857 South Shore Drive
Madison, WI, USA

Ernest Eggiman House

The Ernest Eggiman House is a prefabricated house assembled in 1936 in Madison, Wisconsin. It was a product called the Motohome - an attempt to provide fast, inexpensive housing during the Great Depression. In 1994 it was added to the National Register of Historic Places as the only Motohome in Wisconsin


History

The U.S. housing industry collapsed during the Great Depression. In Madison 28 new homes were built in 1933, compared to 260 at the peak in earlier years. Nationwide, the FHA estimated a shortfall of 1.75 million houses in 1935. Demand for architects' services dropped at the same time. With these changes in mind, various architects kicked around ideas for how to build a modest house for non-wealthy clients. Wisconsin architect Frank Lloyd Wright tinkered with his Usonian homes. New Jersey architect Robert McLaughlin, Jr. aimed for a mass market and mass-production with the Motohome, a kit house that could be assembled from prefabricated parts in as little as two weeks for under $5,000.

McLaughlin's Motohome design had a steel frame covered by 4x8 foot asbestos concrete panels. The vertical joints between panels were covered by aluminum strips. Bands of paired casement windows admitted light. The design was modular, so the panels could be put together in different ways to construct 140 different floor plans costing from $3,500 to $7,200. The exterior fit into the International architectural style which was popular for institutional buildings at that time, with rectangular lines, bands of windows, and lack of adornment.

Inside, the Motohome had many leading-edge conveniences for that day. Heating, running water, and electricity were controlled by a centralized "moto-unit," which had been designed with help from General Electric and American Radiator. Each Motohome came with central air-conditioning, a dishwasher, a clock-radio, toaster, percolator, iron, washing machine and a bathroom scale. It even came with a library of how-to books and a week's worth of groceries. It was marketed as a convenient, complete, inexpensive solution to a family's need for housing.

The first prototype was built in 1932 by American Homes, and sold to a coal company in Pennsylvania as possible worker housing. In 1935 the Motohome went into full production.

Built in 1936, the Eggiman house was the 54th Motohome. It was built for Ernest Eggiman, a salesman, by Advance Homes, Inc. of Madison. It was built with a full basement beneath, unlike most Motohomes which were built on a slab. This particular Motohome had a 2-story cube as its main block and a garage in a smaller one-story cube on the southeast corner. The front door was in the middle of the main block, shaded by a flat canopy that still wraps around the corner of the house. Inside, the first floor holds a living room, dining room and kitchen. A central stairway leads to the second story, with three bedrooms and a bathroom. In 1957 the garage was converted to a den and first-story bathroom. At some point the moto-unit (centralized utilities) was replaced, since it could be serviced only by a specially trained repairman.

Only 100 or 150 Motohomes were ever built. They didn't sell and the project was shut down around 1938. Their designer McLaughlin wrote:

It is in a sense unfortunate that the desire for shelter had to be one of man's most primitive instincts. A consequence of this has been the enshrouding of the house with various sentimentalities and prejudices which have kept it from becoming as comfortable, healthful, and happy a place to live in as the methods of our modern civilization might otherwise have accomplished.

That is, Americans in the 1930s were ready for a factory that looked modern, but for a home they preferred something more like the house they had grown up in.

In 1994 the Eggiman house was added to the NRHP as "one of the most important examples [in Wisconsin] of the attempt to industrialize the production of housing during the Great Depression", and an excellent example of the International style of architecture.

National Register of Historic Places - Ernest Eggiman House

Statement of Significance:

The Eggiman house is an outstanding example of the International Style in Wisconsin. Although Madison has many International Style houses, many designed by nationally noted architects, the Eggiman House is one of the finer examples of the style in the city and the state as well.

The term "International Style" was coined by architect Philip Johnson in 1933 to describe the work of Avant Garde architects illustrated at a Museum of Modern Art Exhibition in 1933. The show depicted the work of European and American architects experimenting with a fundamental rethinking of architecture. Cultural Resource Management in Wisconsin notes the principles of the International Style defined by the MOMA exhibition as: "an emphasis on volume or space enclosed by thin planes or surfaces instead of a suggestion of mass and solidity; regularity and an underlying orderliness which is seen clearly before the outside surfaces are applied; and lastly, the avoidance of applied, surface decoration, and the dependence on the intrinsic qualities of the materials, technical perfection and excellent proportions. "

The International Style was born in an age of austerity, both in Europe and America. Proponents of the International Style were social utopianisms who believed that works of Modern architecture would improve the lives of their inhabitants and ultimately transform society. These architects attempted to incorporate technological advances in machines, materials and processes into rational, economic, and efficient new forms. They felt such forms were necessary to express the needs and lifestyles and potential of the machine age.

The widespread attitude that better living would come tomorrow from advancing technology created a receptive climate for the transmission of European modernism to the states. Unlike European modernists who fixated on mass-housing schemes and large-scale projects, American architect's interest in residential design remained rooted in the single family home. In Madison, the clients of these houses were largely young professionals. Most conspicuous were the large numbers of university faculty.

Madison attracted progressive architects such as the nationally recognized George Fred Keck, designer of the House 'of Tomorrow and the Crystal House at the Chicago World's Fair in 1933-34. His 1937 Morehouse House shows homage to Distil and Russian Constructivist avant-garde movements. However, modernism was rooted not in style, but ideology, so other Wisconsin architects like Balch and Lippert and William Kaeser attempted to fuse the ideology of the International Style with regional building traditions.

Architects of the International Style experimented freely with materials and processes in an attempt to lower costs and increase utility and durability. The 1935 J. W. Gale House in Shorewood Hills was built with precast concrete panels, reputedly the first in the Midwest. Poured concrete was used for both walls and floors in the 1940 Howard Haskins House in Madison.

Innovations were not limited to structural improvements alone. The International Style strove for an open floor plan and dispensed with walls in favor of movable partitions and flowing multi-use spaces. Built-in dividers and furniture helped reduce cost and increase functional efficiency. Long expanses of windows created uninterrupted vistas through interiors to the exterior landscape.

During the height of the prefab craze of the depression, the International Style was the favored architectural imagery for the industry. As an article in Literary Digest stated:
To the man in the street, however, the prefabricated house is a square, modernistic, flat-roofed structure of austere design. This conception is justified because 'shoe-box' type of architecture lends itself naturally to precast panels which must be assembled in straight lines.

The Eggiman House is a pure example of the style as defined by the MOMA exhibit. The use of the steel frame and wall panel construction illustrates the enclosure of volume by thin planes similar to curtain wall construction in commercial construction. This type of construction is rare in International Style houses, which often are built with more conventional materials and only suggest such lightness of structure. The regularity and orderliness of its interior plan is clearly seen in the severe cubic form, modular design, and functional fenestration. The Eggiman House has no applied, surface decoration, and its aesthetic qualities depend entirely on the intrinsic qualities of the materials, construction detailing, proportions, and fenestration.