NEW YORK'S MOST HATED HOME
Nixed by Queens, historic artsy metal box heads for Calif.
THE Aluminaire House, a 1,200-square-foot structure billed as the first all-metal home built in the United States, has been called one of “the pivotal works of modern architecture in America” by respected critic Paul Goldberger. The 1931 masterpiece was even highlighted in a MoMA exhibit on modern architecture.
It also may be the most hated house in New York.
After rankling a Queens historic district, the aluminum building has languished inside a storage facility since 2012. Before that, it had been subjected to vandals on Long Island.
And so, on Wednesday, the house’s disassembled panels, pipes and beams began a 2,800- mile trek from Ronkonkoma to Palm Springs, Calif., inside a 45foot-long trailer at a cost of $15,000.
The desert resort city, some 100 miles from downtown Los Angeles and celebrated for its stock of modern properties, will become its new permanent home. The city plans to reassemble it in a planned park and open it to the public in 2018.
THE fanfare surrounding its arrival in California as part of Palm Springs’ Modernism Week — a popular annual showcase of midcentury-modern design that kicks off on Feb. 16 — couldn’t be more different from its reception in New York City.
In 2013, residents of Sunnyside, Queens, were outraged to find out that the Aluminaire House might move to their neighborhood as part of a proposed town house development in Sunnyside Gardens, a historic district that was among the nation’s first planned communities.
“We thought it was a nobrainer,” says Long Island-based architect Michael Schwarting, who along with architect wife Frances Campani, has spearheaded the Aluminaire House’s preservation efforts.
“We thought it was absolutely the right place: the meaning of it [and] the scale of it.”
But the community thought otherwise.
In October 2013, enraged historic-district residents reportedly stormed a public hearing held by the city Landmarks Preservation Commission to voice vehement opposition to the proposal.
The bulk of their complaints centered on the Aluminaire’s metallic style, which, they said, clashed with the neighborhood’s sea of red-brick, English-gardenstyle homes. There were also concerns it would become a potential target for graffiti vandals attracted to its light-colored blank canvas.
“To all these architects who think it’s a great idea, how would they like it if this house was dropped into their neighborhoods?” one outraged attendee said, as reported by the Web site Curbed at the time.
Opponents also included local politicians, such as City Council member Jimmy Van Bramer, who lives in and represents the neighborhood.
“While I, in particular, as a cultural-affairs chairman of the City Council, appreciate architecture and design, we very much felt that this particular building was wildly out of context,” Van Bramer tells The Post. “This silver, modern, spaceship-looking edifice was going to be plopped down in the middle of our community. Whether you like it aesthetically or not, it just didn’t belong there.”
In a victory for opponents, the landmarks commission rejected the proposal in January 2014. “There was a sense of relief here — there’s no question about that,” says Herb Reynolds, of the Sunnyside Gardens Preservation Alliance.
DESIGNED by A. Lawrence Kocher and Albert Frey, the house was erected as part of the Allied Arts and Industries
and the Architectural League of New York’s 10-day exhibition in the Grand Central Palace on Lexington Avenue in 1931.
The Aluminaire House was a demonstration in “modern” living, as well as a property to show principles of functional Modernist architecture: the use of inexpensive materials (all of which came from America), simple interiors and easy construction, which could be handled with a screwdriver and wrench.
Overall, experts say, it was the architects’ original intent to display nascent ideas of affordable housing, in which off-the-shelf, prefabricated structures could house residents.
“It got a lot of press and it was talked about by many critics,” says architect Campani.
Adds Schwarting, “They say over 100,000 people visited in one week.”
The following year, it was on view at the Museum of Modern Art in an exhibition on modern architecture.
“The styles of the past are disregarded in an attempt to attain convenience, ease of living, attractiveness of outlook and a logic of quiet and pleasant existence,” co-designer Kocher is quoted as saying in a Feb. 3, 1932, press release announcing its appearance at MoMA.
By that point, the house had been purchased by Modernist architect Wallace Harrison for a reported $1,000. In the 1930s it would sit on his Huntington, LI estate, where it was kept as a weekend home.
The Aluminaire House eventually fell into disrepair, and its original design was changed through the creation of a proper second bedroom from a library mezzanine loft, which closed off the double-height ceiling.
Before his death in 1981, Harrison sold the estate to art dealers Harold and Hester Diamond. It was later traded in 1984 to a doctor named Joel Karen — all for prices not immediately available.
Schwarting first discovered the Aluminaire House in the 1970s while working as an associate for architect Richard Meier.
Later that decade, he began teaching architecture at the graduate level at Columbia University — and would take students out to document it. “It wasn’t so far from NYC and a fascinating house that nobody really knew about,” Schwarting says.
But when Dr. Karen obtained a demolition permit for the home in 1986, New York Institute of Technology, where Schwarting and Campani still teach, helped the owner gift the home to the school for architectural studies in exchange for them removing it from the estate.
Over the course of more than a decade, students helped reassemble the home on NYIT’s Central Islip campus. However, that location shuttered in 2005. The nearly completed structure stood on its grounds until 2012, when vandals began striking it.
That year, it was taken down by Schwarting, Campani and a crew of workers.
ON Feb. 26, the disassembled home will be the subject of a Modernism Week lecture on its history, as well as a fund-raiser to help cover the cost of its impending installation. So far, $150,000 of the $600,000 needed to fully reassemble the home has been raised.
“We have the most amazing collection of midcentury-modern architecture, bar none,” says Mark Davis, a member of the California-based committee formed to bring the metallic property to Palm Springs.
“It will be one jewel of many that we already have in Palm Springs.
“[New York’s] loss was our gain. Now it’s being appreciated,” he adds.
New Yorkers also couldn’t be happier.
“I’m happy it’s found a home,” says Van Bramer. “But I’m also pleased that home is not Sunnyside Gardens.”