountywithin the city limits. Ordinance 157 placedthe following restrictions on Quonset huts,Pacific huts, Butler huts,16 and other tem-porary 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 imme-diately. It appeared that the city fathers hadsaved the city limits from the invasion ofhuts. But what they saved represented only asmall part of what Anchorage is today. Atthat time, the city limits constituted roughlyan approximate one-square-mile area. Allthat lay beyond those boundaries was out-side their control.

On the bid date, fifty-six bids wereopened and approximately fifty huts award-ed.18 In the weeks that followed, the way-ward Quonset huts migrated to every cornerof the region that would become theAnchorage Bowl. Much to the chagrin of cityfathers, they loomed about city limits like theMexican Army at the gates of the Alamo. Anambitious or desperate few accepted theterms of the city council and requested per-mission to erect huts within the city core.Disputes quickly arose. When the AlaskaRailroad Brotherhood of Locomotive Firemenand Enginemen requested permission to erecttwo Quonsets as a clubhouse, Jack Parsons,owner of the nearby Strathmore Apartments,protested on the grounds that they would bea fire hazard and a nuisance.19

Similar to the controversy that ensuedin Anchorage, the Seward city council quicklyenacted their own ban on Quonset huts inthe downtown area.20 Even Fairbanks, a citynoted for its frontier individuality, raised itseyebrows when confronted with the issue oftemporary buildings. City Manager LouisKelsey staged a drive against wannigans, orany kind of portable, temporary structure,that had been moved into the city withoutpermission. Under Kelsey, violators wereissued warrants and brought to city court toface misdemeanor charges.21 However, therewas only so much the government could doto deter the use of available buildings in themidst of a housing crisis.

Not all hut proposals were met withresistance. The use of the Quonset by philan-thropic organizations often seemed exemptfrom the protests. Prior to the enactment ofrestrictions, members of the Anchorage

Chris Chiei108

Rotary Club were able to acquire and erect a hut for use by Boy Scout Troop 618.Rotarians and Scouts joined together for adedication ceremony and a baked-bean din-ner on June 6, 1945.22 On the immediatelyadjacent site, Frank Brink, a representative of the Theater Club, successfully petitionedMayor Francis Bowden and City Manager A.J. Koenig for permission to erect the LittleTheatre in a hut.23

Meanwhile, the Soroptomists Club, agroup of young Anchorage businesswomen,made it their organizational mission to provide a Teen Town, a national programhosting activities for the city youth. In a let-ter presented to the city council it was citedthat there was “no place for young people tomeet after school and enjoy the companion-ship of their friends away from undesirablecontacts.”24 It was ironic perhaps that theypresented the goal of using Quonset huts toseparate children from the “undesirable”—aterm commonly used to describe the Quonsethut itself. Having acquired a number of huts,the club requested the city council to providespace for their facility along the existing golfcourse (now Anchorage’s Park Strip), promis-ing they would move the huts if the propertywere needed for other purposes in the future.A number of Teen Towns in other cities werealso housed in surplus Quonset huts. InFairbanks, a hut formerly owned by the ElksLodge was sold to the local Teen TownCommittee for $575.25 After two short years,the Fairbanks’s Teen Town was closed due tolack of funds and volunteer help.26 The hutwas sold again, this time to O’Harra bus line,which transformed the building into a busstation waiting room.27

On May 5, 1946, Mrs. Howard Bunker,secretary for the Anchorage Health andWelfare Council, presented statistics to thecity council showing that over a three-monthperiod in 1946, seventy-eight “transientcharges of the Health Department, theDepartment of Public Welfare, and AlaskaNative Service” arrived in Anchorage andrequired a one- to two-night stay. Some weretaken in by kindhearted residents, but eventhat effort required hours of going from doorto door: “Many times [Alaska NativeServices] just can’t find a place [for them] atall. In that case people have had to sit up allnight on benches in hotel lobbies, in theSalvation Army building, or in airline offices.We have had people sit right here in thisoffice for hours, while we try to find them aplace to spend the night—often they aremothers with children.”28

In late 1946, the Anchorage Healthand Welfare Council was able to acquire and


Government Hill Youth Club,

Anchorage, AK, ca. 1947

erect a Quonset hut for use as transienthousing for Alaska Native Services and theDepartment of Public Welfare. Mrs. WilliamSmith, president of the council, convincedthe city to donate property in support of theeffort. Dr. C. Earl Albrecht, territorial com-missioner of health, provided a surplus armyQuonset to be dismantled and moved fromFort Raymond in Seward. Dr. Ruth Gruber, aformer Anchorage resident, donated $200 tohelp furnish and equip the hut.29

Institutional Housing Throughout WWII and into the postwaryears, the Alaska Railroad’s30 efforts atrecruitment was stymied by the lack of avail-able housing for railroad workers. Potentialemployees, especially those with families,were informed of the housing situation, and,as a result, many heads of families turneddown offers of employment. Those that did

accept positions with hopes of bringing theirfamilies at a later date were often discour-aged by the severity of the housing situationand asked to be reassigned in a short periodof time, or they were left unassigned.31

Following the war, the Alaska Railroadembarked on a proactive campaign to dealwith the lack of housing for married railroadpersonnel. On June 12, 1946, Colonel John P.Johnson, general manager of the AlaskaRailroad, addressed the Anchorage CityCouncil with a proposal to house an estimated two hundred railroad workers andtheir families on a triangle-shaped parcelatop Anchorage’s Government Hill—a sitejust north of the city’s downtown. TheGovernment Hill project was one of the mostorganized postwar Quonset communities.32

The timing was fortuitous. The nearbyWhittier base, including all of its structuresand equipment, was soon offered as surplusto the general public. This base and othersalong the rail line and throughout the territory had an abundance of Quonset hutsthat could easily be purchased, dismantled,and shipped by rail to other locations. Thechallenge was finding a way to integratethese huts into a civilian community thatwas digestible, if not inspirational, to theaverage railroad worker. Having observed thecontroversy surrounding the surplus of hutsat numerous locations around the city, theRailroad understood that the Quonset hutwas associated with temporality and the mil-itary. In addition to being a reminder of thestruggles of World War II, it was far from the “white picket fence” expectations ofAmerica’s young couples. In order to counterthese perceptions, the Railroad subdivided

Chris Chiei110

Articles in Anchorage Daily

Times, August 21, 1946

the parcel into a grid of major city streetswhere the backs of individual lots wouldmeet along a common alleyway. Huts wouldbe erected on the rear side of the lot, leavingthe street side vacant. A railroad familywould have the opportunity to purchase a lotthat came with a home they could immedi-ately occupy at a price they could afford; better yet, there was still room for theAmerican Dream. As finances permitted,families could build their permanent homeon the front of the property and transform theQuonset hut into a garage or storage shed.The Railroad intended to hold all propertiesas lease agreements until families were set-tled permanently. The land would then bewithdrawn from the Railroad reserve, individ-ually assessed for taxes, and sold to perma-nent residents.33

On July 25, 1946, the InteriorDepartment officially transferred possessionof the Whittier base to the Railroad.Immediately following, railroad employeeswere given permission to begin dismantlinghuts in Whittier. In exchange for the huts’removal, employees were granted ownershipof structures and provided with free rail serv-ice for the transportation of materials back toAnchorage.34 By August 21, 1946, nine hutshad been reerected on properties atGovernment Hill; four others were in trans-port. In addition to the remaining structuresat Whittier, another 190 Quonsets had beenprocured from the Dutch Harbor and were on their way.35

In a short period of time, theGovernment Hill Housing project developedinto a community of 165 Quonset huts, achurch, and a Teen Town before the project

was halted by a lack of funds and materialsin late 1948. At its peak, the seventeen-blockarea served as home for 866 Alaska Railroademployees and their families.36

In addition to the Government HillHousing project, the Railroad establishedother Quonset communities up and down therail line. Towns such as Fairbanks, Healy,and Seward each had their own hut campsfor railroad employees and their families.

Going, Going, GoneAccording to the Anchorage Daily Times, thevery first sale of Quonset huts to Alaska’scivilian population took place at FortRaymond on October 9, 1944. Chris Paulsonand Bert Schock were the successful bidderson twenty-four army buildings, nine of whichwere Quonsets. The two men purchased thebuildings with plans to move them toWasilla, Alaska, for use at their gold miningoperation.37

On behalf of the Bureau of LandManagement (BLM), Fred R. Kessler, a realestate consultant and appraiser fromWashington, D.C., visited the defunct Fort


Groundbreaking ceremony for

Government Hill housing

project, Anchorage, AK, 1946

Raymond base in the fall of 1945. His taskwas to individually assess each type of struc-ture 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' x36' and $50 for the 24' x 60'.38

Though the local community did notattach a high monetary value to these build-ings, the huts, more often than not, weregenuinely welcomed throughout Alaska,from the little fishing town of Ketchikan to

Barrow. Hal Johnston and his wife, residentsof Skagway, a town noted for its outstandinggardens and gardeners, and one that hadseemingly been commandeered by Quonsethuts during the war years, moved into theirfirst home there—a surplus Portaseal hut39

being rented as an apartment. Their hutcame complete with a log-frame coveredporch, proudly capped with moose antlers.

Members of Palmer, a farming cooper-ative born from a Depression-era New Dealprogram, repeatedly placed requests for

Chris Chiei112

RIGHT: Government Hill,

Anchorage, AK, December 2003;

BOTTOM: Aerial view of

Government Hill housing project

Anchorage, AK, December 8,

1947

Quonsets toward the end of the war. Thecooperative purchased a total of eighty-ninestructures.40 Local resident Jessie DeVriesvividly recalled her experiences with one ofthose huts:

When we got back to Palmer at the

end of the summer (1945) we dis-

covered that the Matanuska Valley

Coop had purchased all of those

Quonset huts up there (Glukana)

for $50 a piece, and were reselling

them for $55 a piece. And since we

had no housing, we went down and

purchased one of those for $55. The

trouble was that we had to go up

and get it from Dry Creek (Glukana)

and to bring it down here. And of

course we had no place to put it

either. When we decided we’d go

up on our property, we had to go

across the bridge to get up there,

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

destruction. And at about that time

the temperature dropped down to

40 below and stayed that way for at

least two weeks. My husband had

hired a man with a D8 and they

went out and tested the ice. The

Matanuska River had completely

frozen over enough so that it would

hold a cat. So they drug it across

the river on the ice. And then to get

up the hill—there were four curves

that you had to navigate to get up

before the straightaway. Well in the

process of getting those up there,

there was a little of the tin along

the edges that fell off (laugh). But


Hal Johnston and his mother

beside his Portaseal hut,

Skagway, AK, March 1949

that wasn’t anything like taking it

apart, ya know, and getting it

together again.41

Once settled on their property, theDeVries family grew, but their Quonset didnot. With the addition of four children, the DeVries gained an entirely different perspective on “Quonset living.” As JesseDeVries remembers, “The walls were wherekids could reach it. Lots of times they’dscribble on it. You didn’t scream at them and get all upset because it was just aQuonset hut.”42

Exactly how big a family can youraise in a single Quonset hut? Dennis andCleo Green of Delta Junction, Alaska, raisedfive in a single Quonset Redesign, with justa small log shed added to one end. Theissue of close quarters did not seem to both-er them. According to Mrs. Green, “It wasreally quite roomy, or at least it seemed likeit. Kids were small then.” Of greater concernwas the challenge of heating a poorly insu-lated metal Quonset hut against the extremewinter temperatures of interior Alaska. AsGreen remembers, “It was pretty cold. Thefrost would come through the walls on thelittle buttons and things. We usually put‘roll-out’ insulation along the wall—in thewinter time—behind the furniture andthings. And then also when we got snow wepiled snow around it. When it was reallycold we run the wood stove as well as theoil one.”43

The effects of the Alaskan climates onthe Quonset hut was recollected by WymanOwens of Seward as well:

I can remember the awful blizzard

of the early 50s, and how the snow

would drift through any small

opening and collect in small piles

near the draft. After a while we

finally were able to plug the open-

ings 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 bliz-

zard 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 makeup a home? Apparently several. GretchenBersch and Findlay Abbott grew up in a

Chris Chiei114

Quonset homestead in the coastal town ofHomer, Alaska. They described the followinginventory of huts that made up their home-stead:

First, at the top of the Baycrest Hill,

were Chuck’s two huts connected

by the bathroom. The Jamesway

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 grewup in or near a Quonset hut that it affectedthe way they perceived the structure of atypical 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

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

anything out of the books. She drew

a Quonset hut as her house, because

that was her idea of a house.47

Unfortunately, the Quonset hut’s new-found acceptance as a stop-gap solution tothe housing shortage was short-lived inAlaska. On April 22, 1947, the Oregon ExportCompany of Portland, Oregon, burst onto thescene with a prefabricated housing optionnot seen before in the territory. Their firstadvertisement, which consumed two fullpages of the Anchorage Daily Times, offereda mail-order house kit that was eligible for aFederal Housing Authority (FHA) loan—anoption not available for those who soughtany other type of temporary structures.Though these simple flat-roofed buildingswere obviously influenced by methods of prefabrication and mass production devel-oped in wartime, they did not appear to bevestiges of war. Its advertisement claimedeasy assembly—only requiring two men andthree or four days. House kits were availablein one-, two-, or three-bedroom options, andthe price was more than six times the goingrate for a surplus Quonset hut.48

Shortly thereafter, Ove Selid of SelidConstruction Services, announced, in anadvertisement appearing in the FairbanksDaily News Miner, their exclusive rights asdistributors of Martin-Alden Precision CutHomes. Because postwar Americans associ-


ated prefabrication with temporary militarybuildings such as Quonset huts, Selid wasquick to point out that these were not prefab-ricated structures.49 The image this companypresented was more familiar to prewarAmerica. The advertisement included a ren-dering of a one-story orthogonal structurewith double-hung windows flanked on eitherside by artificial shutters. The ramblingvolume, capped by a gabled roof andadorned with a hedgerow, even includedparsley-looking trees—all elements indica-tive of marketing techniques used by themidcentury developers-to-be.

Born from the same technology thatperfected the Quonset hut, these mass-pro-duced housing options shifted the limelightaway from Quonsets. In Alaska and through-out the nation, the Quonset, along with thehousing crisis, would soon fade from theheadlines of newspapers. Classified adver-tisements for surplus huts would becomefewer and then disappear altogether. In theend, these huts, born of one crisis and calledin to service for another, were never truly celebrated or loved by either.

Quonset Huts Mean BusinessCommercial development quickly accompa-nied the increasing number of homes thatsprung up around Alaska and throughout theU.S. to house the growing population. InAlaska many small businesses that neededlow-cost, low-maintenance buildings thatrequired very little initial investment of capi-tal commonly chose the Quonset hut. Giventhe need for structures for commercial use, itoften made sense to use the the Quonset hutsthat remained. If they could not be the per-fect family home, they could perhaps becomethe 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 issueof Anchorage Daily Times. Then, anyone living in the Anchorage area knew theanswer: The Garden of Eatin’. The Quonsethut in which the restaurant operates wasconstructed by Hans and Gerry Kirchner in1947. Originally intended as their home, the hut served them in a multitude of waysbefore taking its final form as a public diningroom and kitchen.

The Kirchners arrived in Anchorage atthe height of the housing shortage. Althoughjobs were scarce and housing options dismal,Hans found employment with the AlaskaRailroad, and Gerry became a shopper forAlaska Airlines—a service provided to ruralresidents for assistance in purchasing itemsfrom the city. Before long, they came closerto achieving their American Dream throughthe purchase of twenty-five acres of land,their “little spot.”51 But their dream ofbecoming frontier farmers on this land,which they named “Aching Acres,” was

Chris Chiei116

Chuck Abbott, Homer, AK,

ca. 1950; OPPOSITE CLOCK-

WISE 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

quickly squelched by misfortune: thedestruction caused when a North Air trainerplane crashed into their property and a sur-prising early frost that prematurely ended thelife of their crop.52

They surmised that by moving ontothe land they would at least be able to eliminate their current boarding costs. Hanswas able to acquire a Quonset hut from theAlaska Railroad53 and they moved into their“Quonsie,” as they called it, on October 23,1947.54

Fine tuning this hut was an ongoingaffair. Immediately after moving in, thepower failed, the plumbing failed, and thehot water heater all but exploded. Afterresolving these issues, Han’s included in his Christmas note to Gerry the followingstatement:

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 conven-

iences 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, itwas used to entertain guests. In addition to ahut-warming party, where twenty-fourfriends brought dinner “complete from the

fried chicken to the mints,” the Kirchnersalso shared their first Quonset Christmaswith friends:

For Christmas the hut was fancied

up with crepe paper and ribbon

bows; at one end we stood a beau-

tiful spruce tree from our very own

land and ornamented it with fruit

and cookies and candy and pop-

corn 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 ven-ture—real estate. Consuming most of theirtime and the last of their resources, they sub-divided half of their property into individuallots. Soon, a community of newcomers aroseon the old potato field. Quonsie became thecommunity center—partly due to the natureof its location, but mostly due to the welcom-ing spirit of the Kirchners. As Gerrydescribed, “Our hut was headquarters forborrowing tools, getting water, taking baths,and the like. Grand Central Station hadnever seen a thing on the traffic that shuttledthrough the place.”57

Having spent five years in the territoryby then, both Hans and Gerry had estab-lished themselves with a certain amount ofoccupational success—Hans in his five yearsof service with the Alaska Railroad andGerry with Alaska Airlines. But they were

Chris Chiei118

ready for a change. On June 30, 1951, theyofficially renamed Quonsie “The Garden ofEatin’,” and opened its doors as a public din-ing room.58 Hans took on the role as headchef. Gerry became the restaurant’s hostess.The restaurant accommodated as many asfifty-eight guests at candle-lit tables extend-ing to either end of its tunnel-like space.59

The walls were adorned with humorous say-ings and paintings. The menu followed suit,with its own page of fictitious entrees includ-ing “bees knees,” “mosquito knuckles”, and“dehydrated water.” Most memorable was aneasel at the entry that supported large parch-ment sheets signed by all visitors.

The Garden of Eatin’ soon rose in rankto become the premier dining experience inall of Anchorage. Many famous visitors to theterritory were hosted for dinner in theKirchners’ humble Quonset. When NebraskaSenator Hugh Butler first visited the territoryas part of an effort to assess Alaska’s readi-ness for statehood,60 there was no questionwhich dining establishment was best suitedto impress upon him the advanced state ofAlaska’s culture. Word of the Garden’s suc-cess would eventually reach the food editorof the New York Times who, in 1965, wrote,“one of the most unusual and successfulrestaurants in Anchorage bears the ludicrousname of Garden of Eatin’.”61

In the late 1970s, an influx of peopleand money came to Alaska for the construc-tion of the Alaska Pipeline. Larry Osenga,who purchased the Garden of Eatin’ in 1970,decided to ride the wave by adding a two-story banquet hall and bar to the back end ofthe Quonset. Joined to the original structure

at the kitchen, the banquet hall hosted a dinner theater, weddings, and special events.Although the capacity of the facility morethan tripled, the Quonset’s tiny kitchen continued to serve as the culinary hub forthe entire complex.62

Huts for Public ServiceOther Quonset dwellers, restaurant owners,and roadhouses aspired to live up to thestandards set by the Garden of Eatin’.Quonset huts became schools, churches,even homes for sporting events.

The families that arrived in postwarAlaska faced not only a housing shortage butalso a lagging educational system. With thearrival of so many new students, communi-ties across the state experienced a growth instudent population that completely over-whelmed the existing facilities. In Anchoragealone, student enrollment jumped 13 percentbetween 1945 and 1946. To address this situ-ation, less than one year after the AnchorageCity Council attempted to outlaw Quonsets,the school board and city council, unable tofind another solution, accepted a proposal toconstruct a number of Quonset huts to beused as a temporary school. Again, the hutswere “better than no solution at all.”63

Representatives of the Anchorage citycouncil contacted the army surplus divisionto inquire about huts that could be utilizedas a school. In pursuit of ten new class-rooms, the city purchased three 24' x 60'Quonsets and four 16' x 36' Quonsets. Thetotal cost for all seven was $925—hardly aninvestment worth seeking a municipalbond.64 When the Quonsets were officially


turned over by the army on August 6, 1946,construction was expedited in hopes thathuts would be ready in time for the fallsemester. However, a shipping strike delayedthe arrival of building materials necessary tocomplete the project.65 Without any addi-tional classroom space, the school year com-menced on September 4th with the existingfacility filled far past its capacity. As an emer-gency measure, overflow classrooms wereestablished in activity rooms and “any otherspot that a seat could be set up.”66 A third-grade class was conducted in a storeroom;other classes were held in the school base-ment and in a space rented by a local church.

These Quonset units were used asclassrooms throughout much of the 1950sbut were considered far from ideal; theyserved their purpose while other more per-manent facilities were being constructed.The biggest problem was the inadequacy of

an oil-stove heating system. Some complainedthat stoves often overheated and always gaveoff an offensive odor.67 One heater evenexploded, covering an entire classroom insoot, but fortunately harming no one.

Quonset huts, despite their clean safe-ty record, gained an inaccurate reputation asbeing too unstable for occupation—thoughpublic officials often claim that they were firehazards, no one ever produced supportingdata. Some were convinced that Quonsethuts were an ever-present danger. In reality,not one Quonset fire was reported in theAnchorage Daily Times or the FairbanksDaily News Miner between 1942 and 1950—the same period of time in which notorioushotel fires occurred and during which theMatanuska Valley Hospital was consumed byflames. These structures were all traditionalwood or long-frame constructions, unlike themetal-clad Quonset.

Chris Chiei120

LEFT: Interior of schoolhouse,

Galena, AK, March 1, 1949;

RIGHT: Mr. Freeman’s

junior high-school class,

Anchorage, AK, April 4, 1952

The log hospital destroyed by fire inthe town of Palmer had once been the centerof health care for the entire MatanuskaValley Colony—a post-Depression farmingprogram established by President Rooseveltin 1935. After more than ten years of opera-tion, on May 27, 1946, an electrical fire origi-nating in the hospital’s attic slowly spreadand overwhelmed all efforts to put it out. Thetemporary, makeshift replacement facilitythat followed was significantly undersized forthe functions of a community hospital. Indesperation, the people of Palmer turned tothe U.S. military for help. On behalf of theArmy, Lt. General Nathan F. Twining agreedto provide three Quonset huts and miscella-neous building materials for the expansion ofthe current facility.68 When the huts arrivedin Palmer, still in their crates, they weregreeted by a force of local volunteers who, inthe spirit of a traditional barnraising, worked

together to construct the first. The other twowere added at a later time—each linked tothe next by wood-framed corridors. Althoughintended as a short-term solution, the assem-blage of buildings served the communitythrough 1953, at which time a new hospitalwas constructed and the temporary facilityabandoned.69

Quonset huts were also used to createenvironments much less sterile than hospi-tals. Curling is a winter sport where playersslide heavy granite stones down a sheet ofice while teammates sweep the ice in frontof the stone to strategically control the speedof the stone as it moves toward the goal.Developed as outdoor sport on the frozenlakes of sixteenth-century Scotland, the sportmigrated to other northern countries alongwith Scottish immigrants. Eventually, thesport moved indoors; the Quonset-type struc-tures were ideal for this application. Link


Members of the Palmer

community rebuild Valley

Hospital with Quonset huts,

Palmer, AK, 1947

Chris Chiei122

TOP: Spenard post office and

store, Anchorage, AK, ca.

1950; BOTTOM: Terminal

News Company warehouse,

Fairbanks, AK, 1949

four huts together and you have enclosed afull playing field. Such fields were found asfar away as Beaver Creek in the YukonTerritory. Ready to relax after curling?Residents of Alaska knew to head to a post-war Quonset bar on a Saturday night.According to Fairbanks resident CathleenDoyle, “There were a couple of great barsdown on the south side that were inQuonsets. 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 upand running.”70 Quonset watering holesincluded The Wind Tunnel in Delta Junction,a bar appropriately named for the threeQuonsets that formed its interior, and thePortage Bar, located south of Anchorage.Drinks were served until the town was over-run by flood waters—a side effect of Alaska’s1964 earthquake.

In Fairbanks, Bill Green and his familyrode out that very same earthquake at theirQuonset homestead. As Green remembers,“We were eating dinner that time when theearthquake hit. That old Quonset hutcreaked and groaned, but it didn’t show anydamage. If you take a tin can and squeeze itin your hand that’s really what it soundedlike.”71 Others described similar soundswhile occupying the huts—sounds caused byhigh winds and rapid temperature changes.“You could hear the creaking,” remarkedHank Dubee, a former Quonset resident. ”You could hear the metal shrink, pop andcrack.”72

Even the oil industry found use forthese humble structures. In March of 1955,Richfield geologist William Bishop was sentto Alaska in search of the territory’s long-

suspected oil wealth. In previous months,Richfield had officially filed paperwork togain rights to explore for oil on 71,000 acresof the Kenai Peninsula. Bishop explored thesite, and, after much consideration, chose aspot on the banks of the Swanson River. Bydigging his boot heel into the snow and plac-ing a sign that read, Drill Here, he set inmotion a drilling operation that commencedon April 7 and hit oil on July 17. The strikewould prove to be Alaska’s first successfulcommercial oil venture. Many would say itwas this event that convinced CongressAlaska was ready for statehood.73

In commemoration of this history-making event, Bishop’s boots were bronzedand put on display at the AnchorageMuseum of History and Art. Unfortunately,the Quonset hut that had been constructedwithin a stone’s throw of his heel marks wasomitted. Was it too large to receive the samehonor? After all, historic photos do indicatethat a hut was utilized at the base of theoriginal drilling rig. Its presence is furtherproof of the Quonset’s role as the ForrestGump of Alaska’s built environment. In this,and in nearly every other significant event ofAlaska’s postwar history, it seems that a hutcan be found lurking somewhere in the back-ground. Each, in their own way, quietly sup-ported the forward movement of the Territory.

Sacred SpacesWere Quonset huts deserving of worship?Perhaps not, but they did find themselves inservice of many a god, even if they were notalways the most practical solution. PastorDick Benjamin, Sr., ministered in a Quonsethut—the Abbott Loop Church in Anchorage,


Alaska—after the war. While the church’srounded home was fully functional, noteverything worked perfectly. “We had seatsright against the wall on both sides. If a person was tall and they stood up to sing asong, they were bending over toward themiddle,” Benjamin recalled. But it wasn’t aproblem filling the seats: “One thing abouthaving a small place like that: When you hadfifteen to twenty people, you have a prettygood crowd.” The Quonset-hut church alsoboasted great acoustics. “It was like singinginside a barrel,” said Benjamin. “The organjust filled that place up. It’s like how people

like to sing in the shower. You’d have hardtime beating the acoustics of the inside of aQuonset hut.”74

In 1954, Father Thomas Cunninghambecame the first Catholic pastor in Barrow,Alaska. Father Tom, as most people referredto him, was a New Zealand–born missionarywho arrived in the territory in 1930. Aftertwenty-three years in various roles and loca-tions, Father Tom’s superiors assigned him toBarrow, where he assumed responsibility forthe largest, most northern, Catholic parish inthe entire United States. This area, whichincluded military outposts and native villages,

Chris Chiei124

St Patrick’s Catholic Church,

Barrow, AK, ca. 1980

was strewn across mostly uninhabited and,more often than not, frozen tundra—an areaabove the Arctic Circle, now commonlyreferred to as the North Slope.75

When he arrived in Barrow there wasno existing chapel or church of Christianfaith. Father Tom took up residence in an oldEskimo dwelling and reached the outer limitsof his parish by way of dog sled and militarytransport. Determined to create a spiritualbase of operations, he went in search of sur-plus military buildings. In a letter he hadwritten ten years prior, he stated, “When theNavy begins raining down the duck-soup, Iwant to be there with a fork.”76 Indeed, hewas. A surplus Navy Quonset found fourmiles away would become the seed fromwhich his mission would grow. Local citi-zens, military personnel, and members of thePuget Sound Drake Construction Companyall worked together on the hut’s relocationand reerection. To move the structure, theycut it in two and then hauled it across thetundra with a D4 tractor and sledges bor-rowed from the U.S. Weather Service. It wasmid-July but an untimely cold snap kept thetemperature below freezing. That didn’t dis-courage Father Tom; he knew that “theArctic has no warm weather; just differentkinds of cold.”77 Additional lumber was sal-vaged from the abandoned military base atUmiat and transported free of charge by theAir Force. Dedicated volunteers continued towork throughout the summer, but it was ulti-mately Father Tom who completed a greatdeal of the carpentry and all of the wiring.When the church neared completion, henamed it after St. Patrick, his patron saint.78

Although the church was ready foroccupancy that winter, it was not until thesummer of 1955, with the arrival of a 350-pound locomotive bell, that Thomas consid-ered it complete. It was a gift from ColonelJohn E. Carroll, who convinced the presidentof Seattle’s Great Northern Railway todonate it. With the blessing of GeneralPatrick Carter, the bell was flown to Barrowat no charge.79

Father Tom passed away only fiveyears after opening his Quonset church. Inthe years that followed, the parish was keptintact by itinerant priests serving the DistantEarly Warning (DEW) Line, the communica-tion line across Alaska and Canada used todetect an enemy approaching from the north,and the Navy Arctic Research Laboratory. It was not until 1966 that Father AngusMcDonald took over as resident pastor. Hewas followed by Father Thomas Handley, and then long-time resident pastor FrancisMueller. Throughout the tenure of thesethree Catholic priests, the little Quonsetchurch served Barrow as the center ofCatholic life and would remain as such until1993, when it was removed and replaced bya wood-framed structure.80

The same year that Father Tom builtSt. Patrick’s, another Catholic priest wouldstart another Quonset church, this onebeside a dusty road known as the AlaskaHighway. Its champion, Father EusebeMorriset, was a Catholic missionary from theProvince of Quebec. Having arrived in theYukon shortly after completion of the high-way, he was assigned by the Diocese ofWhitehorse to roadside communities never


before accessible by vehicle.81 The Diocesefirst sent Morriset to Burwash Landings, aloosely knit, partially nomadic First Nationcommunity northwest of Whitehorse. There,he quickly earned the respect of locals, andtogether they constructed the Yukon’s firstchurch north of Whitehorse.

In the years following the war, servic-es necessary to sustain the highway attract-ed a new wave of settlers. Some came inhopes of cashing in on roadside servicessuch as fueling, automotive repair, andovernight accommodations. Others camewith government jobs to maintain the roadand man its border station. Overall, theincrease in population was negligible, but toa dedicated missionary like Morriset, it wasnonetheless an opportunity to widen theinfluence of Christianity. In a short period oftime, he would extend his work as far northas Beaver Creek and as far south as HainesJunction—two communities separated by adistance of 186 highway miles.

Having been an auxiliary chaplain forU.S. and Canadian forces along the highway,Father Morriset was well acquainted withmilitary buildings. In the Haines area alone,nearly every type of temporary structure utilized by U.S. forces in World War II wasrepresented. With this full range of structuresnow available, Morriset selected a Butler hut,which, besides the Quonset and theArmco,82 was the most substantial of all thetemporary structures used by U.S. forces.With the help of the local community, thestructure was moved to a site near the centerof town.

Confronted by this fairly low, ratherdark, linear shell, Morriset was challenged tofind a means by which to transform thishumble structure into a house of God. Thesolution he chose was brilliant. Instead ofjoining the hut’s curved ribs at the peak ofthe arch, he set them apart, allowing lightinto the structure along its entire length.Making that possible were wood beams

Chris Chiei126

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


Chris Chiei128

utilized on each side of the opening to sup-port arched sections and to serve as a baseupon which a raised clerestory could beconstructed.

Morriset also incorporated the hut’scurved form into details throughout thebuilding. On the exterior he constructed afalse-front steeple that announces the churchto the highway beyond. This seemingly two-dimensional Gothic form transitions down-ward with apposing curves that recall thescrolls and half pediments of Renaissancechurch facades. Historically used on basilicasto fill a transition point between nave andside isle, these simplified buttresses appearto have been introduced for visual continuitybetween steeple and hut. Morriset alsoadded an arctic entry immediately below thesteeple, extending the facade with curvingsidewalls whimsically opposed to form anhourglass-like space. To either side of thatare quarter-round windows with mullionsconfigured like radial spokes—a detail thatadds a gemlike quality to the overall facade.

Our Lady of the Way Catholic Church,named by Morriset, opened in 1954. In thechurchyard beside the main structure, weretwo more huts—one a Quonset Redesign andthe other a Butler hut. The former served asa parsonage for Father Morriset, the latter asa storage shed. The only structure in thecomplex without a curved roof was the out-house tucked behind the shed.

While commuting between BurwashLanding and Haines Junction, FatherMorriset planned yet another church, thisone at Beaver Creek. His missionary workincluded the little border town, which

appeared to exist for no other purpose thanfor the border stations and a few roadsideamenities. Although its population wasmuch smaller than Burwash Landing orHaines Junction, Father Morriset felt it wasready for its own Catholic church.

Nearly ten years after completing ofOur Lady of the Way, Morriset again choosea Butler hut as the starting point for hisdesign. He also created an open ridge forclerestory lighting in this structure, but thistime with natural light from the end wallsrather than lengthwise along the ridge. Thesolution was equally effective given thesmaller scale of the space and also allowed agreater opportunity to sculpt the clerestoryinto a more responsive curvilinear form.Here, too, he utilized modest materials in ele-gant ways. Dime-store lampshades becameelegant luminaries when mounted upside-down along the edge of the clerestory.Unostentatious wood paneling became awarm wainscot, and simple wood-trim stripsaccentuated the curvilinear form of thespace. Much in the way that architect AlvarAalto brought natural light into a space with-out a direct visual connection to its source,Morriset would do the same, using a smallwest-facing window tucked to one side of anopening that framed the altar. The result wasa haze of natural light illuminating the apse.Unlike Our Lady of the Way, where the hutsat directly upon the floor, the church atBeaver Creek was raised eighteen inchesonto a stud frame wall constructed betweenthe floor and the base of the arch. Theimpact 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 ofGrace, was fully complete by the end of1962. Beat Ledergerber, a resident, remem-bered that first midnight mass, “Oh, it musthave been 50 or 60 [degrees] below [zero].Standing room only. People you’d never seein church.”83 In the years that followed, thelittle Quonset church became the site of bap-tisms, weddings, and funerals for many ofthe residents of Beaver Creek.

As Hank Dubee said of the Quonsethut, “With a little imagination you can dojust about anything with them. They’re notfancy, but they do the job.”84 Jim Griffin,another Quonset dweller in Alaska in the1950s, was asked recently if he missedQuonset life. “Do you miss a tooth ache or an ingrown toenail? You’re not in love with

those things, it’s just some place to keep youout of the weather so you can do thingsyou’d rather be doing.”85

Quonset huts symbolized the stereo-typical Alaskan lifestyle—function over form.The rugged climate and landscape of theNorth inspired a make-do mentality that waswell suited to Quonset living. Quonset hutswere never intended for permanence but, inAlaska, they became fixtures of the builtenvironment, primarily out of convenience.Eventually their familiarity bred acceptance.Today they are a pivotal part of the history ofthe U.S. and symbols of its pride in a simpleand practical way of life.

Chris Chiei130

Interior view of Our Lady

of Grace Catholic Church,

Beaver Creek, Yukon

Territory, 2003; OPPO-

SITE: Our Lady of Grace

Catholic Church, Beaver

Creek, Yukon Territory,

2003


But today, architects and designers are look-ing for ways to turn impermanence andmobility into desirable traits rather than lia-bilities. Perhaps enough time has nowpassed to leave behind postwar sentimentsabout temporary housing, accompanied bysocial, cultural, economic change hassparked a shift in attitude. Poet AndreiCodrescu, in his introduction to Mobile: TheArt of Portable Architecture, by JenniferSiegal, wrote:

Nearly every American house I’ve

lived in has long ago been demol-

ished 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 imperma-

nence. 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 workingtoward reinventing the identity of the mobilehouse, changing the traditional design but

retaining the concepts of affordability andflexibility. FTL Happold, an architecture,structural engineering, and interior designfirm led by Buro Happold, designs structuressuch as a transportable music pavilion, whichis carried by six custom semi-trailers to anyopen performance site. As with the Quonset,the size of the building has, in part, beendetermined by the means of transportationrequired to move it; in fact, “the allowableweight of the trailers for highway travel ulti-mately determined the exact surface area ofthe overhead tensile shell.”2 The German firmFesto Corporate Design works in the realm of“airtecture,” including what it calls the “firstbuilding in the world to be constructed with acubic interior comprised of supporting struc-tures built with air inflated chambers”3—itcan be folded up in a standard forty-foot container. Austrian architect Oskar LeoKaufmann designed FRED, a customizable,building-block-style home that can be assem-bled in two hours on site. Japanese architectShigeru Ban has become known for his exper-imentations with and highly successful appli-cations of alternative materials. Instead ofwood, he used paper in 1986 to build a smallpavilion. Though applied as a result of a tight

Chapter 6 Quonsets Today: Concluding Thoughts

Julie Decker and Chris Chiei

Architecture schools have often taught that buildings should be static, stationary, and motionless—meant to be frozen in time and place. Partlybecause of their inherent mobility, practical solutions to provisional sheltersuch as mobile homes and Quonset huts were much maligned in the twentieth century.

Quonset hut for rent in

Kenai, AK, 2003

133

budget, he was pleasantly surprised at theeffects of the substitute, specifically thestrength of the paper, and, inspired by tradi-tional Japanese houses made of bamboo,began to use paper tubes in his built struc-tures. This eventually developed into aningenious application in inexpensive anddurable housing units, first offered to the victims of earthquakes in Kobe, Japan, in1995, and later to house refugees in emer-gency situations in other parts of the world.

Jeremy Edmiston and DouglasGauthier of the New York firmSYSTEMarchitects set out on a similar mis-sion, designing refugee housing for Kosovoand creating an easily transportable, simple-to-construct kit of parts to create housingfrom prefabricated components. Their projectwas designed to be constructed primarily ofStresskin, an inexpensive panel system thatsandwiches a layer of foam between twosheets of corrugated-metal decking, provid-ing insulation as well as durability.

So why not the Quonset hut? Will itsee a rebirth? Although the DNA of the

Quonset—whose unique structural systemliberated the interior space from walls andother supports—can be found in any numberof contemporary designs, such as the StevenF. Udvar-Hazy Center at the Smithsonian’sNational Air and Space Museum, a revivalseems unlikely.

Perhaps the answer to the question ofits unlikely restoration is partly in its geome-try and partly in the American ideal that newis always better. The Quonset hut’s shape isboth its charm and its nemesis. The Quonsethut is a simple geometric form where thewalls and roof are one and the same, muchlike the tipi, A-frame, igloo, and pyramid.None of these, all popular building forms intheir time, have prevailed in contemporarytimes. Though cost- and time-efficient, theQuonset possessed attributes, such as porta-bility and ease of assembly, that overshad-owed its less-than-desirable use of space. Itscurved walls create a lot of lateral space toolow to stand in. As a dwelling, the Quonsethut was often unfriendly to furniture, art-work, and other traditional, domestic embell-

Julie Decker and Chris Chiei134

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 tem-

porary housing of earthquake

victims, Nagata-Ku, Kobe,

Japan, 1995

ishments. Jim Griffin, who grew up in aQuonset home in Seward, Alaska, said itsform made the Quonset hut a challenge tobeautify: “When you’re in a building that’sgot, I’m going to guess, twenty- to twenty-five-foot diameter with three-foot pony wallsholding 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 meantonly for times of crisis when creativeinstincts, born of necessity, are at theirzenith. Or, perhaps, it is meant for thosewhose imaginations can embrace theextraordinary. In a society where self-expres-sion is controlled by a housing committeeestablished for no other purpose than self-perpetuated mediocrity, Quonset-hutdwellers, where they have been permitted toexist, seem to go to great lengths to distin-guish themselves in their tin cans. Quonsethuts have served many as a canvas of lifeand living. Quonset dwellers have been freeto record themselves much the same waythat ancient people did in the caves ofEurope. World War II GIs painted the interiorwallboard of Quonset huts with scenes ofplaces they would rather have been andimages of women they would very much liketo have known. In the postwar years, selfexpression moved from inside to outside onQuonsets with murals, such as in the case ofartist Lee Culhane who continually repaintshis Quonset shed in Cohoe, Alaska, asthough it were an ongoing art exhibition.Fairbanks artist David Mollett felt lucky tofind his Quonset hut in 1978 in which he stilllives today:

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 auc-

tion, 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 timewe notice buildings is when they are beingbuilt and when they are falling down.”Quonset huts are doing just that; they arefalling down. Where they have not been dis-mantled and shipped out, they have been left

Quonsets Today135

Kohler, Quonset comic,

1946


Quonset hut residence in

Girdwood, AK, 2003;

OPPOSITE: Cohoe Studio

storage shed in Cohoe, AK,

2003


to rust and decay. Today, the few Quonsethuts that remain in use still serve as stores,restaurants, homes, and churches, but theyare distinct icons of the past. Some are pre-served because of the simplicity they repre-sent; others are merely the most economicsolution to a need for shelter.

Our nation’s relationship with theQuonset has been a tumultuous, compli-cated, 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 alove hate relationship—you start hating it atthe beginning, and then by the time youleave, you’re looking at your new house andsaying, ‘Lets put an arch into the house—sortof like a Quonset, but not really.’”5

Perhaps the Quonset hut will enjoy aresurgence in a time of crisis and return toits glory days when it was prefabricated bythe tens of thousands. More likely, someother structure, born from the specific needsof its era, will rise to the occasion. TheQuonset hut was a building of its time thatgot to hang around just a bit longer. Perhapsit falls just short of being celebrated. But itssimple form, its sometimes awkward butproven ability to adapt to a variety ofclimates and uses, its durability, and its stubborn longevity make it a true Americanicon. It’s the temporary building that almostbecame permanent. It is the hut that hascome full circle.

Quonsets Today139

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

Appendix: Hut Types

1. QUONSET HUT—T-RIB16' x 36' and 16' x 20'

The original Quonset hut, which cameto be known as the T-Rib Quonset,was developed in response to theNavy’s desire to produce a new pre-fabricated hut system during WorldWar II to shelter troops abroad. AtQuonset Point, Rhode Island, GeorgeA. Fuller and his design team, underthe direction of Otto Brandenberger,created the T-Rib Quonset, an adapt-able building for mass production thatwould be portable, erected andknocked down quickly and easily,adaptable to any climate and geogra-phy, and provide soldiers with themost protection and comfort possible.

2. QUONSET HUT—REDESIGN16' x 36' and 24' x 60'The basic strategy of the QuonsetRedesign was to keep the footprint ofthe T-Rib design but to introduce alighter I-shaped steel arch with four-foot vertical sidewalls. The new arch,assembled in two sections instead ofthree, reduced erection time andrequired fewer fasteners. More impor-

tantly, counter-height equipment could now be installed close to thewall without out any residual loss offloor space.

3. QUONSET STRAN-STEEL HUT20' x 48' and 20' x 56'The third and final generation of theQuonset hut was produced by Stran-Steel of Detroit, Michigan. This designreverted back to the full arch profileand used many of the same structuralcomponents as the Redesign, but nowit appeared lighter, thinner, or pushedto greater spans. Initially introducedwith corrugated panels, similar to the T-Rib, it was later modified to use the factory-curved panel only atthe ridge. The remaining sidewall and end wall panels were mountedwith corrugated metal oriented in theopposite direction.

4. PACIFIC HUT18'–6" x 37'–4"Frank Hobbs, a mechanical engineerwho later formed the Pacific HutCompany in Seattle, took blueprints ofhis all-wood Quonset design, thePacific hut, to the U.S. Army Corps ofEngineers in summer of 1942. It wasdesigned to overcome the major short-

coming of the Quonset: its all-steelconstruction. Steel was not only a crit-ical material during the war but alsorusted quickly in the tropics and, inthe Arctic, permitted cold temperaturemigration across metal structures.Wood structures greatly reduce ther-mal transfer. The Pacific hut is easilyrecognizable by the celotex, a water-proof form of masonite, exterior andthe triangular ridgeline vent cover.

5. BUTLER HUT16' x multiple of 4' and 24' x multiple of 4'Developed by the ButlerManufacturing Company of KansasCity, Missouri, the Butler hut was anall-steel arched hut—profile slightlymore than half a circle—with U-shaped arched ribs around an eight-foot radius. End walls were framedwith steel and end walls and side-walls were enclosed with two-foot-wide standing seam metal sheets. Not long after World War II, however,Butler abandoned the curved-roofapproach, although they still producemetal prefabricated buildings todaywith gabled roofs.

Appendix148

6. JAMESWAY16' x multiple of 4' and 20' x multiple of 4'The James Manufacturing Company ofFort Atkinson, Wisconsin, created aversion of the Quonset hut withwooden ribs and an insulated fabriccovering for the Army Air Corps. Thisportable and easy-to-assemble hutwas designed for Arctic weather con-ditions when personnel were wearingbulky clothes and mittens but neededshelter construction to proceed quickly.Insulated blankets in four-foot-widelengths were made with glass fiberinsulation faced with flame-proofmuslin and enclosed in plastic-treatedcotton that was water, vermin, and fireproof. The hardware (nails, fasteners,and connecting bars) was the onlymetal component, and the whole package weighed 1,200 pounds for a 16' x 16' hut. Its wooden packingcrates were designed for reuse as thehut floor.

7. ARMCO HUT20' x 50'During World War II, the ArmcoInternational Corporation ofMiddletown, Ohio, produced archedcorrugated ingot iron bunkers, ammu-nition magazines, and personnel shel-ters. The heavy steel buildings weremodeled on earth-retaining structures

such as culverts and storm sewers.The heavy iron (8- to 14-gauge) did notrequire supporting ribs but was curvedand corrugated much like a Quonsethut. Armcos were strong enough to be completely buried in up to six feetof dirt.

8. PORTASEAL HUT 16' x 37'The Portaseal hut, frequently seenalong the Alaska Highway and CANOLpipeline, is a Canadian version of thewood-framed, plywood-clad structure.These huts were shipped in prefabri-cated sections, could be erected quick-ly, and were heated with improvisedoil drum stoves. Identifiable featuresinclude a tar-paper finish nailed atopplywood sidewalls, end walls withlarge windows, and wide batten-typetrim boards atop the end walls' verticalpanel joints. Some surviving exampleshave been observed with six-inchsheathing strips in lieu of plywood.

9. EMKAY HUT20' x 48'Morrison-Knudsen Company designedthe Emkay (M-K) hut to shelter theircrews for their large and remote mili-tary construction contracts. While they

credit the origin of the design, inspiredby a chicken shed, to their engineer G.D. Paxson, the similarities to theQuonset and Pacific huts are undeni-able. Built in Boise, Iowa, beginning in1943, the Emkay had laminated woodribs. Its distinct “two-centered arch”appears pointed, or gothic, in profile.The huts look peaked from outsideafter the exterior sheathing is applied.All styles were built entirely of woodand wallboard, could be built to anylengths in multiples of twelve feet, andcould accommodate different climates.

10. COWIN HUT36' x 60'The large, steel semicircular ware-houses were developed by Cowin andCompany, Inc. for the Air Corps atWright Field. Cowin called their struc-ture a 36' x 60' Steeldrome. To resistthrust on the arch caused by snowloads, Cowins used a truss system ofhorizontal steel tie rods and verticalsteel hangers. Not many Cowin hutswere shipped to Alaska after 1943because they were inadequate forAlaskan snow loads. A number ofthem collapsed in their first winter of use.

Appendix149

149

Notes

Chapter 1How the Hut Came to BeChris Chiei1 Richard M. Casella, Martha H. Bowers, and

Leonid I. Shmookler, prepared for the United

States Navy, Northern Division Naval

Facilities Engineering Command, Recordation

Report for Naval Construction Training

Center Davisville (Camp Endicott) Buildings

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

Washington County, Rhode Island, (Lester,

PA: Northern Division Naval Facilities

Engineering Command, 1997), 9.

2 George A. Fuller Company, George A. Fuller

Company: General Contractors (New York:

George A. Fuller Company, 1937).

3 “Dunbar Sullivan Dredging Company:

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

Historical Collection of the Great Lakes,

Bowling Green State University Manuscript

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

colleges/library/hcgl/glms0003.html

(accessed November 14, 2003).

4 “Merritt-Chapman and Scott,” International

Database and Gallery of Structures (15 October

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

data/fir1299.php (accessed November 14,

2003).

5 Recordation Report for Naval Construction

Training Center Davisville: 9.

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

United States Foreign Policy, 1931–1941

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

Office, 1943): 564–67.

7 Board to Negotiate Fee Contracts to the

Chief of the Bureau of Yards and Docks,

“Contract NOy-4175, Aviation shore facilities,

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

tract correspondence, 20 May 1941, RG 71,

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

Washington, D.C.

8 Public Laws. Part 1 of United States

Statutes at Large Containing the Laws and

Concurrent Resolutions Enacted during the

First Session of the Seventy-Seventh Congress

of the United States of America, 1941–1942,

and Treaties, International Agreements Other

than Treaties, and Proclamations

(Washington: Government Printing Office,

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

these two firms for numerous construction

projects on the Atlantic Coast and overseas,

they eventually acquired the official title of

“East Coast Contractors.” “The Quonset

Hut,” transcript, 187, Providence College

Archives, Rhode Island.

9 Public Laws, 31–33.

10 Forward bases are special-operations

bases usually located in friendly territory, or

afloat, that are established to extend control

or communications or to provide support for

training and tactical operations. United

States Navy, Building the Navy’s Bases in

World War II: History of the Bureau of Yards

and Docks and the Civil Engineering Corps

1940–1946 (Washington, DC: Government

Printing Office, 1947), 1:162.


Training Center Davisville, 11.

12 George A. Fuller Company, The George A.

Fuller Company: War and Peace, 1940–1947

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

62.

13 “They Slept Under Our Roof,” unknown

newspaper source, nd., Quonset Hut

Collection, Providence College Archives.


Fuller Company, 61–62.

15 Advanced bases are small temporary

bases established near or within a joint spe-

cial operations area to command, control,

and/or support training or tactical opera-

tions, usually controlled and/or supported

by a main operations base or a forward

operations base.


Fuller Company, 62.

17 Ibid., 63.

18 A 1985 Yankee Magazine article by Tim

Clark explored and discredited a fifth mem-

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

engineer with George A. Fuller and

Company, is memorialized as the hut’s

designer in his obituary appearing in the

New York Times that year, but McDonnell,

the last surviving member of the design

team, claimed to have never hear of Dejongh.

Tim Clark, “Living in a Quonset Hut Is Like

Eating Spam,” Yankee Magazine 49, no.11

(November 1985): 119

19 Robert Brandenberger (son of Otto

Brandenberger) to Author, Responses to

Interview Questionnaire regarding Otto

Brandenberger, 11 January 2004.

20 Rudolph A. Hempe, “Ugly Hut Put

Quonset on Map,” Providence Evening

Bulletin, 15 July 1966, Quonset Hut

Collection, Providence College Archives.

21 Ibid.

22 Fred McCosh, Nissen of the Huts (Borne

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

76–108.

23 Keith Mallory and Arvid Ottar, The

Architecture of War (New York: Pantheon,

1973), 81.

24 McCosh, Nissen of the Huts, 109–12.

25 Hempe, “Ugly Hut Put Quonset on Map.”


Fuller Company, 63.

27 Ibid.

28 Miller assigned a Navy Drawing

Accession number 2759 to the drawings and

forwarded them to Moreell for review.

29 R. V. Miller to the Chief of the Bureau of

Yards and Docks, Navy Department,

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

Naval Air Station Quonset Point, R. I.

Temporary Aviation Facilities,” 4 April 1941,

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

Washington, DC.

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

construction, U.S. Naval Air Station, Quonset

Point, RI, “Temporary Aviation Facilities,

Contract NOy-4175—A, B, One, Two—

Revisions to Partial Summary of Equipment,”

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

Notes150

Archives I, Washington, DC.

31 Tim Clark, “Living in a Quonset Hut Is Like

Eating Spam,” Yankee Magazine 49, no.11

(November 1985): 119.

32 Officer-in-Charge of Contract NOy-4175 to

contractors, “Temporary Aviation Facilities,

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

box 774, vol. 1, National Archives I,

Washington, DC.


Fuller Company, 63.

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

box 3, manuscript collection 117, Manuscripts

Division, Quonset Point—Davisville Records,

Rhode Island Historical Society, Providence,

RI.

35 Building the Navy’s Bases in World War II,

1: 162.

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

Marine Barracks, Quantico, VA, “Nissen

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

National Archives I, Washington, DC.

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

Yards and Docks, “Equipment for Advanced

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

box 779, vol. 26. National Archives I,

Washington, DC.

38 It is noted that several other contract cor-

respondences between 1941 and 1942 make

reference to the twenty-foot-long hut,

although little is known about this variation

of the design.

39 D. W. Hopkins, memorandum to the Chief

of the Bureau of Yards and Docks, “Comments

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

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

DC.

40 Officer-in-Charge of Construction to Chief

of the Bureau of Yards and Docks, “Contract

NOy-4175, Naval Air Station Quonset Point,

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

One Two—Crating of Quonset Huts,” August

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


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

struction, Naval Air Station, Quonset Point,

RI, “Temporary Aviation Facilities, Contract

NOy-4175, A, B, One and Two—Change in

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

71, box 774, National Archives I, Washington,

DC.

42 According to Fuller: “A night gale of hurri-

cane proportion that wrecked shipping in the

harbor, tossed crumpled PBYs (patrol bomber

planes used by the Navy) on the beach like

paper hats, and ripped the covering com-

pletely off of many British Nissen huts, left

the Quonset huts practically undamaged.”

George A. Fuller Company, The George A.

Fuller Company, 64.

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

box 3, manuscript collection 117, Manuscripts

Division, Quonset Point—Davisville Records,

Rhode Island Historical Society, Providence,

RI.

44 Admiral Ben Moreell to Officer-in-Charge

of Construction, Contract NOy-4175, Naval

Air Station, Quonset Point, RI, “Additional

purchases under Contract NOy-4175—

Supplemental Agreement No. 2 and Change

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

14, National Archives I, Washington, DC.

45 George A. Fuller Co. & Merritt-Chapman

Scott Corp., Boiler and Battery Room Addition

to Dispensary Surgical Hut (drawing), Navy

Accession No. 3736, approved 5 September

1941, RG 71, Master Facility 215,

Cartographic and Architectural Branch,

National Archives II, College Park, MD.

46 Monica Garcia Brooks, ed., The Good

Housekeeping Stran-Steel House, Chicago

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

com/~brooks_mgb/stran3.htm (accessed on

November 16, 2003).

47 George A. Fuller Co. & Merritt-Chapman

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

(drawing), Navy Accession No. 3722,

approved 21 October 1941, RG 71, Master

Facility 215, Cartographic and Architectural

Branch, National Archives II, College Park,

MD.

48 Chief of the Bureau of Yards and Docks to

Officer-in-Charge of Construction for Contract

NOy-4175, Naval Air Station, Quonset Point,

RI, “Temporary Advanced Facilities, Contract

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

for purchase of Security Materials,” 15

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

National Archives I, Washington, DC.

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

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

Naval Air Station, Quonset Point, RI,

“Contract NOy-4175, Temporary Advanced

Facilities, Program for Production of Quonset

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

18, National Archives I, Washington, DC.


1: 162.


Training Center Davisville: 11.

52 George A. Fuller Company & Merritt-

Chapman Scott Corporation, purchase order

#A–16841 addressed to Great Lakes Steel

Corporation, Stran-Steel Division, 24 July

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



Fuller Company, 65.

54 Ibid.


1: 162.

56 Ibid.

57 Ibid.

58 Ibid., 1:374–75.

59 Ibid.

60 Ibid.

61 Ibid., 1:133.

62 Leonid I. Shmookler, Naval Construction

Battalion Center Davisville, Davisville, Rhode

Island, A Historical Perspective 1942–1994,

(Port Hueneme, California: Northern Division

Naval Facilities Engineering Command,

1994): 1.

63 Ibid., 1:133–34.


1:135–36.

65 Naval Construction Battalion Center

Davisville, Davisville, Rhode Island, A

Notes151

151

Historical Perspective 1942–1994, 4.

66 90th USN Construction Battalion: Its

History and Accomplishments 1943–1945

(Baton Rouge, LA: Army & Navy Pictorial

Publishers, 1946).


1:373.

68 Arctic Contractors, 20' x 48' Hut Truss Trail

Freighting: Oumalik Test Well, No. 1, Drawing

No 698.1, NARL Collection Archives,

University of Alaska, Fairbanks.

69 “Post Maintenance Builds Trailer to Move

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

Chapter 3War, Design, and Weapons of MassConstructionBrian Carter1 The components defined two millenna ago

by the Roman architect Vitruvius.

2 “The Nissen Hut on the Western Front,”

The Architects’ and Builders’ Journal 45

(February 14, 1917): 91.

3 Terry Smith, Albert Kahn: Inspiration for the

Modern (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan

Museum of Art, 2001), 35.

4 Waldo G. Bowman, “Military huts and

structures at American installations in

Britain,” Engineering News Record, October

21, 1943, 98.

5 “Competition Prize Winners,” The

Architectural Forum, September 1943, 88–89.

6 Herbert Matter, Charles Eames, and

Buckminster Fuller, “Prefabricated Housing,”

Arts & Architecture, July 1944, 37.

7 Ibid.

8 Ibid.

9 Reyner Banham, The Age of the Masters

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

10 Ibid.

11 David Gilson De Long, The Architecture of

Bruce Goff: Buildings and Projects, 1916–1974

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

195.

12 Banham, The Age of the Masters, 79.

13 Ibid.

14 Marc-Antoine Laugier, Essai sur

L’architecture (An Essay on Architecture),

trans. Wolfgang Hermann and Anni

Herrmann (Los Angeles: Hennessey and

Ingalls, Inc., 1977).

15 I wish to acknowledge the work of Keith

Mallory and Arvid Ottar and in particular

their book, The Architecture of War, which

was an invaluable reference in preparing this

chapter; Chris Chiei and Julie Decker for

their advice; and Martha Thorne and Lori

Hanna Boyer at The Art Institute of Chicago

who provided access to many drawings by

Bruce Goff in the Institute’s archive at the

Department of Architecture.

Chapter 4After the War: Quonset Huts and TheirIntegration Into Daily American LifeTom Vanderbilt1 Charles Cutler, Tracks That Speak (New

York: Houghton Mifflin Co., 2002).

2 Donald Albrecht, World War II and the

American Dream: How War Time Buildings

Changed a Nation (Cambridge, MA: MIT

Press, 1995), xvi.

3 Great Lakes Steel Corporations, Stran-Steel

Division advertisement, New Pencil Points,

September 1943.


Division advertisement, New Pencil Points,

September 1943.

5 Thomas Hine, “The Search for the Postwar

House,” in Blueprints for Modern Living:

History and Legacy of the Case Study Houses

(Los Angeles: Museum of Contemporary Art;

Cambridge: MIT Press, 1989), 169.

6 J. B. Jackson, Discovering the Vernacular

Landscape (New Haven: Yale University

Press, 1986), 135.


Division advertisement, Architectural Record,

February 1944.


Division advertisement, Architectural Record,

September 1944.

9 Paulette Goddard, “The Great Housing

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

1945): 30.

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

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

33.

11 Ibid.

12 Ibid.

13 Paulette Goddard, “The Great Housing

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

1945): 33.

14 Harley E. Howe, “Stop Gap Housing,”

Popular Science, March 1946, 66–71.

15 Ibid., 68.

16 Gwendolyn Wright, Building the Dream: A

Social History of Housing in America (New

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

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

20 Arthur J. Pulos, The American Design

Adventure, 1940–1975 (Cambridge, Mass:

MIT Press), 31.

21 Quoted in Dana Cuff, The Provisional City:

Los Angeles Stories of Architecture and

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

182.

22 Rodger Young was a slain serviceman

after whom the Rodger Young Village was

named. The village was, then, a rare instance

of a new ethnically mixed American commu-

nity. Dana Cuff, The Provisional City: Los

Angeles Stories of Architecture and Urbanism

(Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 2000).

23 “Big Rodger Young Village Vanishing,” Los

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

24 Cuff, The Provisional City, 186.

25 Ibid., 178.

26 Grace Simons, “Project Eviction

Attacked,” California Eagle 72, no. 45

(February 7, 1952): 1.

27 Mark Pandanell, “Texas City Firefighters

Notes152

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

ter.html.


Division advertisement, Saturday Evening

Post, 15 May 1948.

29 “Converted Quonset,” Art and

Architecture, December 1946, 34–35.

30 P. J. McKenna, “Planting for the Temporary

Home, The New York Times, 6 April 1947.

31 Helen Weigel Brown, “A Home from a

Quonset Hut,” House Beautiful, September

1946, 120–2.

32 Helen Weigel Brown, “How to Convert a

Quonset to an Emergency Home,” House

Beautiful, September 1946, 140–41.


Division advertisement, Saturday Evening

Post, 14 June 1947.

34 Quonsets: The Story of a Building that

Gave America a New Standard of Quality

Building Values (Detroit: Great Lakes Steel

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

35 Los Angeles Times, September 6, 1991.

36 Thomas Hine, Populuxe (New York: Alfred

A. Knopf, 1986).

37 The Talk of the Town, The New Yorker,

March 1946.

38 John J. Bertin and Michel L. Smith,

Aerodynamics for Engineers, 2nd ed. (New

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

39 Tim Clark, “Living in a Quonset Hut is Like

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

(November 1985): 120.

40 Abigail McCarthy, “The Can-Do Quonset,”

Commonweal, November 8, 1991, 634.

41 Lewis Lapham, “The Boys Next Door,”

Harper’s Magazine, July 2001, 11.

42 Amber Ridington, “History Worth

Preserving—The Quonset Auditorium,”

Landmark Report, (Bowling Green, KY:

Landmark Association of Bowling Green-

Warren County, February 2002), 1.

43 Ibid.

44 Tom Quinlan, “The Stat-up Culture,”

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

ley/living/2765031.htm

(posted 28 February 2002).

45 Alastair Gordon, Weekend Utopia (New

York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2001), 49.

46 Ibid., 50.

47 “Hillside House,” Architectural Forum,

August 1950, 95.

48 Quote from Sheldon Cheney and Martha

Candler Cheney, Art and the Machine: An

Account of Industrial Design in 20th-century

America (1936; New York: Acanthus Press,

1992), 1.

49 Ruth Ford, letter to Bruce Goff, October 18,

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

Archives, Ryerson and Burnham Archives,

Art Institute of Chicago, Illinois.

50 Jeffrey Cook, The Architecture of Bruce

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

51 The Provisional City, 194.

52 Great Lakes Steel Corp., Stran-Steel

Division advertisement text, Architectural

Record, June 1947.

53 Jan Cohn, The Palace or the Poorhouse:

The American House as a Cultural Symbol

(East Lansing, MI: Michigan State University

Press, 1979), 238.

54 Alan Dunn, The Last Lath (New York:

Architectural Record and F. W. Dodge

Corporation, 1947).

55 The Los Angeles Times, September 6, 1991.


57 Christopher Reynolds, “An Ode to the

Forgotten Quonset Anniversary: The corru-

gated metal hut turned 50 this summer. But

the ‘fabulous example of American ingenuity’

will go unfeted” Los Angeles Times, Sep 6,

1991, 16, Orange County edition.


59 The Sacramento Bee, April 4, 2003.

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

~hta/history.html

61 “Postwar homes are latest preservation

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

62 The Journal News, March 5, 2001.

63 Fred Williamson quoted in Tim Clark,

“Living in a Quonset Hut is Like Eating

Spam,” 122.

64 T. Luke Young, The Unassuming Quonset:

Survival of Semi-Circular Significance, no. 4

(Washington, DC: Cultural Resource

Management, U.S. Department of the Interior,

National Park Service, 1996), 9.

65 Joe Marshall, letter to the editor, “City

Handling of Huts Distasteful Troubling!” Daily

News Bowling Green Kentucky, November 10,

2003, http://bgdailynews.com/.

66 Quentin Wagenfield, “From Sheds to

Sanctuaries,” Your Church. January/February

2003, 54.

Chapter 5The Huts That Wouldn’t Go Away:Alaska Adopts the HutChris Chiei1 “100 Home Units Seen Needed Here,”

Fairbanks Daily News Miner, January 20,

1945.

2 “Housing Needs Reflected in C. of C.

Study,” Anchorage Daily Times, January 20,

1945.

3 “1482 Housing Units Needed, Delays

Loom,” Anchorage Daily Times, September 3,

1946.

4 Annual Report of the Governor of Alaska,

June 30, 1948:46, Alaska State Archives,

Juneau, Alaska.

5 “Army to Take Over Hotel Here,” Fairbanks

Daily News Miner, September 15, 1942.

6 “Another Hotel Here Taken Over,” Fairbanks

Daily News Miner, September 29, 1942.

7 “List Materials Considered Taboo In

Construction Industry,” Anchorage Daily

Times, 1 May 1, 1942.

8 “A Stampede to Buy Homes,” Anchorage

Daily Times, July, 11 1944.

9 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

Construction Company, Pacific Builder and

Engineer, December 1943.

Notes153

12 See Appendix: Hut Types. James D. Bush,

Narrative Report of Alaska Construction

1941–1944 (Anchorage: Department of the

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

and Civilian Aeronautics Administration, 36 x

60' Steeldrome Cowin Huts Erection and

Insulation Details (drawing), based on Cowin

Company originals, 1944.

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.

16 See Appendix: Hut Types. Butler

Manufacturing Company, Building a Legacy:

Butler in the Twentieth Century, Butler

Military Quarters brochure (Kansas City, MO:

Butler Manufacturing Company, 1941).

17 Anchorage Ordinance No. 157, June 13,

1945: 41–43, Loussac Library, Alaska

Collection Archives; and “Restrict Use of

Quonsets to Two Years,” Anchorage Daily

Times, June 14, 1945.

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,

December 2, 1947.

21 “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 “Ask Space for Huts for Teen Town Here,”

Anchorage Daily Times, February 28, 1946.

25 “Elks Quonset Hut Purchased by Teen

Town,” Fairbanks Daily News Miner,

December 12, 1945.

26 “Statement Issued on Closing of Teen

Town Project,” Fairbanks Daily News Miner,

October 6, 1947.

27 “Teen Town Hut Bought as Bus Waiting

Room,” Fairbanks Daily News Miner, October

27, 1947.

28 “No Housing Available for Needy

Transients,” Anchorage Daily Times, May 6,

1946.

29 “Welfare Group Given Quonset,”

Anchorage Daily Times, 23, October 23, 1946.

30 The Alaskan Railroad was an icon of

Alaska and still is a major corporation and a

large employer in Fairbanks, Anchorage, and

Seward.

31 United States Department of the Interior,

The Alaska Railroad War Record, August 20,

1945, 40.

32 “Housing Units to be Placed on

Government Hill,” Anchorage Daily Times,

June 13, 1946.

33 Ibid.

34 “ARR Granted Whittier Area,” Anchorage

Daily Times, July 26, 1946.

35 “ARR Workers Can Get Huts,” Anchorage

Daily Times, August 21, 1946.

36 “Government Hill Project Halted by Lack

of Funds.” Anchorage Daily Times, November

13, 1948.

37 “Anchorage Men Buy Seward Army

Housing,” Anchorage Daily Times, October

10, 1944.

38 Fred R. Kessler, Real Estate Consultant

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

Land Management, August 5, 1947, Record

Group No. 270, box 2, Real Estate Disposal

Case Files, 1944–49, National Archives—

Pacific Alaska Region, Anchorage.

39 See Appendix: Hut Types.

40 “Farmers Buy Garrison Building,”

Ketchikan Alaska Chronicle, October 9, 1945.

41 Jessie DeVries, interview by Chris Chiei,

January 25, 2003.

42 Ibid.

43 Dennis and Cleo Green, interview by

Chris Chiei, July 10, 2003.

44 Wyman Owens, email message to Sandi

Gerjevic, November 18, 2001.

45 See Appendix: Hut Types. Progressive

Architecture, February 1943, 25. This hut was

designed for Arctic weather conditions.

46 Gretchen Bersch and Findlay Abbott,

interview by Chris Chiei, April 29, 2004.

47 Ibid.

48 Two page advertisement by Oregon

Export Company, “Your New Home,”

Anchorage Daily Times, April 22, 1947.

49 “Packaged Homes to be Sold Here by Selid

Company,” Fairbanks Daily News Miner, April

23, 1947.

50 Tyler Jones, “Dine in a Quonset hut,”

Anchorage Daily Times, April 8, 1973.

51 Gerry Kirchner, We Found our Spot in

Alaska (Anchorage: Soroptimist

Club), 3.

52 Ibid., 10–11.

53 Helen Gillette, “Kirchner Sees Gloomy

Future for the Creative Cook,” Anchorage

Daily Times, September 11, 1968.

54 Kirchner, We Found our Spot in Alaska, 18.

55 Ibid., 22.

56 Ibid., 20–21.

57 Ibid., 27.

58 Ibid., 29.

59 Helen Gillette, “Kirchner Sees Gloomy

Future for the Creative Cook,” Anchorage


60 He opposed the statehood of Alaska; he

did not think Alaska was ready.

61 Bill Kossen, “Garden of Eatin’ Food

Rewards Explorers,” Anchorage Daily Times,

March 31, 1982.

62 Ibid.

63 Helve Enatti, “Anchorage Public Schools

1915–1951: A Thirty-six-year School

Development Study” (master’s thesis,

University of Alaska, May 1967), 210, box 1,

volume II, Anchorage Public Schools

Collection, University of Fairbanks Library.

64 “School Board Can Get Huts,” Anchorage

Daily Times, July 17, 1947 and “City Acquires

School Huts,” Anchorage Daily Times, August

7, 1946.

65 Enatti, “Anchorage Public Schools

1915–1951,” 211.

66 “Students Jam School Rooms,” Anchorage


Notes154

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

Frontiersman (Matanuska Valley, Alaska),

February 26, 1953.

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 6Quonsets Today: Concluding ThoughtsJulie 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

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

s/en/d948c8ea6f89ec2ac1256b3b004f8f18.htm.

4 Jim Griffin, interview by Chris Chiei, June

2003.

5 Cathleen Doyle, interview by Chris Chiei,

August 2003.

Notes155

Image Credits

Frontmatteri Courtesy of the National Archives, RG 80-G-

50407

ii–iii Courtesy of the National Archives,

RG80-G-201671

iv Courtesy of the National Archives, RG 80-

G-229524

v Courtesy of the Navy Historical Center, No.

USN 427450

viii Courtesy of the National Archives, RG 80-

G-346021

xiii Courtesy of the University of Alaska

Fairbanks, Elmer E. Rasmuson Library

Archives, Tom Christensen Collection,

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

Introductionxiv Courtesy of the National Archives, Air

Force RG 342-FH-3a3929656

Chapter 1How the Hut Came to BeChris Chieixviii Courtesy of the Rhode Island Historical

Society, Manuscripts Collection, Mss 177,

Quonset Point-Davisville Records, box 3

2 Courtesy of Alaska Design Forum

3 From The George A. Fuller Company, War

and Peace, 1940–1947, George A. Fuller

Company, NY, 1947

4–5 Courtesy of the Brandenberger Family

6 LEFT Courtesy of the National Archives,

RG 111-SC-138660

6 RIGHT Courtesy of the National Archives,

RG 111-SC-129337

8 TOP, CENTER RIGHT, and BOTTOM RIGHT

From The George A. Fuller Company, War

and Peace, 1940–1947, George A. Fuller

Company, NY, 1947


RG-71, box 774, vol. 2

10–11 Courtesy of the Rhode Island Historical



12 Courtesy of the Rhode Island Historical




RG 342-FH-3A-39511


RG 80-G-225423

14 Courtesy of the National Archives, RG 80-

G-209497

15 Courtesy of the National Archives, RG 71,

box 774, vol. 4

16 Courtesy of the Kimberly-Clark Corporate

Archives

17 Courtesy of the National Archives,

Cartographic and Architectural Records,

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

Quonset Point RI Quonset Hut Temp.

Advan. Facility—Redesign of 16-Ft.x36-

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

[30 x 42]


19 From “Japan Attacks U.S.,” Fairbanks

Daily News Miner, December 7, 1941

20 Courtesy of the Rhode Island Historical



21 TOP LEFT Courtesy of the University of

Alaska Fairbanks, Elmer E. Rasmuson

Library Archives, Tom Christensen

Collection, Folder 20, Box 1, Accession

No. 79-29-320

21 TOP RIGHT Courtesy of the University of



Collection, folder 20, box 1, Accession

No. 79-29-319

21 BOTTOM LEFT Courtesy of the University

of Alaska Fairbanks, Elmer E. Rasmuson


Collection, folder 22, box 1, Accession

No. 79-29-330

21 BOTTOM RIGHT Courtesy of the National

Archives, RG 342-FH-3b47102

22 Courtesy of the Kodiak Historical Society,

Logan Estate Collection

25 TOP From Building the Navy’s Bases in

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

United States Government Printing

Office, 1947).

25 BOTTOM Courtesy of Bettmann/CORBIS,

No. BE028487


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


Library Archives, Floyd Akin Collection,

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

164

28 BOTTOM Courtesy of Alaska Design

Forum

Chapter 2Quonsets, Alaska, and World War IISteven Haycox30 Courtesy of the National Archives, RG

342-FH-3a29659

32 Diagram by Clark Yerrington


G-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

36 LEFT Courtesy of the University of Alaska

Fairbanks, Elmer E. Rasmuson Library,

Archives, Willie Hodge Drake Collection,

folder 6, box 2, Accession No. 92-044-

126N

36 TOP RIGHT Courtesy of the National

Archives, RG 80-G-78164

36 BOTTOM RIGHT Courtesy of U.S. Army

Garrison, AK

Image Credits156

37 TOP LEFT Courtesy of the National




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.


G-311919


G-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,

Oliver Pedigo, and Don L. Miller, Wind

Blown and Dripping: A Book of Aleutian

(Aleutian Islands: Privately published,

1945). Courtesy of the Anchorage

Museum of History and Art, No.

B96.35.4.8

40 BOTTOM RIGHT From Bernard Anastasia,

Oliver Pedigo, and Don L. Miller, Wind

Blown and Dripping: A Book of Aleutian

(Aleutian Islands: Privately published,

1945). Courtesy of the Anchorage


B96.35.4.8

41 From Ketchikan Alaska Chronicle,

September 29, 1945


RG 80-G-12031


RG 80-G-12038

45 Photograph by Clark James Mishler

Chapter 3War, Design, and Weapons of MassConstructionBrian Carter46 Courtesy of the Library of Congress Prints

and Photographs Division, Washington,

DC, LC-USZ62-121070

48 Courtesy of Loring

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


Archive, Accession No.1990.819.3

56 BOTTOM Courtesy of the Art Institute of


Archive, Accession No.1990.819.4



Archive, Series III, Box 5, Folder 5.25

58 Photograph by Eliot Elisofon. From “The

Round House,” Life Magazine, March 19,

1951. Courtesy of Time & Life

Pictures/Getty Images, No. 1204682



Archive, Series III, Box 5, Folder 5, 22

60 LEFT Photo by Hans Namuth. Courtesy of

the Center for Creative Photography, No.

CCP_HN_R.Motherwell 1953.

60 RIGHT Photograph by Max Dupain &

Associates

61 Photograph by Gianni Berengo Gardin.

Courtesy of Renzo Piano Building

Workshop.

Chapter 4After the War: Quonset Huts and TheirIntegration Into Daily American LifeTom Vanderbilt62 Coca-Cola advertisement, 1943

64 From Pencil Points, September 1943

65 TOP LEFT Courtesy of the National




65 BOTTOM Courtesy of the National



G-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

National Bank Photograph Collection, Los

Angeles Public Library, and Evelyn De

Wolfe Nadel

74 TOP From “Converted Quonset for Dr. &

Mrs. Morris Felton at Fallen Leaf Lake,

Calif.,” Art and Architecture Magazine,

December 1946

74 BOTTOM From Saturday Evening Post,

May 15, 1948

75 From “Converted Quonset for Dr. & Mrs.

Morris Felton at Fallen Leaf Lake, Calif.,”

Art and Architecture Magazine,

December 1946

76 From “Stop Gap Housing,” Popular

Science, March 1946

77 Cover of Popular Science, March 1946

78–79 From “A home from a Quonset hut,”

House Beautiful, September 1945

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

Image Credits157

157

83 BOTTOM From Saturday Evening Post,

June 14, 1947

85 TOP LEFT Courtesy of The Motion Picture

and Television Photo Archive

85 TOP RIGHT Courtesy of Alaska Design

Forum

85 BOTTOM LEFT Courtesy of Alaska Design

Forum

85 BOTTOM RIGHT Courtesy of Alaska

Design Forum

86 From Saturday Evening Post, March 26,

1949

87 TOP Courtesy of the Yale University

Library, Manuscripts and Archives, New

Haven, CT

87 BOTTOM Courtesy of Bettmann/CORBIS,

No. BE029330

88–89 From Quonsets: The Story of a Building

that Gave America a New Standard of

Quality Building Values, Great Lakes

Steel Corporation, Detroit, MI. Courtesy

of Alaska Design Forum.

90 From Saturday Evening Post, April 12,

1947

91 TOP LEFT From Country Gentlemen, June

1946

91 TOP RIGHT Courtesy of Alaska Design

Forum

91 BOTTOM LEFT Courtesy of Alaska Design

Forum

91 BOTTOM RIGHT Courtesy of the Seabee

Museum and Memorial Park, Quonset

Point

92 TOP Courtesy of Joe Marshall

92 BOTTOM LEFT Courtesy of the Country

Music Hall of Fame and Museum,

Nashville, TN

92 BOTTOM RIGHT From “Johnny Maddox

and his Rhythm Masters Return to the

New Quonset Every Saturday Night,”

Park City Daily News, March 21, 1952.

Courtesy of Park City Daily News.

93 Courtesy of the Gerald R. Ford Library,

Ann Arbor, MI

94 Photo by Judith Turner. Courtesy of Judith

Turner.

95 TOP From “Hillside House,” Architectural

Forum, August 1950

95 BOTTOM From “Bank in Cleveland,”

Architectural Forum, September 1948

96 Photograph by Eliot Elisofon. Courtesy of

Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images, No.

1204684

97 Photograph by Eliot Elisofon. Courtesy of

Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images, No.

1204686

98 From Architectural Record, June 1947

99 From Alan Dunn, The Last Lath (New

York: Architectural Record and the F.W.

Dodge Corporation, 1947).

103 Courtesy of Abbey of our Lady of the

Holy Trinity, Huntsville, UT

Chapter 5The Huts That Wouldn’t Go Away:Alaska Adopts the HutChris Chiei104 Courtesy of Chris Arend Photography

106 Headline in Anchorage Daily Times,

August 29, 1946

107 Courtesy of the Anchorage Museum of

History and Art, No. BL79.2.110


History and Art, No. BL79.2.7754

110 Article in Anchorage Daily Times, August

21, 1946


History and Art, No. B59.X.1.72

112 TOP Photograph by Kevin G. Smith

112 BOTTOM Courtesy of the Anchorage


B59.X.1.22 and B59.X.1.23

113 Courtesy of Hal Johnston

116 Courtesy of the Abbott family

117 TOP Courtesy of the Anchorage Museum

of History and Art, Steve McCutcheon

Collection, No. MCC 175

117 BOTTOM LEFT Courtesy of Duke Russell

117 BOTTOM RIGHT Courtesy of the

Anchorage Museum of History and Art

120 LEFT Photo by Hermann N. Kurriger.

Courtesy of the Anchorage Museum of

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 PHO-

080 Accession No. 77-56 #325

126 RIGHT Photograph by Clark James

Mishler


128 Photograph by Bruce Binder



Chapter 6Quonsets Today: Concluding ThoughtsJulie 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.

136–37 Photographs by Kevin G. Smith


138 BOTTOM Courtesy of Wolfgang

Kaehler/CORBIS, No. WK019441


140 Photographs by Kevin G. Smith

141 Photographs by Clark James Mishler


142 BOTTOM Photograph by Clark James

Mishler

143 TOP Photograph by Clark James Mishler

143 BOTTOM Photograph by Patrick J.

Endres

144 Photograph by Kevin G. Smith

Image Credits158

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

AppendixHut-type drawings by Shelah Shanks and

Clark Yerrington

CoverFront 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


BOTTOM RIGHT Courtesy of Bettmann/

CORBIS, No. BE029330

Image Credits159

IndexItalics indicate illustrations.

Abbey of Our Lady of the Holy Trinity

(Huntsville, Utah), 101, 103

Abbott, Chuck, 116

Abbott, Findlay, 114

Abbott Loop Church (Anchorage, Alaska),

124

Aboriginal Alcoholic Rehabilitation Centre

(Glen Morcutt), 60

acoustics, 123, 124

Advanced Base Depot, 23

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

map, 32

Alaska Defense Command, 34, 43

Alaska Design Forum, xi

Alaska Highway, 34, 125, 126

Alaska Railroad, 110–11, 118

Alaska Railroad Brotherhood of Locomotive

Firemen and Enginemen, 108

Albrecht, C. Earl, 110

Anchorage, Alaska, 106–8, 119

Anchorage Daily Times, 106, 106, 107, 110

Anchorage Health and Welfare Council,

109–10

Anchorage Rotary Club, 109

Anderson Sheet Metal Company, 7

Andrew Kozak House (Bruce Goff), 59, 59

Architectural Record, 66

Architecture Forum, 94, 95, 96

Arend, Chris, 104

Armco huts, 126, 149

Armco International Corporation, 149

Art & Architecture, 50, 52, 76, 80

Art and the Machine, 71

Attu Island, 43

Ban, Shigeru, 133–34

Banham, Reyner, 54, 60

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

Base Hospital #3 (Espiritu Santo, South

Pacific), 66

Behlen, Walt, 86

Benjamin, Dick, 123

Bersch, Gretchen, 114–15

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

Bethlehem Steel Company, 16

Bishop, William, 123

Boy Scout Troop 618, 109

Bradley, Owen, 87, 93

Brandenberger, Otto, 4, 4, 19, 148

resume, 5

Brink, Frank, 109

Buckner, Simon Bolivar, 33, 43

building industry, 68, 70, 106

Butler, Hugh, 119

Butler huts, 108, 126, 129, 148

Butler Manufacturing Company, 52–53, 148

Camp Parks Chapel and Library (Bruce Goff),

55, 57, 94

Canol Pipeline project, 34, 35

Carnegie-Illinois Steel Corporation, 16

Carroll, Cornel John E., 125

Case Study House program, 52

CB. See Seabees.

Cedros Design District, 100

celotex, 148

Chareau, Pierre, 60–61, 94

Chase, David, 84

Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints

(Bruce Goff), 57

Cline, Patsy, 92

Coca-Cola, 62

Codrescu, Andrei, 133

Cohn, Jan, 99

Cohoe Studio shed (Cohoe, Alaska), 136

Construction Battalion. See Seabees.

Cook, Jeffrey, 98

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

Cowin and Company, 149

Cowin huts, 106, 149

Crystal Palace, xvi

Cuff, Dana, 72

Culhane, Lee, 135

Cunningham, Thomas, 124–25

curling, 121

De Haviland, Olivia, 36

Designs for Postwar Living, 50

Destroyers for Bases Agreement, 2, 26

DeVries, Jessie, 113, 114

Dimond, Anthony, 33

domes, 60

Doyle, Cathleen, 121–22, 139

Dubee, Hank, 123, 130

Dutch Harbor, Alaska, 42, 42, 43

Dymaxion Deployment Unit (Emanuel

Norquist), 52–53

Dymaxion House (R. Buckminster Fuller), 46,

52, 54

Eagle Plant (Eagle “B”), 49

Eames, Charles, 52, 53, 54, 64, 65–66

Eames, Ray, 51, 53

Eareckson, W. O., xiv

Edmiston, Jeremy, 134

Emkay (M-K) hut, 149

Entenza, John, 52

Essai sur l’architecture (Marc-Antoine

Laugier), 61

factories, 49–50

Fairbanks, Alaska, 105–6, 108

Father Tom. See Cunningham, Thomas.

Felton House (John Campbell and Worley K.

Wong Architects), 74, 75

Festo Corporate Design, 133

Fitzgibbon, James, M., 95, 96

Ford, President Gerald, 93

Ford, Ruth Van Sickle, 96

Foster, Norman, 61

FRED (Oskar Leo Kaufmann), 133, 134

FTL Happold, 133

Fuller, George A. See George A. Fuller and

Company.

Fuller, R. Buckminster, 52

Garden of Eatin’ Restaurant, 116–19, 117

Gauthier, Douglas, 134

Gehry, Frank, 135

General Motors, 100

geometry, 134

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

16–17, 23, 148

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

Gomer Pyle USMC (television show), 84

Good Housekeeping-Stran-Steel House, 17

Gordon, Alastair, 94

Government Hill Housing project (Anchorage,

Alaska), 110–11, 111, 112

Government Hill Youth Club, 109

grain elevators, 96

Index161

161

Grandcamp explosion, 73

Great Lakes Steel Corporation. See Stran-

Steel.

Green, Bill, 123

Green, Cleo, 114

Green, Doug, 114

Greuning, Ernest, 105

Griffin, Jim, 130, 135

Gruber, Ruth, 110

Guam, 65

Hagen, Ardell, 70

Handley, Thomas, 125

Happold, Buro, 133

Hillside House (Knoxville, Tennessee), 94, 95

Hines, Thomas, 64, 70–71

historic preservation, 101–2

Hobbard, Harold, 40

Hobbs, Frank, 148

homes, postwar, 24, 69–71, 80–81, 86, 87, 98,

99, 113–15, 134–35

See also Housing.

Homoja housing program, 24

Homoja Village, 25

hook bolts, 49

Hopkins, D.W., 13

House Beautiful, 76, 80

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

68–73, 98–99, 109–16

post-WWII shortage, 68–69, 86,

98–100, 105–7, 111–19

temporary, 71–76, 76–80, 87, 98, 107,

108, 109–16, 133

See also Homes, postwar.

Hudson Bay Company, xvi

Huntington, E. S., 7, 13

“Hutments to Housing” (Architectural

Forum), 71

huts, xv, 61, 148–49

Iafrate, Frank J., 27

igloos, xvi

industrial design, 66

insulation, 14, 16

Jackson, J. B., 66

Jamesway hut, 115, 149

Jamesway Manufacturing Company, 149

Jarvis, James Jackson, 96

Joe Marshall and His Rovin’ Ramblers, 92, 93

John Campbell and Worley K. Wong

Architects, 74

Johnson, John P., 110

Johnston, Hal, 112, 113

Kahn, Albert, 49

Kaufmann, Johannes, 134

Kaufmann, Oskar Leo, 133, 134

Keedoozle (grocery store), 81

Kelsey, Louis, 108

Kessler, Fred R., 111–12

Kimberly-Clark Corporation, 16, 63

Kimsul (insulation), 16, 16, 63

Kinkaid, Thomas, 43

Kirchner, Gerry, 116, 118–19

Kirchner, Hans, 116, 118–19

kit houses, 54, 115–16

Komandorski (Commander) islands, battle of,

44

Kwikset House (Charles and Ray Eames), 53,

54

Kwikset Lock Company, 54

Lapham, Lewis, 87

Ledergerber, Beat, 130

Lend Lease Act, 2, 33

Levitt, William, 99

Levittown, 99

Libby Owen Ford, 16

Liebman, Rosanna, 94

Little Theatre (Anchorage, Alaska), 109

longhouses, xv–xvi, 63

Lundquist, Oliver, 50

Malamud, Bernard, 87

Manning Portable Colonial cottage, xvi–xvii

Marshall, Joe, 102

Martin-Alden Precision Cut Homes, 115

Marx Toy Company, 86

Masonite Corporation, 16

Matter, Herbert, 52

McDonald, Angus, 125

McDonnell, Robert, 4, 6, 7

Merritt-Chapman and Scott Corporation, 1–2

Midway Island, battle of, 41–42, 43

Miller, Don L., 40

Miller, R. V., 3, 9

Mitchell, William, 31

Mobile: the Art of Portable Architecture

(Jennifer Siegal), 133

Modernism (architecture), 66–68, 70, 81, 94,

96

Mollett, David, 135

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

Morriset, Eusebe, 126, 128

Morris-Knudsen Company, 149

Motherwell, Robert, 60, 94

Motherwell Studio (Pierre Chareau), 60–61

Mueller, Francis, 125

Murcutt, Glen, 61

“Nashville sound”, 87

National Register of Historic Places, 102

Native Americans, xv–xvi

Navy Memorial Chapel (Clark Field,

Philippines), 65

New Arch Rib Stran-Steel Hut (SSAR), 23–24,

148

New Pencil Points, 67

Nimitz, Chester, 41–43

Nissen, Peter Norman, 4, 5

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

Norquist, Emanuel, 52

Nunn, Jake, 40

oil fields, 123

Oregon Export Company, 115

Osenga, Larry, 119

Our Lady of Grace Catholic Church (Beaver

Creek, Alaska), 129–30, 129, 130

Our Lady of Way Catholic Church (Haines

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

129

Owens, Wyman, 114

Pacific huts, 106, 108, 148

Palmer, Alaska, 112–13

Paper Log House (Shigeru Ban), 134

Parson, Jack, 108

Passive Defense Quonset (PDQ), 21

Paulson, Chris, 111

Paulucci, Jeno, 94

Paxson, G. D., 149

Paxton, Joseph, xvi

Pencil Points, 66

Piano, Renzo, 61

plank houses, xvi

Index162

“Planting for the Temporary House” (New

York Times), 76

Plyformed Wood Company, 51–52

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

Portage Bar (Anchorage, Alaska), 123

Portaseal hut, 112, 113, 149

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

50–51, 52, 54, 57, 73, 93, 96, 102,

133–34

The Provisional City (Dana Cuff), 72

Pulos, Arthur, 71

Pyle, Ernie, 101

Quigley, Robert, 100

Quon-Kote (paint), 86

Quonset Auditorium, 93, 102

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

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

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

134–35,136, 137, 138, 139, 140–46

advertisements and brochures for, 16,

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

86, 88–91,98

as American icon, 73, 76, 80–81, 84,

100, 101, 102, 139

auditoriums, 87, 92, 93

bars, 123

campaign headquarters, 93

camps, 14, 14, 106, 110–11

campus, 86, 98

car dealerships, 81

cartoons about, 4, 99, 135

churches, 57, 65, 123–26

clubhouses, 109

commercial use, 116–119

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

13, 13, 16–17, 19, 20, 23–24

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

farms, 81

hospital, 121

houses, 59–60, 114–15, 135

interior space, 134

manufacture of, 21, 23

origin of name, 13, 15

offices, 93–94

restaurants, 116–19

safety of, 120

schools, 119–20, 120

sound studios, 87

sports arenas, 121

stores, 122

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

125

warehouses, 122

Quonset Point, Rhode Island, 3

Quonset Point U.S. Naval Station (Quonset

Point, Rhode Island), 1–2, 2, 3

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

Quonsets: the Story of a Building that Gave

America a New Standard of Quality

Building Values, 81

Red-river Frame, xvi

Renzo Piano Building Workshop (Renzo

Piano), 61

rock-and-roll, 93

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

roofs, 51

Roosevelt, President Franklin Delano, 1, 2

Saarinen, Eero, 50, 51

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

59–60, 96–97

Saunders, Clarence, 81

Schock, Bert, 111

Scio, Ohio, 73

Seabees, 26–27, 64

Secondino, Tomasino, 4

Selid, Ove, 115

Selid Construction Services, 115–16

Seward City, Alaska, 108

714th Engineer Railway Operating Battalion,

106

Sherwin Williams, 86

Shockley, William Bradford, 93–94

Siegal, Jennifer, 133

sleds, 27

Snake Ranch (Anchorage, Alaska), 106, 107

Soroptomists Club, 109

splints, 51, 51

St. Patrick’s Catholic Church (Barrow,

Alaska), 123

steel framing, 17, 17, 18, 66

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

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

80, 81, 88–89, 98, 99

Stran-Steel Arch-Rib Home, 98

Stran-Steel Quonset House (Bruce Goff), 56

Stresskin, 134

SYSTEMarchitects, 134

Teen Town, 109

Temporary Aviation Facilities (TAF), 3, 23

tents, xv, 45

Terminal News Company warehouse, 122

tipis, xv

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

Tub (nightclub), 93

Twining, Nathan F., 121

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

Urgo, Dominic, 4

Valley Hospital (Palmer, Alaska), 120–21

Veterans’ Housing Project, 69

Waldvogel brothers, 98

wannigans, 27, 108

Wichita House (R. Buckminster Fuller), 54

Wind Tunnel (Delta Junction, Alaska), 123

Wolfman Jack, 93

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

41–44, 50

economic impact, 36, 41, 44

encampments, 64–66

Japanese strategy, 32, 41–42

Wyatt, Wilson W., 70

Yamamoto, Isoruku, 41, 43

Young, Rodger, 72

Index163

Contributors

Brian Carter is dean and professor of archi-

tecture at The State University of New York at

Buffalo. A graduate of the Nottingham School of

Architecture and the University of Toronto, he

has worked as an architect in practice, most

recently with Arup Associates in London. From

1994–2001 he was chair of the architecture

program at the University of Michigan. His work

has been published in numerous international

journals including The Architectural Review,

Architectural Design, Casbella, and Detail, and

he is the author of several books, including

Patkau Architects: Selected Projects 1983–1993

(Tuns Press, 1994) and Johnson Wax

Administration Building and Research Tower

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

has also curated a series of exhibitions on the

work of Eero Saarinen, Peter Rice, Charles and

Ray Eames, and Albert Kahn.

Chris Chiei is the artistic director for the

Alaska Design Forum, a nonprofit multidiscipli-

nary arts organization serving the Alaskan com-

munities of Anchorage, Fairbanks, and Juneau,

and is a practicing architect in Anchorage.

Chiei, born in New York and raised in New

Jersey, earned a Bachelor of Architecture from

the Pennsylvania State University and served for

two years as a member of Jersey Devil Design

Build Group prior to moving to Alaska in 1995.

He is the project director and lead researcher for

the Quonset and its accompanying exhibition

and has contributed more than eight years of

research to the project. He is a frequent lecturer

on the subject.

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

cations: Icebreakers: Alaska’s Most Innovative

Artists (University of Washington Press, 1999),

Found & Assembled in Alaska (Todd

Communication, 2001), and John Hoover: Art

and Life (University of Washington Press, 2002).

She has curated numerous exhibitions on

contemporary art as owner of the Decker/Morris

Gallery and the Center for Contemporary Visual

Art of Alaska, as the director of the International

Gallery of Contemporary Art, and as a guest

curator of the Anchorage Museum of History

and Art. Decker teaches courses in art history

and writing for the University of Alaska and at

Golden Gate University, in San Francisco. She is

also a regular contributor to the Anchorage Press

and has written for New York Newsday and

American Indian Art.

Stephen Haycox is an American cultural his-

torian at the University of Alaska, Anchorage

where he teaches Alaska history, history of the

American West, and American environmental

history, specializing in the relationship of Alaska

to the history of the American West. He holds

graduate degrees from the University of Oregon

and has published widely on Alaska Native

history. His two most recent books are Frigid

Embrace: Politics, Economics, and Environment

in Alaska (Oregon State University, 2002), and

Alaska: An American Colony (University of

Washington Press, 2002). He is the recipient of

the Alaska Governor’s Humanities Award (2003)

and the University of Alaska Edith R. Bullock

Prize for Excellence (2002); he was named

Alaskan Historian of the Year by the Alaska

Historical Society in 2003.

Tom Vanderbilt is a writer whose work has

appeared in many publications, including The

New York Times Magazine, Wired, The London

Review of Books, NEST, The Baffler, and The

Nation. He is also the author of The Sneaker

Book: An Anatomy of an Industry and An Icon

(New Press, 1998) and Survival City: Adventures

Among the Ruins of Atomic America (Princeton

Architectural Press, 2002).

Contributors165

165

Documents

Quonset hut : metal living for a modern age