HOMES FOR NOMADS

Evening Star, Issue 21318, 24 January 1933, Page 2

HOMES FOR NOMADS

AN AMERICAN'S PREDICTIONS Will the next impetus to industry come through the manufacture and sale of collapsible houses and furniture? asks a writer in the ‘ Christian Science Monitor.’ Will the carpenter and joiner and bricklayer and plasterer and lather ami painter and electrician go to work in some factory iu Oshkosh, snaillike taking their homos on their backs, so to speak? Will some move thence to Wenatchee, perhaps? And some to Muscle Shoals? And from there to Baltimore and from there to Caribou—still taking their homes along packed, it is to be supposed, like a spare tyre? Will a future slogan be: “ Any old place 1 can erect my tako-apart house is Home Sweet Home to me? ”

Don’t laugh. The predictions of Harvey Wiley Corbett, chairman of the Architectural Commission of the Chicago World’s Fair, made before a small house forum in New York City, have it that the “ old English cottage ” is passe and that the future will see a nomadic America moving about at the bidding of the labour market and living not in old-fashioned homes, but in units of “ enclosed space ” purchased already furnished from a salesman’s catalogue. The possibilities of such a. drastic change in American living standards bring up many conjectures, both serious and amusing. A conversation: “ Whore do you live? ” “ 1 live in that 1946 sport model Casey House with standard accessories. It’s got a Fisher body, a Timken hack porch, a Jordan chassis, and a Bosch cooling system. You’ll find it parked at the corner of Main street and Avenue A, but the traffic officer says we’ll have to move next week. Guess I’ll get a job in the country where I can park my home under a tree.” But not all the forum agreed with Air Corbett’s prediction. A canvass of 1,000 women of moderate incomes disclosed that the rank and file was clinging tenaciously to the old-fash-ioned domicile, elms and bird’s nest and everything, including that shoeprint on the cement sidewalk made by Junior when ho was a toddling child. The standardisation of American clothes, manners, and customs has justified a “ Alain street ” and a “ Babbitt,” but, somehow, it is hard to believe that it will extend to the “ movable factorv-furnishcd borne.”