Quonset hut
lightweight prefabricated structure
A Quonset hut is a lightweight prefabricated structure of corrugated galvanized steel with a semi-circular cross-section. The design was developed in the United States based on the Nissen hut introduced by the British during World War I. 170,000 Quonset huts were manufactured during World War II, and the military sold its surplus huts to the public after the war. The name comes from the site of their first deployment at Quonset Point at the Davisville Naval Construction Battalion Center in Davisville, Rhode Island.
Design and history
The first Quonset huts were manufactured in 1941 when the United States Navy needed a lightweight, all-purpose building that could be shipped anywhere and assembled without skilled labor. They could be assembled in a day by a 10-person team using only hand tools.
The George A. Fuller construction company manufactured them, and the first was produced within 60 days of signing the contract. In 1946, the Great Lakes Steel Corporation claimed "the term 'Quonset,' as applied to builders and building materials, is a trade mark owned by the Great Lakes Steel Corporation." But the word is often used generically. Today similar structures are made by many contractors in countries around the world.
The original design was a 16-by-36-foot (4.9 m × 11.0 m) structure framed with steel members with an 8-foot (2.4 m) radius. The most common design created a standard size of 20 by 48 feet (6.1 m × 14.6 m) with a 16-foot (4.9 m) base dimension, allowing 960 square feet (89 m2) of usable floor space with optional 4-foot (1.2 m) overhangs at each end for protection of entrances from the weather.
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The subject matters to the general reference register because the source frames it as lightweight prefabricated structure. Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.
Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 2, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q1627026. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1941 and 1946.
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This entry incorporates text from “Quonset hut” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.