These steel-and-ceramic dwellings still stand, more than 60 years later As the numerous companies chasing the idea of affordable mass-manufactured housing suggests, the dream of prefab homes still attracts innovators, bold ideas, and creative design. But right after WWII, a Chicago businessman fashioned his home of the future from wartime technologies and an old airplane factory, creating a line of ceramic-and-steel prefabs called Lustron Homes that are still used by hundreds of homeowners nationwide. Photographer Charles Mintz, who just recently released a book, Lustron Stories, that tells the stories of modern owners of these midcentury oddities, argues that this unorthodox design may have realized the prefab dream decades ago.
?When you think about prefab modern homes, you often think of East German apartment buildings,? says Mintz, who has been working on the project since 2011. ?Here you have a stunning example of how it actually worked.?
Charles Mintz

Charles Mintz

Lustron was the brainchild of Carl Strandlund, an industrialist and inventor with the Chicago Vitreous Enamel Corporation who had previously worked on buildingprefab gas stations. To fulfill his goal of creating homes that would ?defy weather, wear, and time,? just as the postwar housing boom was reaching a boil, he took over an old airplane manufacturing plant in Columbus, Ohio, and in 1947, began cranking out prefab home that could be shipped and assemble...