This house is just incredibly cool. I wonder if it is still standing. What’s really amazing about the design is that it still looks quite modern. I don’t think that a 40″ Plasma screen would look at all out of place in that living room.

Architect Builds Modern GLASS HOME
THE open spaciousness of a country manor, captured in a 5-story house but 19 feet wide and set in the heart of crowded New York City is the latest architectural miracle to be wrought by the use of glass blocks.

From the outside the narrow structure, designed and built by Morris B. Sanders, architect, is impressively beautiful. Inside all idea of confinement is lost. Through a clever method of arranging the furniture close to the wall an illusion of space is created which is further heightened by the perspective-destroying glass walls. The rooms seem to extend indefinitely.

Recessed shelves, bookcases, and cupboards add to the roominess of the interior. In many cases metal furniture was used.

I would love to live in a house with a giant handle on top. It would make life so much easier for God when the rapture comes!

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Will We Live in Vacuum Bottles?

by John L. Raymond

What is a vacuum bottle house? It sounds fantastic, but science is developing a new type of house with vacuum walls, adapting the principles of the familiar thermos bottle, which will be so perfectly insulated that one ton of coal will do the work of nine. Some day you may live in one!

IN HIS fascinating book, “The Time Machine,” H. G. Wells looks forward to the day when man, in an awkward attempt to survive a dying sun and a frigid and dreary earth, will take to the ground to live like ants—an idea which does not flatter the ingenuity of scientists who have been working to develop the perfect house, in which comfort is assured regardless of outside temperatures.
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Ultra-Modern Homes Promise Better Health and Comfort

A NEW architectural age is dawning! Proof of this is seen in the strange new types of homes which are springing up throughout the country, presaging the day when we will be living literally in glass houses.

Our faithful old wooden and stone dwellings are primitive and unscientific, not so very far removed, so far as comfort and convenience is concerned, from the caves in which our half-human ancestors dwelt, say exponents of the new housing era. Bouncing health and inexpensive comfort are the goals towards which home designers are striving. No more muggy rooms on torrid summer days; no more dry, over-heated rooms on cold winter days. Plenty of health-giving sunlight shining through glass walls and plenty of terrace space for sun bathing and al fresco dining.
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Would you Live in a Stainless-Steel Igloo?

These heavily insulated steel shells are a new approach to the housing problem. Low in cost and portable, they give a wide flexibility of layout.

By FRANK ROWSOME, Jr.

YOU can’t make an electric light just by perfecting a wax candle.” So says Martin Wagner, Harvard professor and internationally known architect, in explaining how he conceived the unique igloolike houses shown on these pages.

Most modern prefabricated houses, Wagner asserts, are at the same stage of development that automobiles had reached when their builders were trying to make them look like buggies. In his opinion, a steel, plywood, and plastic house that is produced in a factory should not merely imitate wooden, carpenter-built houses. Instead, it should make full use, in form as well as construction, of new materials and new techniques.
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In the future men will apparently dress like Smurfs.

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This is a House?

British architects have designed this Home Of The Future to prove that living will be much easier in the brave new world of tomorrow.
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TOMORROW’S HOME: Comfort in Cubes

In a few years, do-it-yourselfers may be playing a gigantic game of dominoes—using aluminum cubes to build an efficient, mobile and low-cost home

By MERLE E. DOWD

HOLLOW aluminum cubes —12 ft. square with translucent plastic tops and variable wall panels—might be the building blocks for tomorrow’s do-it-yourself homebuilder.

The cubes, which could be put together domino-like to form any floor plan you want, are the basic unit for a startling experimental “Industrialized House” which was brain-stormed by famed designers George Nelson and Co., Inc., of New York.
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Depthscrapers Defy Earthquakes

THE “Land of the Rising Sun” (Japan) is subject to earthquakes of distressing violence at times; and the concentration into small areas of increasing city populations invites great destruction, such as that of the Tokio earthquake of 1923, unprecedented in magnitude of property loss, as well as life.

It was natural, then, that the best engineering brains of Japan should be devoted to the solution of the problem of building earthquake-proof structures; and a clue was given them by the interesting fact that tunnels and subterranean structures suffer less in seismic tremors than edifices on the surface of the ground, where the vibration is unchecked.
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Houses that Hang from Poles

A house which hangs suspended from a central mast, in whose bath room you bathe in a pint of water, where clothes are laundered in fog and where power is supplied
from garbage —this is the revolutionary type of home science okays for the future.
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Portable Globe House for Well-Rounded Living

Only 15 feet in diameter, low-cost home offers all the conveniences of a larger one. And, it can be delivered by boat, truck or even helicopter.

IT looks like a satellite that just fell out of orbit. But actually it is a down-to-Earth, low-cost portable home—with all the modern conveniences you would expect to find only in a more usual-looking (and usual-priced) house. Called the Kugelhaus (Kugel is German for “ball,” and haus means just what it sounds like), it is nothing more than a 15-ft.-diameter hollow ball. Its eggshell-like construction is of either lightweight reinforced concrete, metal or plastic. Just one inch of concrete gives good results, says the inventor, Dr. Johann Ludowici. The house can be completely assembled in the factory—with whatever furniture or other equipment is wanted—before delivery. As portable as a house could be, it can be flown to wherever you want it by helicopter, towed in by boat (it floats), or, more conventionally, carried on a truck.
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Paris Balloon-Homes Are Gas-Proof
REASONING that if balloon silk can hold gases, it can likewise keep gases out, Parisians are building balloon houses—-grim shoe-like affairs which provide safety from much-feared gas attacks.
Entire families will find refuge in each of the inflated structures. Fresh air would be pumped in through a filter which neutralizes poisonous gases, just as do filters on gas masks. Frames of wire hold the balloon silk in position when the air pump is not operating.

“Orange-Peel House” for Campers Fits on Small Trailer
Developed in Germany, a portable shelter for camping or trailer travel looks like a gigantic orange —and peels apart almost like one. The parts of the shelter are shaped much like the segments of an orange peel. One person can fasten the segments together to complete the shelter in 15 minutes. The parts of the shelter including the floor are made of plywood. When the shelter is disassembled, the parts can be stacked on a small trailer for the trip to the next camping site. The collapsible house has two windows and a door. In Germany the “orange house” sells for about $150.

Transients Build Skyscraper Wigwams
ALONG the shore of Medicine Lake, near Minneapolis, Minn., homeless, unemployed men have built one of the strangest communities in America—a white man’s village of tepees and skyscraper wigwams.

Originally started as a minor relief project, the camp now covers 93 acres and is one of Minnesota’s largest relief depots.

Local building and wrecking companies. donate material for the structures which range from a two-person hut to a three-story community dwelling. These buildings have the customary Indian ridge poles, but the sides are covered with shingles instead of skin. The interiors are attractively equipped with rustic furniture.
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