THE TOWN OF TOMORROW AND HOME BUILDING CENTER

 

NEW YORK WORLD'S FAIR, 1939.  THE TOWN OF TOMORROW AND HOME BUILDING CENTER.                                                            

New York: 1939. 4to. Decorated printed wrappers. 15 booklets loosely laid-in. First edition.

An important publication on suburban planning - scarce.  These are the demonstration houses in a model village, "The Town of Tomorrow."  Visitors could walk through it, into each of the fifteen houses, and pick up a brochure.  Each brochure includes a perspective of the house, floor plans, and description which includes the companies which donated to materials to the project.  The brochures are numbered as follows: 1. The dual house by Henry S. Churchill; 2. The house of plywood by A. Lawrence Kocher; 3. The bride's home by Landefeld & Hatch; 4. The Pittsburgh House of Glass by Landefeld & Hatch; The small brick house of the sheltered workshops by George D. Connor; 6. The small home of wood by Evans, Moore & Woodbridge; 8. The New England home by Cameron Clark; 10. House of Vistas by Werner Walter Johnson; 13. The Garden home by Verna Cook Salomonsky; 15. The Johns Manville triple insulated house by Godwin, Thompson & Paterson; 16. The Kelvin home by Electus D. Litchfield; 17, The Celetex house by Henry Otis Chapman Jr. & Harold W. Beder; 18. The electric home by James W. O'Connor; 19. The Fire-Safe home by Perry M. Duncan; and 21. The motor home by Adams & Prentice.  In this first edition, the numbering of the booklets was erratic, going from 1 to 21 but the complete series contained fifteen.  This work would certainly interest historians of prefacrication, the domestic house and the modern movement in the twentieth century, as well as town planning.  Very good.

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