| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 92.1

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 92.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Suburban Steel: The Magnificent Failure of the Lustron Corporation, 1945–1951. By Douglas Knerr. (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2004. x, 248 pp. $44.95, ISBN 0-8142-0961-0.)
Douglas Knerr's study of Lustron's short-lived experiment in prefabricated housing is set in a matrix of housing history, postwar recovery, industrialization, economics, and the red scare of the 1940s. It is a tale of a construction innovation that failed: the quest for rationalized processes in residential construction.	1
Through a series of clever moves and fortunate timing by its parent firm, Chicago Vitreous Enamel Production Company, the housing experiment of the Lustron Corporation was funded by the federal government. Lustron proposed not only prefabricated housing but also the revamping of the entire housing industry.	2
From 1945 to 1946, Lustron's primary activities were planning and financing. In 1947, the focus was on manufacturing and delivery, but by 1951 the company went into bankruptcy and dissolved. Its collapse was due to the withdrawal of federal moneys and the company's inability to fulfill its commitment of up to four hundred houses a day. Indeed, the company produced a total of only twenty-five hundred units between 1945 and 1951.	. . .

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