Beacon of modern architecture lands in desert
Structure meant to proselytize benefits of modern living
The Aluminaire House, one of the earliest and edgiest examples of the international style of modernist architecture in America, was never meant to withstand a harsh desert climate. Originally it wasn’t even designed to be outside.
When 27-year-old Swiss architect Albert Frey moved to New York in 1930 and teamed up with an Architectural Record editor to build this affordable, modular — some say prefab — metal house, it was part of a design showcase inside the Grand Central Palace, a soaring exhibition hall made by the architects behind Grand Central Terminal. The house, a boxy three-story structure clad in aluminum panels that went up within 10 days, drew big crowds as well as some gleeful ridicule from the mainstream press, which naturally helped to establish its bona fides as avant-garde architecture.
Now, having been disassembled, reassembled and relocated three times over the decades and rescued from demolition along the way, the influential house is being reconstructed in a new — and the plan is, permanent — site. It has been rebuilt by California’s Palm Springs Art Museum on a revamped parking lot just south of the museum with a budget of $2.6 million, and a public opening is set for March 23. In anticipation, an Albert Frey exhibition opened at the museum in January. This time construction, which began in July, took considerably more than 10 days. The museum had to prepare the site and pour a concrete foundation for
the house. It also added features like weatherproofing and air conditioning so the house can survive the elements — and not act like a solar oven.
“It’s a metal box in the desert. We have to keep it from melting in the desert sun,” said Los Angeles architect Leo Marmol of Marmol Radziner, who has been overseeing the project as a museum trustee. “If you think about a metal box in the 125-degree summer sun, it would be hot enough inside to damage any finished materials — paint, wood.”
As for the comfort of visitors, they won’t be allowed inside anyway. As Marmol explained, the process of meeting legal accessibility requirements would have brought major changes to Frey’s design. So instead the house will stand, its interior partly visible from the outside, more as an educational tool: a prototype of modern architecture and an early example of Frey’s work in the city that he later helped shape.
“Frey is the grandfather of the modern design that you see everywhere in Palm Springs, and he’s the grandfather
we want because he keeps us true to our ideals,” said the museum’s executive director, Adam Lerner. He described the architect’s use of industrial and humble materials as a powerful reminder that modernism hoped to change society through good design and that good design does not require luxury consumption or hefty price tags.
Frey first moved to Palm Springs in 1934 to build a mixed-use space for the brother of A. Lawrence Kocher, the Architectural Record editor who collaborated on the Aluminaire House. He lived there until his death in 1998 at age 95. Over that time, he helped to shape the built environment of the Coachella Valley with dozens of residences, schools and commercial properties, including some small-scale but high-impact structures in the 1960s.
The Aluminaire House anticipated his interest in lightweight metals and affordable, everyday materials. But it also reflected Frey’s European roots. He designed the house shortly after his apprenticeship
with Le Corbusier in Paris and closely followed the master architect’s five “points,” or principles, including the columns that hold up the structure and its rooftop garden, reminiscent of Villa Savoye, meant to compensate for the green space lost by
building.
This direct connection to Le Corbusier and European modernism is one reason the Aluminaire House has inspired great support over the years. After its debut at the Architectural and Allied Arts Exposition of 1931, the house was purchased by architect Wallace K. Harrison for $1,000. He used it on his 11-acre Long Island estate for decades, even making additions and relocating it once, but in the hands of subsequent owners it had fallen into disrepair.
Demolition was planned in 1986, then vocally opposed by a group of preservationists until architect Michael Schwarting raised the money to dismantle and move the house to Central Islip, New York, where it became an educational project at the New York Institute of Technology.
Schwarting and architect Frances Campani worked with students on it until 2004, when the Islip branch of the campus closed. Eventually, to protect it from vandalism, they dismantled the house again and stored the pieces in a 40-foot-long tractor-trailer. “It took five days,” Schwarting recalled. “It comes apart like a big erector set.”
They said some original pieces in storage could be used this time around, like the metal columns, girders and beams and some steel window frames. But the original aluminum panels were badly damaged, and their substitutes had weathered, so another replacement set was fabricated. New wood walls inside were needed, as was seismic retrofitting.
Like a Ship of Theseus, the house has seen so many of its parts replaced that it edges into tricky philosophical territory: Is the shiny structure that will be feted in March in Palm Springs even the same one that debuted in New York in 1931? Marmol argues that the current version is essentially the same house, calling it a “preservation” project because “we’re returning the house to its original use as an exhibition, designed to proselytize about the benefits of modern living.”