Cherner and the FHA: Housing Research in the 1950's

Perhaps best known as the designer of the Cherner chair, Norman Cherner wasalso the designer of many low-cost houses designed to be built of componentparts. In a 1957 publication, Fabricating Houses from Component Parts, hepresents 15 houses, with an average size of about 700 square feet, in threecategories: panel, bent and girder construction. During the same year, accordingto the Cherner Chair Company web site,1 Cherner’s “Pre-built” home wasassembled for an exhibition in Vienna by the U.S.Department of Housing, afterwhich it was reassembled in Connecticut to become Cherner’s home and studio.This paper will compare the work of Cherner for the FHA with roughly contemporarywork produced for the Housing and Home Finance Agency’s Divisionof Research and presented to the public as “Housing Research paper 29: ADemonstration of New Techniques for Low-Cost Small Home Construction”(April 1954). The research and development of this project was carried out bythe Small Homes Council at the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana.The works will be scrutinized for the ways in which they were presented to andreceived by the public, the impact they had on the design and constructionof low-cost single family homes in the 1950’s, and the nature of architecturalresearch and testing in the post World War II environment.

Volume Editors
John Quale, Rashida Ng & Ryan E. Smith

ISBN
978-0-935502-85-5