Prefabrication was not new in 1933, when the House of Steel was erected. In the 19th century, British manufacturers shipped prefabs to Australia and other parts of the empire. Often, these buildings were made of corrugated iron. During the Gold Rush in the U.S., East Coast entrepreneurs sent kit houses by rail to San Francisco. And by the 1920s, Sears, Aladdin, and others were shipping the plans and precision-cut lumber for do-it-yourself houses to most parts of America.

What was new were advanced industrial processes, new industrial materials–and modern architecture, with its emphasis on rectilinear forms, smooth, unadorned surfaces, and functional efficiency. By the late 1920s, Le Corbusier’s concept of a "machine for living" presented a tantalizing business opportunity: the chance to mass-produce houses "like Fords."

Among the first to explore the opportunity was the visionary engineer/architect R. Buckminster Fuller. Fuller’s plans for a mass-produced "Dymaxion" house–a lightweight hexagonal unit made of aluminum and casein, with a central utility core–excited the imaginations of the American public and the media in the late 1920s, but his vision was a little too visionary for mass consumption. Despite Fuller’s tireless proselytizing, the Dymaxion home never made it to the production stage.

Nevertheless, Fuller helped create America’s prefabrication movement, a movement that was catalyzed by the Depression-era housing crisis. At the "Century of Progress" Worlds Fairs of 1933 and 1934, millions of Americans got a chance to view the fairs’ "houses of tomorrow"–a group of model homes, almost all of them prefabricated, almost all of them modern in design–that were meant to herald a new era of efficient, low-cost housing.

While a number of U.S. industrial concerns, including automakers, building materials producers, and makers of appliances and other housing components, were involved in the Century of Progress houses, and continued to dabble in prefabrication research throughout the 1930s, none seriously pursued the concept.

Instead, the task of fostering the nascent prefab industry fell to a group of bold architect-entrepreneurs. Among the most prominent of these were Howard T. Fisher, the founder of General Houses, Inc., and Robert McLaughlin, founder of American Houses, Inc. Fisher and McLaughlin struggled mightily to sell their brand of modernism to Americans in the ’30s, but, despite the hoopla, few people in the depths of the Depression were willing or able to take a chance on innovative, but little-tested, housing concepts. In New London both the House of Steel and the Winslow Ames House remain to tell the story of what might have been.