The Home: Late Late Showpiece

To Russians long resigned to the cramped quarters of Soviet collective living, the thing was a dazzling mirage. There, on a fenced-in lot in Leningrad's Viborg district, was a new model home designed for four and packed with capitalistic features.

Made entirely of plastics from outer walls to the furniture and draperies inside, the house can be assembled (if it ever reaches the mass-production stage) in a day and a half to form a big box with glassed-in ends. Perched on a concrete pedestal 6 ft. off the ground, the whole thing resembles nothing so much as a huge television...