Aluminaire House—a distinctive-looking all-metal structure—was once the most hated house in New York City. Now, with great fanfare, she has found a fabulous new life in Palm Springs, California.
Nearly a century after its 1931 debut at Midtown’s Grand Central Palace—where it wowed a record crowd of over 100,000 visitors as a prime example of modern European design fused with American mass-produced materials—the house finally is back to its original. glory. However, in the intervening years, it fell on hard times. It was vandalized on Long Island, dismantled into a pile of pipes and panels — and scorned by preservationists stationed in Queens when its keepers set out to reassemble it and give it new life.
But last spring, after a seven-year effort, the Aluminaire House was resurrected as a museum exhibit in the Southern California resort town — long a mecca of midcentury modern architecture — where it was welcomed like family, far from its frosty Queens welcome. A coffee table book on the architecturally significant house was also published earlier this month.
“We had to write one last chapter, and that chapter hadn’t happened yet,” said Frances Campani, one of two architects who oversaw the house during a nearly four-decade journey determined to save it from the scrap heap.
She and her husband, architect Michael Schwarting, were excited to attend last April’s ribbon cutting at the Palm Springs Art Museum, where the house was rebuilt into a permanent outdoor exhibit.
“We feel good,” Schwarting said. “We are now sending the house to its fate.”
‘Home of the Future’
The visionary Aluminaire House—made mostly of aluminum, with some glass and steel, and hailed as “the house of the future” by Popular Mechanics—was designed by modernist architects A. Lawrence Kocher and Albert Frey. Their goal: to show a shining example of functional modernist architecture, as well as a nascent form of affordable housing. Not only were all the materials inexpensive and made in America, but construction could be handled with a wrench and a screwdriver.
At the time, aluminum was an exciting new building material. The Empire State Building, erected in 1930-31, was one of the earliest buildings to use aluminum in construction.
Frey loved metal, Schwarting said. “His car’s license plate was ALUMI,” he said. The name of the house is a play on words, a portmanteau of “aluminum” and “shiny”, with allusions to light and air. The house shone in the sun.
After the 1931 exhibition and after the 1932 exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, the structure passed into private ownership and the house was moved to several locations on Long Island. And, unlike taking the country’s pride on a pedestal, it fell into disrepair. But it caught the attention of Schwarting, who was intrigued by the use of metal panels in gas stations of the 1950s and 1960s.
In 1988, the house moved to the Central Islip campus of the New York Institute of Technology, where Campani and Schwarting taught. There, over the course of more than a decade, their students helped reassemble it.
When that campus closed in 2005, the house remained — nearly finished but deteriorating. In 2012, when vandals began tagging it, it was dismantled into a sad pile of metal parts and loaded onto a storage trailer.
“It separates as a large Erector group,” Campani said.
“It just didn’t belong there”
The couple started a foundation to save their beloved home and began searching for a permanent home. Ultimately, this began a long – and, at times, controversial – process.
On Google Earth, they spotted a vacant corner lot about 44 miles west in Sunnyside, Queens, originally a playground for the Phipps Garden Apartments, dating from the same era. So in 2013, they proposed putting the house there, within the Sunnyside Gardens Historic District, which was one of the first planned communities in the US. The quarter-acre plot of land was fenced off for three decades.
“We thought it was a historically appropriate location and somewhat visually intriguing,” Schwarting told The Post. “Sunnyside is low and brick, and the Aluminaire house is bright and shiny.”
The house – a three-story cube of about 1,200 square meters, includes a garage with a door at each end. In contrast, the surrounding houses were adjacent, with no parking space.
The plan also included eight residential units on the site; the house would occasionally be open to the public as a historical monument and teaching tool.
The opposition was not only immediate but also intense. Locals reportedly stormed a public hearing held by the city’s Landmarks Preservation Commission in fierce opposition to the proposal, claiming the all-metal aesthetic clashed with the red-brick surroundings.
Former City Councilman Jimmy Van Bremer, who represented the neighborhood and still lives there, previously told The Post in retrospect, “This silver, modern, spaceship-looking building was going to come crashing down in the middle of our community. . Whether you like it aesthetically or not, it just didn’t belong there.”
Landmarks refused to approve the plan in 2014.
“We were devastated,” Campani said.
So the dismantled house sat packed on the trailer for several more years, with Campani and Schwarting footing the bill for storage.
Conceptually, it made sense to put the house in Sunnyside, “even though it didn’t feel like a neighborhood at all,” said Laura Heim, a Sunnyside architect whose late husband, Jeffrey A. Kroessler, included a chapter on the house in his yearbook 2021, “Sunnyside Gardens: Planning and Conservation in a Historic Garden Suburb.”
“Residents passionately testified that the Aluminum House was wrong for the district and that the abandoned playground meant a lot to them, speaking as if it were still a living amenity and not a fenced-off land,” Kroessler wrote.
In 2019, the plot was purchased by the City of New York. “It remains an eyesore,” Heim said.
Five years later, plans for it are finally coming to fruition. With $3.5 million in funding from the City Council, a public playground will be built on the site, a Parks Department spokesman told The Post. “This project is in the procurement phase and we anticipate starting construction this winter or spring,” he said.
A home in a home
Shortly after the devastating Sunnyside decision, Campani and Schwarting spoke at Modernism Week, an annual festival in Palm Springs, where Frey designed a number of buildings. Locals embraced the idea of moving the house to the Palm Springs Art Museum.
And so, in early 2017, it was trucked across the country in a 45-foot-long trailer — 2,800 miles from Ronkonkoma to Palm Springs — at a cost of $15,000. Seven years and $2.6 million later — after site selection, fundraising, permitting, design and construction, along with the coronavirus pandemic — the house opened to celebration, located on part of a repurposed museum parking lot. Visitors have free access to roam the house.
However, they cannot go inside. The integrity of the building would be compromised by current fire and accessibility codes.
There were two major concerns about rebuilding the house. The house was reinforced to be earthquake resistant.
And a cooling system was added against the intense desert heat. “Even then there was some concern,” Schwarting said. The ribbon cutting took place on a sunny day. “We touched the house and it wasn’t hot at all,” he said.
The Aluminaire House exhibit was the most complex the museum had ever undertaken, said Leo Marmol of Marmol Radziner, architects in Los Angeles. “The house is an incredibly important part of history, and its influence can be seen in the tiny house movement today,” said Marmol, who was instrumental in rebuilding the house.
Palm Springs, unlike Sunnyside, has fully embraced the home.
“When I run into my neighbors who are not connected to the museum, they tell me how excited they are about Aluminaire House,” said Adam Lerner, the museum’s executive director, who happens to be from Forest Hills, Queens.
“People here in Palm Springs really care about architecture,” he said. “I think the house found its rightful home.”
Timeline of events
- 1931: Shows at NYC’s Grand Central Palace to a record 100,000+ visitors to showcase “modern” living.
- 1932: On view at the Museum of Modern Art in an exhibition of modern architecture.
- 1932 to 1988: Aluminum House privately owned between three separate parties, during which time it was demolished.
- 1988: Parts of the house were moved to the New York Institute of Technology’s Central Islip campus, where architecture students reassembled it.
- 2005: That campus closed — and the house remained standing, but deteriorating.
- 2012: The Aluminum House became the target of vandalism. It was dismantled once more and loaded onto a storage trailer.
- 2012 to 2017: Its remaining parts in storage.
- 2013: Residents of Sunnyside, Queens express outrage over a proposal to bring Aluminaire House there.
- 2014: The Monuments Preservation Commission rejected the proposal after community objections.
- 2014: Campani and Schwarting spoke at Modernism Week in Palm Springs, where locals embraced the idea of showing the Aluminum House there.
- 2017: His 2,800-mile trip to Palm Springs.
- 2024: The house opens to fanfare after seven years of site selection, fundraising, permitting, design and construction — and COVID-19.
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Image Source : nypost.com