Fifty years after their commercial crash, UFO-like Futuro homes are still flying with fans in Philadelphia and beyond

The Future from Willingboro arrived in 1973 with a helicopter lowering a modular home that looked like a UFO on the site of a shopping center where it was soon to open as a bank.

“We used to call it the little spaceship,” said Dionne Bolden, who grew up in Willingboro and is the township’s acting director of recreation and parks.

Designed by Finnish architect Matti Suuronen in the 1960s and built by a Philadelphia company in a factory in Atlantic County, Futuro homes were intended for use as ski lodges or second homes. They never really took off for residential or commercial use in the 1970s; about a third of the nearly 100 believed to have been built were lost or destroyed.

But these whimsical, prefabricated structures of reinforced plastic – with built-in furniture and portholes – are finding new fans on social media, as well as a new life as travel accommodation.

“We’re getting calls from people wanting to buy it,” Bolden said. “But it is part of our history. We don’t want to lose it and we certainly don’t want to sell it. »

Meanwhile, two Midwestern entrepreneurs are separately gearing up to launch new iterations of these mid-century modern artifacts.

In Euclid, Ohio, Futuro Homes LLC is developing a prototype of new models intended for the sustainable and compact housing market. The company expects to have basic “shell kit” models available for purchase within three months, CEO Anthony Corpora said. A hull kit is priced at $179,500 and a “full loaded” model for $279,500.

Last year, Kris Swain, owner of Atomic specialties in Oxford, Ohio, purchased a vintage Futuro that had sat for years in a Cumberland County shipyard and is using it to create molds for a new generation of homes.

The Futuro Shipyard was once part of an outer space-themed attraction at Morey’s Piers in Wildwood, which Swain has worked with for a long time.

“We are releasing one for Morey’s Piers next spring,” he said. “We have 100 on order for Airbnbs.”

A Airbnb Futuro in Joshua Tree, Calif., is already booked months in advance, said Simon Robson, a researcher and self-taught historian who oversees the website thefuturohouse.com.

Robson Posts Beautifully Restored Futuros Documents, Clippings, And Fan Photos In states like Texas, as well as New Zealand, Japan and other countries around the world. The site also provides updates on the latest sightings of the long elusive or endangered Futuros it calls “Lost Souls”.

“I’m really happy when I hear that one of them is getting the love and care they deserve,” Robson said from his home in Dallas. “It’s sad that some Futuros are allowed to deteriorate. There are perhaps 65 of the nearly 100 that have been made still on the planet. And that’s not a lot.

The original homes were made in Pleasantville, Atlantic County by the Futuro Corp. of Philadelphia. The company hoped to sell 10,000 units nationwide and has built virtually every Futuros that still exists in the United States, Robson said.

From a copy of company documents 1971 retail price list posted on Robson’s website, the cost of a new Futuro ranged from $12,500 for a hull to $23,400 for a fully furnished two-bedroom, two-bathroom model.

Promotional material and vintage photographs featured in a story about the Society for Gentlemen Explorers website include shots of models in miniskirts and bikinis posing with Futuros on ski slopes and other scenic settings. And no less an authority than Playboy magazine praised the Futuros in 1970, describing them as perfect “parks” for space-age swingers.

America got its first glimpse of a Futuro when a Finnish-made house was displayed at Philadelphia International Airport in 1969.

But an American model displayed on Benjamin Franklin Parkway in Philadelphia to raise money for a children’s charity became an object of derision in 1970. An Inquirer story referred to “that egg-shaped thing with portholes” that was ruining the landscape near the Franklin Institute.

“Philly reacted to them with pure hatred,” said Michael Bixler, editor of the Hidden City of Philadelphia website. “People didn’t take the Futuro seriously. They thought it was a stranger, or a gimmick, not a house to live in.

What could have been the Parkway Futuro later racked up $750 in late fees while it was stored in a downtown parking lot. And one of two Futuros known to have existed in Philadelphia was set on fire, Bixler said.

He and his wife, Kate, stumbled across the Willingboro Futuro in 2018 and since then have been researching and documenting homes, including those in the Philadelphia area.

The couple visited two intact Futuros in southern Delaware, including one that was used as a residence for 50 years. They also chronicled a since-demolished Futuro in Delaware County, and one that Swain bought and moved to Ohio from Cumberland County last year.

Futuros” reminds me of the futuristic concept designs of the “Atomic Age”, such as buildings and exhibits in 1964-1965 New York World’s Fair“, Kate Bixler, who works in publishing, said in an email.

The houses “are actually very spacious (no pun intended),” she said. “They feel like a place where you can feel free to become absorbed in your thoughts and dreams.”

Corpora, whose company plans to produce an updated variant of the Futuro, said the original houses “were a great success that failed”, in part due to the limitations of the design and the materials used for the manufacture.

The major flaw: the porthole-shaped windows of the original Futuros didn’t open; the new ones will. The supporting structure of the original Futuros also contained wood, which the new ones will not contain.

“The Futuros are hugely successful and iconic around the world,” said Corpora, whose core business is designing, building and fitting out motorhomes. The same composite materials that go into motorhome bodies will produce the new Futuros, he said.

The latest iteration will also be split into sections that can easily be shipped to a buyer’s home or chosen construction site, much like Sears kit houses of the 20th century.

“It will be a complete plug-and-play assembly,” Corpora said. “A few people with a basic set of tools and a few helpers can do it in a weekend.”

Atomic Specialties has a long history of “creating custom sculpts and fiberglass parts for theme park rides,” said Swain, whose company produces the new Futuros — a base model is expected to cost $80,000. – in partnership with Creation of original ideasin Sevierville, Tenn.

“I’m a Futuros fan, and I wanted one,” said Brainchild owner Steve Brauch. “They have a retro vibe to them [about] the future 50 years ago.

Both men said the interest in small homes was creating a market. And the association with an earlier era is part of the appeal.

The Futuro’s design “is like a peak of the mid-century modern era,” Swain said. “There were other forms. But there is something about this one.

Itself a space-age suburb — Willingboro was built by William Levitt of Levittown fame — the township hopes to see its Futuro restored. After serving as a branch of a New Jersey-based savings bank and an office for Willingboro’s Police Athletic League, the structure has been used in recent decades only for storage.

“We need to figure out what we need to do with the building in order to preserve it and reuse it,” Bolden said. “There are people in the community who want to be part of this process.”

In 2020, advocacy group Preservation New Jersey named the Willingboro and Greenwich Futuros to its list of most endangered places in the state.

“We would like to see [the Futuro] rehabilitated for public use and for the benefit of the community,” said Rikki Massand, a member of the organization’s board of directors.

“The structure is representative of an era, it was designed by a master architect,” he said. “There is a lot of nostalgia for the idea of ​​space exploration. And there is a special feeling when you see the Futuro.