Ground Condition · 2025-03-18 · 9 MIN READ

Quonset quorum

What do metal Army shelters, abstract expressionism, and French modernism have in common?

Kelsey Keith

Quonset quorum

What do metal Army shelters, abstract expressionism, and French modernism have in common?

Kelsey Keith

Mar 18, 2025

Everyone has a house they’re obsessed with. This phenomenon is very much not limited to architecture people, or design writers, or erstwhile shelter magazine types— it is simply a statement of fact. It might be a derelict house under a blanket of ivy in an otherwise-manicured neighborhood, or one of the 20th century’s masterpieces of domestic architecture. Or it might be, as in my case, a tube of corrugated metal on the eastern end of Long Island, occupied first by an abstract painter and second by a libertine book publisher, before its

demolition

in 1985.

Robert Motherwell in his Chareau house, photographed in 1953 by Hans Namuth.

Nerds among you may know the Quonset hut in question, designed by French architectural designer-in-exile

Pierre Chareau

for the painter

Robert Motherwell

in 1947.

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Left: There aren’t many color photographs of this house, but from this exterior shot you can imagine the curving steel crossbeams on the interior that Motherwell painted in the same red his friend

Alexander Calder

was known to use on his sculptures. Right: The flooring for the mezzanine/balcony was done in oak disks set in concrete. “We wanted to use tiles,”

recalled

Motherwell, “but I couldn't afford them.”

Motherwell had the house for about five years (long enough to kickstart the

Spanish Elegy

series that would cement him in post-war art canon) before selling it to radical publishing figure

Barney Rosset

, who founded Grove Press. Rosset sold it in 1980, and soon the new owners tired of it. Critic

Alastair Gordon

appealed to preservationists in documenting the house through photographs, interviews, and writings before the wrecking ball hit in 1985. As Gordon explains

in a 2007

feature:

Chareau was fascinated by the possibilities of the Quonset hut, a prefabricated building system

developed during the war

by Navy architects at the Quonset Point Naval Air Station in Rhode Island. The kit-of-parts structures were made from curving steel ribs and corrugated-metal roofing. They could be easily assembled and were inexpensive… “I remember two trucks coming with all of these ribs and curved galvanized steel,” said Motherwell.

But the house was more than just a Quonset hut. Chareau and Motherwell improvised and created a unique architectural hybrid, very much in the spirit of Motherwell's collages of the same period. Working with the materials at hand, they shaped a multilevel environment that was surprisingly sophisticated. Certain elements suggested a cruder, low-budget version of Chareau's masterwork, the

Maison de Verre

, in Paris.

It all comes back to Maison de Verre.

What’s memorable about the house, and attractive to someone daring to do a lot with a little, is how well Chareau’s design used industrial materials for aesthetic ends. That particular move was his hallmark, and in this case, incorporating two Quonset kits (for a total cost of $3,000) allowed Chareau his surgical additions of industrial elegance.

A Quonset without embellishment has its benefits—chief among them affordability and flexibility—but that tends to work when you need to build cheap or fast (a thrifty artist’s summer house, temporary post-war housing). In any case, it’s an efficient structural model. The whole thing about the Quonset is that it was designed as an engineering problem: a low-cost dwelling, easy to install by the dozens.

“The Motherwell house is, in some sense, as much ensemble as unified concept. Collage is another word that comes to mind.

The compound is a juxtaposition of Quonset hut, industrial greenhouse, concrete, and humble wood.”

Cited from

the book

Pierre Chareau: Modern Architecture and Design

, taken from the 2016 Chareau exhibition at the

Jewish Museum

. That window, btw, was 36 feet long as salvaged from an old greenhouse.

Floor plan of the structure

via

L’Architecture d’Aujourd’hui

, no. 30 (1950); worth noting that the ground floor was dug out below grade.

As for the cons: Quonset huts are durable to a point, but not necessarily long-lasting structures. Then there’s the interior space, which requires a creative mind to work around—the signature curve blending wall and ceiling doesn’t support a traditional arrangement of furniture and artwork. Finally, the temperature: The original engineers

worked to insulate the thing

so it could withstand “the arctic cold of Newfoundland or the desert heat of the Sahara,” but that clearly predates our current meteorological state of affairs. (An architect friend did point out to me that

in Hawaii

, they were constructed using canvas instead of corrugated metal due to the climate.)

So, back to Chareau, who had the right idea with the modified Quonset. At a time when housing costs are astronomical, why not reconsider the form as a starting point for domestic structures?

Notable architectural riffs on the theme include a

double-Quonset residence

in Honolulu by

Vladimir Ossipoff

in 1948 and the

Daniels residence

(completed 1949)

James Fitzgibbon

in my hometown of Knoxville, TN. The

Eames Office

Herbert Matter

, and

Buckminster Fuller

worked with John Entenza of

Arts & Architecture

magazine to highlight prefabricated construction as a means for building necessary post-war housing in an issue dated July 1944—including the Quonset—and the Eameses later designed their own

prefab “Kwikset” house

, whose roofline is an obvious allusion to its Quonset predecessor.

Left: Motherwell’s

first drawing

(1948) in what would become

his series

Elegies to the Spanish Republic

. Motherwell originally created the design for the second issue of

Possibilities

magazine—for the first issue (1947), Motherwell had his pal Chareau contribute. Right: Motherwell in the East Hampton converted Quonset in this same period—late ‘40s.

ON FILM:

Norman Mailer

’s

much-derided 1970 film

Maidstone

was filmed at the house when it was owned by legendary man-about-town

Barney Rosset

You can suffer through it

for glimpses of the house, but be warned, there are disappointingly few.

In the last issue, I wondered what’s up with

Zara Home

(and received several messages asking the same, and pointing out a

Vincent Van Duysen

armoire

currently for sale at Zara for $11,000). However, my curiosity is flavored with distaste, for—unsurprisingly, given its fast fashion roots—Zara Home currently also sells

this homogenized rendition

of a Senufo table. Notably, it’s priced at exactly the same dollar amount as a

real

Senufo table

from the Ivory Coast, which you can procure via

Lichen

in New York. Different but also appealing: this 19th century

Meiji-era low table

from Japan for $750 via 1stDibs. Lesson:

Ain’t nothin like the real thing, baby!

Spot the fake!

Here is a really lovely

landscape project

by Molly Sedlacek of

OR.CA Living

for a Cliff May house outside of San Diego

For Dwell,

Anjulie Rao

gets into the new function of

GoFundMe

: the “personal relief market,” aka

a crowdsourced solution

in the void of failing home insurance policies

Speaking of fire resistance, the

LA Times

published a primer

Cal Earth

’s

SuperAdobe

housing designs

—domed structures made from soil, water, sandbags, barbed wire, plaster, and cement—that have been “studied by NASA and endorsed by the United Nations.”

Something I’ve noticed in my parents’ historic neighborhood in east Tennessee: renovating in the style of

Giant White Houses

. According to

Dan Kois

at Slate, it’s “overtaking America” and the driving forces are exactly what you’d guess: Chip and Joanna, the rise of minimalism, Zillow.

Dan Kois also wrote that

pandemic-era ode to

the various styles of

house address numbers

in his neighborhood… a subject

near and dear

to my heart.

Awesome story

Diana Budds

on women woodworkers for the NYT [

NB: The print hed on this story was “Ladies Who Lathe,” which, for the record Diana did not write.

]

Brick is back!

(Brick never left.)

This condo building at 100 Franklin Street in Tribeca stopped

Asad

and me in our tracks last year when we encountered it in on a gallery walk. It was designed by

Palette Architecture with DDG

; the facade is made of brick hand-made in Denmark, and that courtyard stitching together the two halves of the building reads very London.

Why is outdoor furniture so vexing?

As previously mentioned, we are redesigning our backyard in the East Bay hills with the help of a

talented friend

. (More on this soon!) I’m in furniture-hunting stage and have noticed there are precious few modalities in the category. Presumably this is why everyone I know has bought

HAY

’s

Palissade

—but California sun is too hot for the original version, IMHO. (Imagine metal slats grilling your posterior.)

Ronan Bouroullec

redesigned it

with cord seating

, which I very well may cop. HAY’s

Crate collection

(which expands upon

Gerrit Rietveld

’s designs from the 1930s) also appeals.

Other than HAY—which I,

ahem

, literally wrote

the book

on—what am I not seeing? Send me outdoor furniture recs, please!

What stayed with you?