Avion Village

As early as the mid-1940s, Dallas, like other centers of defense production and military activity across the nation, faced a severe housing shortage that private builders could not meet. Some federal officials used the crisis to experiment with architecture and planning and to test a pilot program for lowering the cost of quality housing through prefabrication and mass-production building techniques, while also introducing industrial workers to mutual home ownership as an alternative to traditional suburban ownership. Avion Village was one of several early developments intended as a permanent addition to community housing stock, and its layout encouraged both privacy and resident interaction. Built under the auspices of the Federal Works Agency and its assistant administrator, Texas native Lawrence Westbrook, it was designed by Roscoe DeWitt and David R. Williams in cooperation with Richard J. Neutra. Avion Village began in May 1941 amid heavy media attention as two teams competed to finish the first house in a planned 300-unit development; that first unit was completed in less than one hour, and the entire project was finished in 100 days with help from an on-site makeshift prefabrication plant. Civilian employees of the North American Aviation Company were its first residents. In 1948, the Avion Village Mutual Housing Corporation bought the development from the federal government, and it continues to be mutually owned by residents.

Grand Prairie, Texas · United States