If you love nerding out about the history of your house as much as I do, then you need to hunt down the Parade of Homes history for your town. Don’t have one? You can borrow mine (Madison) or Atom Stevens’ (Denver) because they can really deliver on the excellent design ideas!
My research into the history of my own house quickly led me to the history of Madison, WI Parade of homes. Soon I fell completely down the rabbit hole of old newspaper ads, exploratory neighborhood walks, and visiting the local home builders association to check out their archive of annual Parade of Homes brochures
Here are some snaps I grabbed the last time I was over there.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Find a local (maybe) Parade of Homes
Atom has done an even deeper dive into the history of Denver’s mid-century Parade of Homes, a treasure trove of information about the trends and innovations in home design from the 1950s and 60s. His search started at the library.
Yours can, too. Or maybe you have access to your local paper archived online! It’s easy to search! You can use resources like these to unlock the secrets of your own mid-century home.
When Atom first started researching his own home, he found himself at the library digging through microfiche (the tool of all us true history nerds).
He discovered vintage advertisements from the 1955 Denver Parade of Homes, and suddenly, a whole world of mid-century design history opened up.
Why the Parade?
A Parade of Homes was a major event that showcased new homes built by various developers, each featuring the latest in home technology, layouts, and style. They happened all over the country and at many scales.
You can hunt down vintage home ads from any time or place but the Parade of Homes is always a good “fence post” to start from. It’s an easy search term. Any week in history that a Parade was going on there will be a host of associated ads and coverage. You may be able to find maps that lead you back to the actual homes in real space so that you can visit them today.
1955 was an especially good year for these events, because it was the first time homeowners could take advantage of 30-year mortgages.
This shift allowed more people to buy bigger, more modern homes, which is why we start to see two-car garages, split-levels, and even powder rooms showing up in homes during this period. Builders wanted to showcase how much house you could get now that your cost was spread over a 30-year loan.
The Parade of Homes ads gave Atom context for not only his house but also his entire neighborhood. It’s amazing to think about how much insight you can gain by digging into old records.
So, if your town ever hosted a Parade of Homes, that’s a fantastic starting point for research! If not … borrow Madison’s or Denver’s … or both.
Why research Advertising?
Now, you might be thinking, “Ads? Really?”
Yes! Ads are a goldmine of information. Atom found that ads from the 1950s and 60s are packed with details about what made homes desirable back then—features like garbage disposals (seriously, they were a big deal!), modern kitchens, and space-saving floor plans. These ads not only tell us what was trendy but also reflect the way mid-century homes were designed to make life more comfortable and efficient for families of the time.
If you’re on the hunt for your home’s history, look for these types of ads in old newspapers or other local archives. Even if your home wasn’t a part of an official Parade of Homes, you might still uncover some fascinating details about its design or builder.
A quick digression into modernizing MCM homes
As much as we love the style and character of mid-century homes, they weren’t exactly built with modern energy efficiency in mind. Many homes from the 50s and 60s have little to no insulation, single-pane windows, and drafty designs.
And with many municipalities implementing stricter energy standards, remodelers are likely to have to include energy improvements when completing major renovations.
What could these stricter energy efficiency standards in cities like Denver mean for mid-century homes?
Updates like adding insulation or more energy efficient windows could be required.
In Today’s Episode You’ll Hear:
- Why the Parade of Homes really took off in 1955.
- How builders advertised in the “housewife” era.
- What new energy standards might mean for mid-century homes.
Listen Now On
Resources
- Lately Atom has been talking and writing about Denver’s Parade of Homes!
- Find all things Atom on Insta!
- Get ready to remodel with my free Masterclass, “How to Plan an MCM Remodel to Fit Your Life(…and Budget)” available on demand!
- Get the essential elements of my master plan process in my new mini-course, Master Plan in a Month.
- Want us to master plan for you? Find out all the details with my mini-class, Three Secrets of a Regret-Proof Mid Mod Remodel.
And you can always…
- Join us in the Facebook Community for Mid Mod Remodel
- Find me on Instagram:@midmodmidwest
- Find the podcast on Instagram: @midmodremodelpodcast
Read the Full Episode Transcript
Della Hansmann
Do you love learning weird, obscure mid-century facts? Do you think you’re pretty good at it? I do, and I think I am, but not me, not you, not anyone I’ve ever met loves it more or is better at it than Atom Stevens.
Della Hansmann
Hey there. Welcome back to mid mod remodel. This is a show about updating MCM homes, helping you match a midden three home to your modern life. I’m your host. Della Hansmann, architect and mid-century ranch enthusiast. You’re listening to Episode 1812.
Della Hansmann
Today we’re digging in on the story of how Atom started researching his own super cool by the way, mid-century home by looking into vintage 1950s and 60s ads at his local library on microfiche. That search led him to discovering the history of the 1955 Denver Parade of Homes.
Della Hansmann
We’re going to talk about that today, because that particular moment in time was a huge shift in American Housing history as a country. We had just solved the housing crisis, the last housing crisis, when Congress passed the 30 year amortized mortgage program and kicked off a tremendous boom of new and better home construction.
Della Hansmann
That Parade of Homes showed off almost 100 houses all over the city of Denver, highlighting the growth and the possibility of what homes could be for the future. Listen in to learn all about that and how we could take those formerly future looking homes, now 70 years old, almost, and set them up for the future now in today’s episode. Let’s get right into it.
Della Hansmann
When you want to learn more about the history of your house. One amazing resource is, if your municipality, your area, has had a parade of homes going back a long way, you might be able to find vintage ads for it, and they can prove to be a treasure trove.
Della Hansmann
I found this in my town, and Atom has found it in his. Hi, I’m Della Hansmann of mid mod Midwest. I’m here with Atom Stevens real estate agent, who specializes in mid-century and modern homes in the Denver area. And we both love mid-century design.
Della Hansmann
You have gone so much deeper than I have on this. You actually found out the history of the Parade of Homes in Denver by researching it on microfiche. What did you go look in the first place?
Atom Stevens
It was just I had started by trying to research the history of my own home several years ago, and I fell down the rabbit hole, falling in love with all of these mid-century ads. You know, it’s, it’s the librarian thought I was crazy, because when I originally came in, I was like, How do I do you have, like, an index of, like, what ads are where? And she just looked at me, like, why would you want to look at ads? It was like, history. Yeah, history.
Atom Stevens
So I but as I started digging in, I’m like, This is where all the information is, I mean, there’s some articles here and there, but the ads are what’s really telling the story. Yeah. So as I started spending sometimes an unhealthy amount of hours at the library, digging through the micro fish. But one of the things I ran across was ads for the Parade of Homes. Now I you know, growing up in the 1980s the Parade of Homes was so cool to me.
Atom Stevens
It’s a little different now, but back in the 1980s it was over the top crazy, like they would build a neighborhood of like, six homes, and they would be gigantic, and they would all have home theaters in the basement and all these things. And like, it was fun to go because you could just dream about what could be if you were rich. But what I didn’t know until I ran across those ads in the microfiche is the Parade of Homes actually had a long history. The First Parade of Homes in Denver was in 1953 now 71 years ago, almost.
Atom Stevens
And so being the advertisements for that was really interesting, because it was a totally different format then. And in fact, the 1955 parade was the biggest, and it was a different format, where what I was used to was, again, it was just one neighborhood, maybe six to 12 homes. But at that year, they had homes all over the city. It was pretty much every builder had a home in the parade. They had almost 100 homes in the parade. I’m not sure you could have seen the whole parade.
Della Hansmann
No. In Madison, they were definitely always they chose an area they were about to develop. They had a bunch of different builders come in and each do a model home on the street, which is now so fun, because you can go and you can find the remnant streets, but right all over the Denver area, it must be at home chaos that week.
Atom Stevens
Oh, I’m sure. And you know it was there’s like the newspapers. So they in that in those years, they put the program in the newspaper. So you’d get your newspaper and you’d have the whole program and the map and the list of houses and all the advertising, which, of course, is great because now that’s all archived. The whole story is there. But you know, it was also indicative of what was happening at the time.
Not only was the whole country going through a building boom in 1955 but as it turns out, in round 5455 Denver was growing at four times the national average. Average, wow. We were having the boom of booms here in Denver, which is why there were 100 homes in the parade, and they came in every shape and size, from two bedroom, one bath starter homes to sprawling ranches on acre lots and everything in between.
Della Hansmann
Oh, that’s amazing. Plus 1955 was the first year you could hold a parade after 1954 when the 30 year mortgage was introduced by act of Congress. So that really, like, opened up the funding for people to be able to afford a lot more home than they had in Madison. We really see the difference in 1954 the houses are still pretty modest. They’re all one car garages.
Della Hansmann
They have one bathroom per household, and 55 suddenly we’ve got, like, three split levels show up, and we’ve got two car garages, and we’ve got powder rooms on the main social area and then separate bedroom. There’s at least one house that has the teeniest of owner’s baths with, like, a useless little tower that I’m sure does not exist today. It’s been remodeled into nonexistence. But I but moment was sort of like suddenly your dollar could go so much farther because you were going to spend it.
Atom Stevens
That is true, I hadn’t, I hadn’t noticed that shift. But that is right, like I have you’re in Denver too. In 54 It was like one car, car ports or garages were rare, but they existed. And then in 55 you start to see one car garage, like half garage, half carport, or even two car garages start to appear up here on houses, and I hadn’t thought about that, like clear shift in that. In that time period.
Della Hansmann
They went from 15 year funded mortgages to 30 year mortgages, which just basically means, okay, spend the same amount and lab, well, the interest would definitely eat a chunk of it, but you could basically have almost double the value of house for the same monthly payment.
Della Hansmann
Which really just opened up houses to so many more people, and so much more house to more people. When you think about things that get advertised in those sort of parade of home spreads, what’s the feature that stands out as cool to you versus like the things they were advertising that you look at and think that’s not worth the ad copy?
Atom Stevens
Well, I mean, they were, gosh, trying to think of like specific things that they were advertising that I think were cool. I mean, other than specific features of like floor plans, the plans, yeah, right, different types of floor plans and how they would divide up private spaces and, you know, sleeping spaces and living spaces kitchens were, of course, the center of everything in terms of selling features. Because, I mean, let’s face it, it may sound sexist, but it’s, in most cases, it’s women who buy houses.
Della Hansmann
And it was a housewife era definitely, yes, that’s that is true in all of the advertising literature. I wonder how much it was actually true in reality, but it was certainly true in the culture, right? These houses were being built. It was the part of society that was visible and sort of catered to, was you.
Atom Stevens
It was very much catered to. And so like kitchen cabinets, appliances, for whatever reason, Garbage Disposals were on the top of the list of like everything. I don’t know if like waste King, garbage disposal company must have given builders extra money for putting that as the top line feature, but,
Della Hansmann
Or maybe it really was just that desirable. You think about how excited people were about vacuums when they didn’t have to sweep dust out of the house every day, and maybe that meant again. Now we’re like, we want to do organic, and everybody’s got their own yard composting, but it might have been the difference between needing to compost and garden your own food and feeling like, right, everything in cans and frozen. And then I will put the waste down the garbage disposal, and.
Atom Stevens
Yep. And speaking of today, I have a chicken who is making a bunch of noise in the background here.
Della Hansmann
That’s just to the modern feeling of the mystery background.
Atom Stevens
Yes, but yeah, you’re right. And actually, to give some context, I don’t know if this was true throughout the country, but in Denver in 1955 most homes had incinerators for burning your trash, really, oh, part of the idea of a garbage disposal really, was to dispose of garbage down your drain, which you know later came to be a bad idea, but it was seen as an alternative to using the incinerator in your backyard.
Della Hansmann
Every individual house had, it wasn’t like a neighborhood incinerator. It was like a personal incinerator.
Atom Stevens
Every backyard had an incinerator in it. Yeah, and I don’t people have showed me photographs of their incinerators here in the neighborhood and things like that. Some houses still have evidence of where it was. It’s rare to actually see one still in place. But yeah, that was a common thing. 55 to have an incinerator in your backyard.
Della Hansmann
Fascinating. We definitely, I have had clients from all over the country have to watch out for old oil drums being buried in the yard. If the house originally had an oil powered boiler.
Atom Stevens
We didn’t have that here, but yeah, I could see that as like that would be a regional thing to have to deal with.
Della Hansmann
Things to watch out for well, and I think for people watching Parade of Homes is a great place to start looking for house ads. I mean, there’s usually a home section, maybe weekly in a lot of older newspapers, but if you can find the date that the parade regularly repeated, that gives you a source point to go and check for newspaper archives every individual year, and then you can kind of compare along and see how things change in your community, in your town.
Atom Stevens
Like moment some people discovered that they lived in a parade home and, like, that’s another piece of story. A little breaking point this home was in the parade.
Della Hansmann
It’s really cool when you find that out, and then you can, kind of, it makes you want to go learn more about your neighbor’s houses. And, yeah, inside of them, I think would be really interesting to, oh, this is such an extrovert idea. It’ll be really interesting to host or organize a new parade of an original parade site and get people to, like, open up their houses as a tour.
Atom Stevens
That would be a cool idea
Della Hansmann
See how they’ve changed, probably
Atom Stevens
Especially at some of the because in some of the years in Denver, they did do it at a single site. Into the 60s, there were, and I think even one in the late 50s, they did it all on the one site. And so it would be cool to pick one of those out and see if the homeowners would be willing to.
Della Hansmann
That would be a coordination thing. But for the extroverts in the audience, if you ever feel inclined, I would be lovely. I would love to support that. I would not love to organize that.
Atom Stevens
Yeah, that would be very cool, though,
Della Hansmann
Marvelous. So yeah, Parade of Homes, don’t be a stranger to yours. Go find out what it looked like in your town.
Della Hansmann
Mid-century. Homes have so many great features built into them, but they also can be missing a few key elements we value today, like insulation and other sustainability items that we care more about now that energy is more expensive and important to us.
Della Hansmann
So when you’re thinking about taking care of your mid-century home, thinking about how to bring it up to modern building codes and to make it as sustainable as possible, is a great thing to consider how we can retrofit better sustainability features, better energy efficiency features, into mid-century homes without ruining them. This came up for you recently in a client sale, right?
Atom Stevens
Yeah. I mean, I don’t think it’s any secret that mid-century homes are generally not energy efficient, yeah, and a lot of that just comes from the fact that when they were built, energy was cheap. It was so cheap that it just didn’t matter that your windows were single pane and you had no insulation. My house was built with no insulation in the walls. If you can believe it.
Della Hansmann
That’s wild to me. When I visited Denver, I was there in the summer, but I kept asking people, it’s cold here in the winter, right? Well, then why are your windows like this? But, but yeah, I think energy efficiency wasn’t on people’s mindset. And also, when we think about the changing culture, the people who were moving to these mid-century houses lived in drafty farmhouses and draftier buildings that were also not insulated and not temperature comfortable in a way that we now expect.
Della Hansmann
So I think both energy has become more expensive and our standard for human comfort has really shifted, so we now want to heat and cool houses and control the temperature in a way that doesn’t really line up with how well sealed they are awesome.
Atom Stevens
No, these old houses are pretty drafty as it goes. Still not as drafty as earlier homes, but they definitely still struggle from that. But you know, one of the big issues, though, is that it’s not just the cost of energy that’s the problem in a lot of major cities. Denver, especially. There are starting to be mandates coming down, and right now they’re going after major commercial buildings, but the thinking is that eventually it will affect all of us, and that mandate is that we have to use less energy.
Atom Stevens
And so I kind of experienced this on, you know, I sold a house here in my neighborhood, actually a block from my house. That original house from it was a one owner house from 1954 the homeowners bought it in 54 and they lived out the rest of their lives there.
Atom Stevens
And the house actually had its original roof on it, which is pretty incredible, but it was a tar and gravel roof. It’s the kind of roof that, actually, if you maintain it, can last through the decades and but we ended up having to replace it because insurance said they didn’t want to cover a 70 year old, 70 year old roof. So I guess I understand.
Atom Stevens
But as we got the roof replaced as part. Of the sale that I handled, when they came to close out the permit, the inspector kind of put me on notice. He’s like, you know, to close out the permit, he wanted us to prove that there was insulation in the roof.
Atom Stevens
Fortunately, these houses, even though they were built with no insulation in the walls, they were built with some insulation in the roof. So I was able to prove to him that we had insulation in the roof, but it turned out that if we hadn’t, he would have made us add insulation as part of the roof replacement.
Atom Stevens
And he said, you know, just you guys should be on notice with these mid-century homes that, like we’re coming for these houses eventually, from an energy standpoint. And so since that, I’ve had to start thinking about like we love these houses. We love the way they live, we love the way they look, we love the way they’re designed. We don’t want to give those things up, but we do need to face the reality that living in an energy inefficient house is no longer going to be an option moving into the future.
Della Hansmann
Yeah.
Atom Stevens
So we need to start thinking now, while we can before mandates start coming down and things like that, how can we improve these houses without giving up what we love about their architecture? And a lot of us need to start thinking about that.
Della Hansmann
It’s, it’s an open question, and it’s definitely something whenever we touch a house, whether we’re doing enough work that we’re going to trigger the attention of city codes or not. Anytime I have a client opening up a wall, I encourage them to do everything they can to update the plumbing, the electric and improve the insulation situation. In many cases, any work that you do past a certain point just requires that you bring it up to modern code. Now that was it.
Della Hansmann
When you mentioned that you said someone from the city of Denver had told you they’re coming for these houses, I was wondering, do you think that means as they are, as they have worked on, or do you think that they’re actually going to be coming and knocking on doors to say, at some point there’s a limit, or we need to see a plan for changes to be made?
Atom Stevens
That’s the big question that nobody really knows the answer to at this point. But there is actually one class of house that’s facing that right now, and we don’t, I mean, we as a real estate agents, nobody really knows how to guide these people so far. But what’s happening is Denver is blessed with a lot of mid-century high rise condo buildings.
Della Hansmann
Oh, interesting.
Atom Stevens
And so, you know, these single family homes that we talk about all the time, they’re not the only mid-century housing stock. And actually, the mid-century high rises we have here in Denver are fabulous. There are a lot of people who hate how they look, because they’re basically these big towers, maybe 10 or 12 stories, some even taller that have huge balconies on the outsides of them, and
Della Hansmann
That’s great to live in.
Atom Stevens
Right? The idea behind that is, even if it makes for an ugly building, which I disagree, but I get it to live in one of these units is incredible. Not only do they have fabulous floor plans, but imagine your entire outside wall being glass. And imagine being able to you know there are operable parts that are basically sliding glass doors. Imagine opening your sliding glass doors out onto not a four foot balcony, which would be typical today, if you can find a balcony at all in an apartment or building.
Della Hansmann
Useless.
Atom Stevens
Eight foot deep balcony, a space there that you could have a dining table outside, and in the warm months, dine outside, you basically have an outdoor room. So architects here in Denver were achieving indoor outdoor connection, not just on single family homes like these, but even in our residential towers.
Atom Stevens
Most of which were built as apartments at the time but converted into condos through the years because condo because condos, at least in Denver, didn’t come about until the mid to late 60s. Interesting, but these are incredible places. But what’s happening is Denver passed this new mandate that says all buildings over a certain size need to meet these energy performance requirements, or you’re going to be fined or whatever.
Atom Stevens
And so these buildings built in the 1950s and 60s, they’re really struggling, because they’re already having to dig up extra money to, like, shore up their foundations and deal with an aging building, and now they have this extra mandate on them that’s saying you have to make this building perform from a certain energy performance standpoint, they don’t know where they’re going to find the money to do that.
Della Hansmann
And even what technology makes that happen. We need to recruit some engineer friends who are obsessed with mid-century.
Atom Stevens
Yes, to help us figure out how these buildings could even face these mandates. I don’t know how they’re going to pay for it, but yeah, but I could see that mandate eventually, then coming to single family homes, saying you need to upgrade your home.
Della Hansmann
Well, and even if we don’t want to take it from the stick perspective, the carrot perspective, it’s just a good idea as energy prices are probably not going to get lower. Definitely no to think about making your house. More comfortable, more effective and more efficient of the energy costs that it requires.
Della Hansmann
So yeah, thinking about ways to add insulation, particularly to roofs, but also to walls, and to do that in esthetically satisfactory way can be tricky, but it is the opportunity you have every time you need to make a change to a layout or to make a repair in your house, as an opportunity to get into the wall from the inside and add insulation.
Atom Stevens
Yeah, right, upgrade windows if you can.
Della Hansmann
Or, you know, there are also retrofit solutions. I think there are also some livability things that they were doing in the mid-century that we’ve lost or forgotten generationally, particularly, I don’t know what the status of this would be in Denver, but in the Midwest, people who have their original wooden windows, they all came with storm windows, and those storm windows.
Atom Stevens
My house came with storm windows, actually.
Della Hansmann
Do you still have them?
Atom Stevens
I do. Some of them are broken, and I haven’t installed them in a few years, and I really should, because they don’t look very nice, but they do help do that job.
Della Hansmann
They do the double pane job and done right, designed well and in there very few houses around here that still have them, because most people either replace their windows or they just forgot that that was a seasonal maintenance thing. Take out your screens, put in your storms. It was an energy efficient thing. Also, it was a sound privacy thing. Plus, it was a security measure. It did a lot.
Atom Stevens
also in our house in particular, and this hasn’t been spelled out, I did find documents that said that the builder was unhappy that he was having to buy an extra $300 worth of storm windows for all the houses, because Cliff may hadn’t originally, you know, in California, they don’t have the storm windows.
Atom Stevens
There’s no need for that. But living in one and having left the storms off here and there, one of the other things is it protects the wood windows from condensation, right, which can destroy wood windows over time,
Della Hansmann
Right? It shifts, I mean, this gets a little technical, but it shifts the thermal barrier of the house outwards, which means that instead of whatever the outside cold temperature is, it’s not hitting your window glass and then running down.
Atom Stevens
So that when you boil a pot of spaghetti, you’re not getting a bunch of water building up on your windows and then causing rot on the wood frames.
Della Hansmann
Exactly. So there are some old school measures. And again, that’s a there’s got a will to want to do that. But then you can also go with a modern replacement window that’s got a better energy efficiency rating. And with things like these gorgeous flat roofs, there are a little bit more of an investment.
Della Hansmann
There are possibilities to do a graduated edge that still seems nice and slender out by the end of the soffit, by the gutter line, and then gets thicker up, built up to the thickness you need to get your proper I’m not sure what your R value required in Denver would be without checking the code books, but here in the Midwest, we need our 38 and it’s thick. You know, even if you’re doing it in bridge installation, it adds up.
Della Hansmann
And so, yeah, it’s there are things that can be done. And then the question is, can we spread the word enough to enough people that live in mid-century homes, to hire people to do the work that understand and care about the mid-century esthetic, rather than just coming in and sort of smacking a hat onto.
Atom Stevens
And that may be the hardest thing right there.
Della Hansmann
That’s going to be the question.
Atom Stevens
I try to and I try to help where I can and be a resource where I can, because I know at least a few contractors and various things that like they get how these houses are built and what makes them special and how not to break them.
Della Hansmann
I do think that there is some benefit. I think anytime you can educate a new person who wasn’t aware of or interested in in mid-century design, maybe not everyone, but my experience has generally been I chat with a contractor about why mid-century design is cool and how they can incorporate it into what they’re going to do, and they suddenly think that’s a fun tool in their tool belt.
Della Hansmann
They want to know about that. They want to tell their next client about that. So I kind of feel like in the way that we work with clients doing master plans for people all over Madison, all over the country, each time they have a good experience with a contractor, that contractor can then go on and like, just interpret that idea.
Della Hansmann
Maybe it won’t be quite the same. And maybe they’ll improve on it. Maybe they will, uh, maybe it’ll be lost a little bit in translation, but we can just sort of get more and more people on board with the idea that mid-century houses are cool and they need a certain type of care.
Atom Stevens
And I always offer homeowners. Not many take me up on it, but I always offer them the opportunity that if they want to bring me in and just walk through with their contractor and teach them the things that they should be sensitive about, that can go a long way in making sure that you get a contractor that’s not going to inadvertently break your house.
Della Hansmann
And that’s particularly true. You know, with some of the houses in the cliff may design, yeah, you’re not going to blow insulation into those wall cavities because they aren’t traditional wall cavities. So yeah, knowing those things, it’s really important
Atom Stevens
yes
Della Hansmann
To moving forward with. Um, well,
Atom Stevens
Electricians appreciate it as well, because they’re not normal wall cavities.
Della Hansmann
I really want the heads up, yeah. I mean, it’s going to help them provide accurate pricing and not be unpleasantly surprised when they open up a wall and go,
Atom Stevens
What? What is going on here?
Della Hansmann
So I guess we’re putting out a call here. If you are sustainability minded, if you are engineering minded, and you would like to become obsessed with mid-century homes, or you already are. These are problems that need solving, and we’d love your input Internet.
Atom Stevens
One other thing that I just want to throw out there too is even though it’s kind of late century, so going into 1970s and 80s, but I feel like a lot of it is still in the same spirit of mid-century. But the architects and builders were really exploring green building in the 1970s a lot of that was driven by the energy crisis.
Atom Stevens
But you know, there was also just an interest even at that time, of being off grid. And there were a lot of things done. If you look at 19 like late 1970s early 1980s modern homes, there are actually a lot of green elements to how those homes could be built.
Atom Stevens
It may be time to reopen the books written during that time and see how we can apply some of the lessons they learned then to the homes that we have now, whether it’s taking advantage of passive solar design, mass wall construction, things like that, because it’s still a form of modernism. It is still in some ways, compatible to the things that were being built earlier.
Della Hansmann
Absolutely, and there’s a lot we can do. I mean, some of the best sustainability features are built in from scratch. Site and orientation is hard to retrofit. But when you’re adding on, you can think about what is the best direction for an addition, not just to fit within your lot, but also to provide a shady courtyard, to give you better privacy, to give you better through flow.
Della Hansmann
Or to prevent removing through flow of air and thinking about whatever you can do to remove the energy load of the house, separate from the house’s design itself, is beneficial, and some of that is just planting trees in the right spots, which now is the right time today, is always great to plant trees.
Della Hansmann
So yeah, I mean thinking about just reducing your personal energy costs is a great way to think about improving your house for the long term. And I think that 1970s in particular have a lot to teach us about that.
Atom Stevens
Yeah
Della Hansmann
For these houses.
Della Hansmann
Find the transcript of this episode and a link to the Parade of Homes ads we are talking about on the show notes page, mid mod midwest.com/ 1812.
Della Hansmann
Next week on the podcast, I’ve got Elin Walters of exactly design. She and I are going to discuss the different types of designers you might encounter you might choose to work with to construct the plan for your dream home improvement project. But for right now, send me a DM on Instagram and let me know your greatest mid-century home research success.
Della Hansmann
Did you track down the original owner’s kids unearth some old blueprints in the county records, or find a picture of your house in a 1960s newspaper article. Bonus points. That was on microfiche. Send me your story. Okay, catch you next week. Bye.