England’s Aluminum Houses: The AIROH House
At the end of World War II, England faced a severe housing shortage. Wartime rationing had put a halt to new construction during the war, and thousands of houses had been destroyed or damaged during the blitz. England needed to built an estimated 200,000 houses. But traditional building materials, such as timber or brick, were in short supply, as were skilled craftsman. And even if they were available, the houses were needed immediately — there wasn’t time to build them using typical construction methods.
In the face of these challenges, the Ministry of Works instituted a strategy of building thousands of pre-fabricated houses. These could be partially manufactured using now-idle munitions factories, and then shipped and assembled on-site by an unskilled labor force. There were many different flavors of these ‘pre-fabs’, all designed based on a standard ‘portal’ bungalow. Some of these were designed to be temporary, with a lifespan of only 10 years — some were designed to be more permanent. They were built out of a variety of materials: timber, precast concrete, cold-formed steel. Some even used repurposed military vehicle parts as structural members. This house-building project was known as the Emergency Factory Made program.
The most interesting, and perhaps advanced, of these prefabs was known as the AIROH house. During the war, England’s aircraft industry had greatly expanded, employing over 300,000 people by the wars end. Not wanting to dismantle it for strategic reasons, the Ministry of Aircraft Production needed something to occupy it’s aircraft plants. It also needed to find a use for a stockpile of 100,000 tons of scrap aluminum salvaged from destroyed aircraft. As part of the EFM program, a house design was created that would solve both these problems. A house that could be built in aircraft factories, and designed to consume as much aluminum as possible. This was the AIROH house.
The AIROH house was essentially an airplane in house form. It was fabricated in four individual sections, each of which bore a more than passing resemblance to a section of airplane fuselage. They would be driven to the construction site on the back of trucks, then bolted together into a single house. A kitchen and bathroom were built in, and all pipes and wiring were installed in the factory. The assembly process was almost entirely mechanized:
“With the exception of the nailing down of the floor boards, which was done by hand, the entire production was a mechanised process. The wall frames, like shallow trays, were first sprayed on the inside with hot bitumen, then immediately passed under a battery of cement pourers to be filled with air entrained grout which provided an insulating layer. The partly made wall panels were then passed through low pressure steam drying ovens which enabled the grout to reach full strength in 48 hours … The final assembly of the components was done on the moving belt system, during which the final paint spraying was carried out … Each unit of the house emerging fully wired for electricity, glazed and painted …”
The houses were 675 square feet, and each one was identical. The AIROHs were constructed by a variety of manufacturers including Vickers and Bristol Aeroplane Company. Over 50,000 of them would be built as part of the emergency housing program, each one using two tons of scrap aluminum.
The requirement that the houses be built in aircraft factories put a great number of constraints on the design. The windows were small, and the positions were fixed, as the sections had to be stiff enough to survive being transported to the job site on the back of trucks. Because the finished sections were too bulky to store, and hiccup in the logistics or delivery process could grind production to a halt.
It also became apparent that aluminum was an extremely expensive material to construct houses out of. The AIROHs cost twice as much as the other houses built as part of the emergency housing program. Once the program ended the companies attempted to sell them on the open market, but had little success.
Ultimately the government would move away from single family homes, and towards precast concrete high-rises, as a more economical method of constructing public housing. And as the AIROHs were temporary houses with a lifespan of 10 years, precious few of them are left today. Most are gone, perhaps recycled back into the aircraft aluminum from whence they came.
