At Home with Tomorrow, by Carl Koch, designer of the Techbuilt house with Andy Lewis is a very rare book published by Rinehart and Company in 1958.
I was lucky to score an excellent example of this book. It’s fun to page through it to learn about Koch and the design philosophy he used to build our original house. We used this knowledge to ensure our renovation and addition adheres to Koch’s principals.
The book is 208 pages in black cloth with a dust jacket in color. There are black and white illustrations, diagrams, models, and plans throughout with primary photography by Ezra Stoller. The book was only published in a first edition.
Besides the Techbuilt house, Koch was also the designer of The Industrial House, The Acorn House, The Mighty House and Lustron and Conantum, all of which are covered in the book.
I found a copy for sale with an excellent write-up which I draw from here:
Carl Koch was a pioneer in the prefabricated housing movement after World War II. When the veterans came home from World War II, eager to use their VA loans to put roofs over the heads of their families, America's new suburbs bloomed with varieties of updated traditional houses. While most buyers preferred a vaguely "Early American" look, the prolonged building drought brought on by the Depression and the war years had interrupted another architectural trend that was now poised to make postwar reentry.
The Modernist Movement, springing from primarily Germany via the Bauhaus, had formed tentative roots in 1930s America. Before the war, Walter Gropius, Marcel Breuer, and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe accepted positions on the faculties of some of this country's most prestigious architectural schools. There, they trained a generation of students in the discipline of Modernist design. In the process, they changed the way houses would look and the way Americans would look at their houses. The Modern approach to design was in every sense more than a style--it was a cause.
Not all modern houses followed the strict, rectilinear forms favored by the Bauhaus and the International School. Most people preferred to come home to a less rigidly geometric environment. They wanted clean lines and glass to bring the outdoors in, or to move the indoors out. They wanted rooms with a minimum of walls, so that living areas flowed easily into each other and blended effortlessly with their surroundings. They wanted their home to be oriented toward the back--not the front--of its building lot, with rear-facing walls of glass borrowing visually from the outer spaces.
Techbuilt Houses, partly prefabricated, were not-too-modern houses designed by architect Carl Koch and built with considerable success in the 1960s. They demonstrated once again that mass-produced, standardized building parts could be put together in highly individual ways.
Ironically, the Modern house may be about as popular today as it was in the 1950s. In fact, now that 1950s suburbs are finding their way onto local, state, and national lists of historic landmarks, they have a trendy cachet that just may be even brighter than it was half a century ago.
Here is the original Kirkus Review of At Home with Tomorrow published on June 16th, 1958
The designer of Techbuilt House, in discussing his career in home design and the future of design and production of homes for people of moderate income, is concerned with: the industrialized house as a unit; the relation of house to land and community; the interests of the family is selecting and making use of their home; history and present state of prefabrication as an industry; the ways in which architectural designs are influenced by the broad characteristics of the times. He maintains that the largely deserved disrepute of the prefabricated house is due to inadequate implementation of a sound idea and that basically, in the prefab" lies a hope of happy, healthy, 'good' surroundings for millions of families." A useful primer.
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