Monday, September 12, 2011

Steel House Overview

Welcome to the House of Steel blog! The House of Steel, nicknamed “Rusty”, is an historic building located on the Connecticut College campus in New London, Connecticut. It has fallen into a state of disrepair, and a restoration project has been in place in order to return it to its former condition, and make the house usable again. Although there has been interest in conserving the house for several years, the restoration has just gotten under way. Over the next two weeks the house will be disassembled, shipped to Philadelphia for restoration. Early in 2012 it will be brought back and reassembled. This blog will document the restoration process starting with the disassembly, which has just gotten started.

For any readers at Conn, the House of Steel is located at the far south end of campus, near the Winslow Ames House, by South Lot. It is a small, rust-colored building that has stood unnoticed by most of the college community on the edge of campus. However, despite its unassuming appearance, the House of Steel is, upon closer inspection, an extremely interesting and historically important building.


Some basic history about the house:

The House of Steel was constructed in 1933 shortly after Winslow Ames saw the design exhibited in the Chicago World’s Fair. General Houses, the company which made the House of Steel, and American houses (which built the house next to Rusty, also for Winslow Ames in the 1930s) were pioneers in the prefabricated housing movement, which they believed at the time would be the answer to America’s affordable housing crisis.

Both companies were slow to take off, especially since it was the height of the Great Depression, when most people did not have enough money to build new houses, or were unwilling to spend what money they had on such new experimental designs. Ames had both the money and the interest and ordered two of the new prefab houses. At the time he was the director of the Lyman Allyn Museum, and had housing provided for him. He built the Steel House and its neighbor as rental properties. Both buildings continued to have tenants living in them even after they were sold to Connecticut College.


Why it is worth saving:

Although the house is currently not much to look at, and many people might be wondering why we are going to so much effort to save it, it is a rare example of early prefab housing. The Steel House incorporates many new design ideas that were quite revolutionary at the time. The whole concept of mass-produced parts that could be factory-produced and then assembled quickly was a huge change from standard building methods that had been in place for generations. Rusty is one of the few surviving examples of its type, and is uniquely positioned directly next to a competing prefab house from the same era, the Winslow Ames House (1934). It is also unusual in that it has no frame, but instead is made up of uniform steel panels bolted together to form the exterior walls. The inside is also an open plan, with the kitchen, dining, and living room areas all in the same open space, and only the bedrooms and bathroom separated by interior walls. General Houses incorporated modern design ideas into the plan and construction of the house, while at the same time taking into account the limitations of the time period, and designing theirs houses to be as cost effective and efficient as possible.

The Steel House is listed on the state and national registers of historic places, and is recognized as an important site, making it well worth our efforts to save it!

For more information about the house visit http://oak.conncoll.edu/~steelhouse/

We also have a Facebook page at http://www.facebook.com/pages/Rusty-the-Steel-House-at-Connecticut-College/159498734134075

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