PHILADELPHIA — The Futuro of Willingboro, New Jersey, arrived in 1973 with a helicopter lowering a modular house that looked like a UFO onto a shopping center site where it would soon 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 at an Atlantic County factory, Futuro houses were intended for use as ski chalets 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 have been lost or destroyed — among them a beloved Outer Banks, N.C. landmark ruined by fire Oct. 20.
