Monsanto's House of the future at Disneyland's Tomorrowland.

MONSANTO'S PLASTIC HOUSE looks serene amid its landscaping here. Its white, cantilevered wings make cloud reflections in the quiet pool at its base. It looks as though it suited its hillside setting or could fade nicely into a flat plot in the Midwest, or a rocky one in New England, or among the jack pines and live oaks of South Carolina. 

The thousands of people who visited the House of the Future since it opened its doors earlier this summer would find it hard to believe that here is the house that lack-of-information built. The whole project goes back four years. At the time it was common knowledge in the industry that plastics had a small but well established beachhead in the  construction field. The applications were confined mostly to functional and decorative purposes. It was quite clear that the beachhead could be expanded almost indefinitely if the plastics and the building industries could ever arrive at a common ground of understanding of each other's problems. 

Monsanto, with a frank eye on new markets for its chemicals and plastics, and some healthy inquisitiveness about what plastics could or could not do for construction, asked architects at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to do a study of plastics in housing. In the back of everyone's mind was the thought that some day the design for a plastic house might come out of this. In 1955 a study titled "Plastics in Housing" emerged. It was an encouraging and fascinating document. At this point Monsanto's Plastics Division took a deep breath and decided that a full blown construction pro-gram was the only way to break the bottleneck on performance data and show builders, architects and the public in tangible fashion what plastics could do. Meanwhile, Monsanto joined with MIT in a telescoped research program—one in which design, engineering and testing could go along almost simultaneously. This has since become a continuing program. Eventually the Monsanto-MIT team came up with a bold design for a molded plastic house which offered some startling new approaches to the philosophy of housing for Americans. 

It also offered some tempting glimpses into the future of plastics. The decision to actually build a house involved no small responsibility and no small cash outlay. Feeling it was the better part of wisdom to keep an eye on the basic objective—plastics in housing—Monsanto invited a cross section of housing industry suppliers to take a long look into their respective futures and translate what they saw into reality. Construction started in January 1957 at Disneyland. The house was opened to the public in June. Some of the innovations in the house, pictured on these pages, may not be commercially available for years. But in the meantime, like the special applications of plastics in the House of the Future, these imaginative new electronic and mechanical aids to man's health, convenience and pleasure can be market- and engineer-researched from every angle. In one bold leap, Monsanto and its cooperating partners feel, design and engineering temporarily have gone ahead, rather than merely kept the traditional two paces behind the housing needs and desires of Americans. 

The House of the Future isn't Monsanto's only club in the bag when it comes to plastics-in-building research. At St. Louis early this spring the company's Inorganic Chemicals Division opened a large laboratory building which is doubling as a proving ground for plastics. Plastics, for example, face the building blocks and structural panels on the exterior, are being used as pipes, drawer liners, walls, ceilings, floors and even in some new, highly efficient vent fans indoors. The gentle compound curves of the House of the Future and the glazed turquoise face of the new St. Louis laboratory represent the best use of plastics technology for the moment. Both were designed to stimulate creative thought among builders, architects and the plastics industry—and to feed back a continual stream of practical information. Research years are telescoped very quickly into months in this fashion.