Wall panels gradually insinuated themselves into the minds of homebuilders throughout the 1930s, helped greatly by government actions. As these builders were unable to sell their custom models during the Great Depression, a few of them experimented with lower-cost construction methods. The ready-cut house had offered some savings, but when sales declined, most of the large providers couldn’t support their overhead. But, over the course of the decade, some of the otherwise skeptical builders gradually saw examples of the value of panelization, also known as prefabrication.
Builders saw, for example, how building panels on a production line could enable the rapid construction of 550 cottages 10’ x 24’ cottages for the 1932 Olympic Games in Los Angeles. A local lumber yard attacked this project head on, setting up a straight-line process, batching the cutting of 500 total pieces, re-using cut-offs, and stocking cut parts adjacent to one of five setups on a waist-high work table. The surface of the table was grooved to match the framing layout of each unique panel: 8’ x 12’ floor panels, 8’ x 10’ end panels, 8’ x 12’ side panels, 12’ x 6’ roof panels, and 5’ mono gable ends. Onsite, the panels were bolted together creating “demountable” cottages, which meant they could be readily disassembled and reassembled elsewhere.
Not long after the Olympics, several other projects acquainted builders with panelization technology. The most widespread impact was made by the 1500 Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) campsites that were built across the nation. Most of the sites had multiple 25’ x 30’ buildings that were to be demountable. The panels for these were constructed in 5’ sections as shown in the image. And in 1936, the U.S. Forest Products Lab demonstrated the utility of sheathing pre-made panels with the newly recognized standard 4’ x 8’-sized plywood sheets. This methodology was immediately adopted by a Milwaukee builder, and likely several others. These were a small sampling of the successful experiments with prefabrication that were carried out, just in time to be useful in the preparation for war.
Shortly after Germany invaded Poland in September 1939 and Europe was officially at war, President Roosevelt declared a limited state of emergency and all government entities redirected their efforts to the potential of U.S. involvement. One of these was the Farm Service Agency (FSA). Created in 1935 to construct homes for poor farmers, the FSA was given the new task of building homes for families displaced from the future sites of bombing ranges, airfields, and other war-related infrastructure. This agency reused the design implemented by the CCC for their housing projects, contracting with multiple firms to deliver them mainly in the Southeast. One of the successful bidders was the King & Boozer Company, who claimed that they could turn out one of the 20’ x 30’ units every 20 minutes from their plant in Alabama. For a 75-unit project in Virginia, along with a crew of 20, they shipped the panels by rail to Richmond, VA and trucked them the rest of the way to the site, erecting them in only 15 days. Following that success, they secured several larger contracts, and many other builders followed their lead.
As the world war widened in early 1941, the government conducted a demonstration on prefabrication for representatives of all federal agencies involved in housing. As the Structural Building Components Association (SBCA) would do in a demonstration on the National Mall in 2024, a midwestern company came to the D.C. area and framed a house using floor, wall, and roof panels in less than a day in front of a crowd of key decision makers. That demonstration established the methodology going forward for much of the government housing that followed. Then, after the U.S. entered World War II, FDR signed an Executive Order prohibiting private residential construction. That order told homebuilders that their previous building practices and clientele would have to be put aside while they determined how to do government work the way the government dictated that it needed to be done. And the homebuilders who pursued this work were quickly overwhelmed with the volume of projects available to house the millions of “men behind the men behind the guns” of a nation at war.