In late 1953, Michael set up headquarters in the Texas City Monomers plant, hired Farnsworth & Chambers as the General Contractor, put together a cadre of engineers, utilizing some of the Texas City people, and began contracting for the construction of this unique, huge high-pressure process polyethylene facility. 

The family moved to Dickinson, Texas, where Michael leased a house on a property for which the mineral rights were owned by John Mecum, a wildcat prospector.  Miriam and family encountered an oil rig being erected on their driveway early one morning!

Michael discovered that Gulf Coast chemical plant construction was tightly and rigidly controlled by local craft unions, who disregarded national union practices and agreements, and enforced their own local preferences.  With encouragement from Farnsworth & Chambers, Michael began a much more efficient set of craft rules, built his own concrete plant, and located and qualified non-local pile suppliers.  Despite at least a dozen work-stoppages because of this policy, the project finished on time and below budget, in January of 1955. 

In January 1955, Bob Miller, the Corporate Vice-President and General Manager of Monsanto's rapidly-growing Plastics Division, called Michael to Springfield, Massachusetts, to tell him that Edgar Queeney, Chairman of Monsanto, and the Plastics Division Executive Committee, had decided that "because the common perception of plastics at that time was that it was kunstoffe� (fake stuff), good only for toys and flower pots" a major campaign was needed to establish plastics as engineering materials suitable for design into appliances and structures.  Queeney and Miller had selected Michael, because of his reputation as a successful engineer/builder of major buildings/factories, as the person to accomplish this.  Michael was placed in charge of a small, recently-formed, structural plastics engineering group operating as (SPEG). 

The family moved from Texas to Wilbraham, Massachusetts that spring, into a 1790s house with a "coffin window"� and a tooth in the wall, on eleven acres of land adjoining the Wilbraham Academy.  Daughter Anne Elizabeth completed the family, born in Springfield, Massachusetts in 1955.  With advice and encouragement from Ralph Hansen, the Plastics Division Director of New Business Development, Bob Whittier and Kent Hatch, the engineer and architect members of SPEG, Michael created a multi-fold plan to change the perception of plastics, recognizing that there were two major problems: (1) building and appliance safety codes did not mention or allow the use of plastics materials, and (2) despite tremendous industrial interest, there were no demonstrable products or applications that were credible to the engineering profession or general public.  Immediately, SPEG expanded its contacts with the MIT Engineering & Architecture Department, and in June 1955, MIT brought in a study, Plastics In Housing, showing a variety of ways in which plastics could be used to form different kinds of panels and different kinds of products to fit into current standards of housing construction methods.  This was not, in Michael's view, the way to go, so SPEG settled on creating a Creative Design team at MIT, made up of people from the Engineering and Architectural Departments, to explore how to use molded or formed plastics structural articles in creating a "concept house," furnished with new, creative, plastic furniture and appliances.  This team came up with the idea of using multi-curved shells as the structural components, assembled into a cruciform shape, attached to a cube mainframe.