ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Plastic Design Expertise: The Filament Wound House and Cold War Politics of Housing and Development

• In Event: The Sciences of the Artificial: Modern Science and Design Expertise

English Abstract

Filament winding is a technique for constructing tubular structures that emerged in the context
of the Manhattan nuclear project during World War II. In the 1960s, universities and research
centers in the U.S. began considering the potential of filament winding as a building technology
for housing projects. How did a technology that initially served nuclear science become feasible
for housing construction? This work addresses this question through a case study of the Filament
Wound House, an all-plastic housing prototype designed through two research projects
conducted by the Architectural Research Laboratory (ARL) at the University of Michigan.
Initially conceived in a 1962 study funded by the U.S. Agency for International Development to
explore plastic housing solutions for “underdeveloped” nations, the project was later reassessed
in 1968 for military families under the sponsorship of the U.S. Department of Defense, and a year
later proposed as an urban renewal project. I argue that in all these cases, filament-wound
housing was directed toward populations perceived as dependent—whether foreign aid recipients,
military families, or the urban poor.
Drawing on research reports and conference papers, I show how ARL designers
positioned themselves as experts, how they imagined both the house and its intended occupants,
and how housing diplomacy and development discourses shaped plastic research and
architectural innovation in the 1960s. This study places plastic architecture within broader
histories of design expertise that treated housing as a homogeneous, non-situated problem
solvable through technology, while simultaneously promoting the global expansion of the U.S.
plastics industry.

Author

• Daniela Diaz Blancarte, Harvard University