The prefabrication in domestic architecture after the Second World War. The case of levittowns in USA
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.32870/rvcs.v0i5.107Keywords:
prefabrication, mass production, real estate, speculation , subursAbstract
To look back at a fundamental fact of the history of housing construction, as it was prefabrication in the United States in the immediate years after the Second World War hand in hand with specific company (Levitt & Sons), allows us to analyze the phenomenon from various points of view: professional, technical, economic, political, but where the most important should always be the social. The prefabrication was used only as a means to try to remedy a situation of housing need at a certain time, lowering costs and offering construction speed and not as the real solution to all the problems faced by the American society in those moments Therefore, what can we learn from this experience in our current situation?References
Architectural Forum (1949), "4,000 Houses per Year", abril, Architectural Forum, pp. 86-93.
Baxandall, R. y E. Ewen (2000), Picture Windows. How the Suburbs Happened, Nueva York, Basic Books.
Eames, Charles; Matter, Herbert y R. Buckminster Fuller (1944), "Prefabrication", Arts & Architecture, julio 61:7, pp. 29-35.
Gans, Herbert J. (1982), The Levittowners. Ways of Life and Politics in a New Suburban Community, Nueva York, Columbia University Press.
Goldstein, Barbara (ed.) (1998), Arts & Architecture. The Entenza Years, Santa Mónica, Hennessey + Ingalls.
Hayden, Dolores (2003), Building Suburbia. Green Fields and Urban Growth. 1920-2000, Nueva York, Vintage Books.
Kelly, Barbara M. (1993), Expanding the American Dream. Building and Rebuilding Levitown, Albany (NY), State University of New York.
Kelly, Burnham (1951), The Prefabrication of Houses, Nueva York y Londres, The MIT; John Wiley & Sons y Chapman y Hall. Disponible en: https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=mdp.390 15026795446;view=2up;seq=10. Consultado: 29 de enero de 2019.
LANDIA (1951), Architectural Forum, febrero.
Liell, John (1984), Levittown: A Study in Community Planning and Development, Ann Arbor, Yale University.
Mohan, Geoffrey (1997), Suburban Pioneer, New Day, 28, septiembre.
Morrow Ford, Katherine y Thomas H. Creighton (1951), The American House Today, Nueva York, Reinhold.
Redfeld, Charles E. et al., (1951), "The Impact of Levittown on Local Government", Journal of the American Institute of Planners, 17:3, pp. 130-141. United States Congress (1949), Housing Act of 1949. Disponible en: https://www.loc.gov/law/help/statutes-at-large/81st-con- gress/session-1/c81s1ch338.pdf. Consultado: 27 de enero de 2019.
https://doi.org/10.1080/01944365108979326
Wright, Gwendolyn (1983), Building the Dream. A social History of Housing in America, Cambridge (MA), Londres, The MIT Press.
--- (2008), USA. Modern Architectures in History, Londres, Reaktion Books.
Downloads
Published
How to Cite
Issue
Section
License
Copyright (c) 2019 Vivienda y Comunidades Sustentables

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
Update Notice: Beginning with Issue 20 (July–December 2026), the contents of Vivienda y Comunidades Sustentables are published under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC 4.0). Previous issues remain subject to the licensing terms under which they were originally published.
Authors who publish in this journal agree to the following terms:
In accordance with copyright legislation, authors retain copyright of their work and grant Vivienda y Comunidades Sustentables the right of first publication. Vivienda y Comunidades Sustentables does not charge any fees for manuscript submission, editorial processing, or publication.
Authors may enter into separate, additional contractual arrangements for the non-exclusive distribution of the published version of their article (for example, by depositing it in an institutional repository or republishing it in a book), provided that they clearly acknowledge that the work was first published in Vivienda y Comunidades Sustentables.
