MONSANTO’S PLASTIC HOUSE looks serene amid its landscaping here. Its white, cantilevered wings make cloud reflections in the quiet pool at its base. It looks as though it suited its hillside setting or could fade nicely into a flat plot in the Midwest, or a rocky one in New England, or among the jack pines and live oaks of South Carolina.
The thousands of people who visited the House of the Future since it opened its doors earlier this summer would find it hard to believe that here is the house that lack-of-information built.
The whole project goes back four years. At the time it was common knowledge in the industry that plastics had a small but well established beachhead in the construction field. The applications were confined mostly to functional and decorative purposes. It was quite clear that the beachhead could be expanded almost indefinitely if the plastics and the building industries could ever arrive at a common ground of understanding of each other’s problems.
Monsanto, with a frank eye on new markets for its chemicals and plastics, and some healthy inquisitivenes about what plastics could or could not do for construction, asked architects at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to do a study of plastics in housing. In the back of everyone’s mind was the thought that some day the design for a plastic house might come out of this.
In 1955 a study titled “Plastics in Housing” emerged. It was an encouraging and fascinating document.
At this point Monsanto’s Plastics Division took a deep breath and decided that a full blown construction program was the only way to break the bottleneck on performance data and show builders, architects and the public in tangible fashion what plastics could do.
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