Prefab on Permanent Display

Unlike the other contributions to the Allied Arts Exposition at the Grand Central Palace in 1931, an event that served to celebrate 50 years of the Architectural League of New York, the Aluminaire House was built full-scale, in modern materials, and in a modern style. The largely reactionary nature of the architectural drawings and models on display was accentuated by Philip Johnson, who staged a Salon des Refuses exhibition across town with young architects too modern to be included in the League's show. If anything, the prefabricated, all-metal Aluminaire House was an outlier, since it was part of the expo but was also included, less than a year later, in Johnson and Henry-Russell Hitchcock's Modern Architecture exhibition — aka The International Style — at the Museum of Modern Art. The house was designed by Albert Frey, who apprenticed with Le Corbusier, and A. Lawrence Kocher, a former editor of Architectural Record.

By the time of the MoMA show in 1932, architect Wallace K. Harrison, who would later lead the design of the United Nations, had bought the house and moved it to his property in Syosset on the North Fork of Long Island. Given the lightweight steel and aluminum structure, steel flooring, insulated wall panels, steel windows, and other modern components, it made sense that the house could be dismantled, moved, and reconstructed easily. Furthermore, Frey and Kocher actually designed the house as one that would be mass-produced in the vein of the Ford Model T, not just as the one-off that was actually built. Following Harrison's death in 1981, the sole Aluminaire House fell into disrepair and faced a demolition order from the property's new owner, regardless of the fact it was on the National Register of Historic Places by then. 

The lasting fame of the widely published but little seen Aluminaire House led to calls for the house's preservation and a successful campaign that brought the house to the Central Islip campus of New York Institute of Technology in 1988. NYIT professors and students approached the dismantling, moving, and reconstruction of the house as a case study of historic restoration suitably focused on low-cost, mass-produced housing. But by 2006, NYIT's Central Islip campus was closed, leading to uncertainty once again about the house's future. The Aluminaire House Foundation was then formed by Michael Schwarting and Frances Campani, two NYIT professors who helped save the house after Harrison died; they kept the house in storage until a new home for it could be found. 

In 2013, they thought they found a permanent home: a corner site in Sunnyside Gardens, a planned neighborhood in Queens that also dates back to the interwar period. While the foundation thought the house would fit in well there, local residents and politicians disagreed, battling the relocation plans. The Landmarks Preservation Commission sided with them, deciding a year later that the all-metal building was out of character with the historic brick buildings of Sunnyside Gardens, shelving those plans for the stored house. Then, in early 2015, it was announced that Aluminaire House would be making a cross-country road trip: moving from New York to Palm Springs, the desert city that is famously home of Modernism Week but was also Frey's home from 1934 until his death in 1998 at the age of 95.

It would take a full nine years for Aluminaire House™ — now carrying italics, like other works of art in a museum, and a trademark — to open in its now-permanent home: in the south parking lot at the Palm Springs Art Museum in Palm Springs, California. The ribbon was cut on March 23, 2024, overlapping with Albert Frey: Inventive Modernist, a large-scale retrospective exhibition on display at the museum until June. The museum has been invested with preserving other examples of Frey's legacy throughout the Coachella Valley, so it made sense that they would be the permanent caretakers of Aluminaire House™. The house's $2.6 million reconstruction (by comparison, Harrison bought it for $1,000) was carried out with Marmol Radziner, the LA firm that previously restored another Frey house. And although the photos that follow show the house only from the outside, the museum reminds us: “Aluminaire House™ was originally exhibited in 1931 without interior fittings. Due to contemporary ADA and Fire Safety codes, interior access is not permitted.”