Modernism Week: Grand opening date of The Aluminaire House announced during lecture

In 1987, New York Institute of Technology architects Michael Schwarting and Frances Campani saved the 1931 Aluminare House from demolition while it was at a private Huntington, Long Island estate.

The Aluminaire House, which was designed by Lawrence Kocher and Albert Frey, has since become an icon of modernist design, and was recently listed by Architectural Record as one of the most important buildings completed worldwide in the past 125 years.

During a Tuesday Modernism Week presentation at the Hyatt Palm Springs, Schwarting and Campani remembered going into the structure for the first time and seeing the disrepair, which included graffiti on the walls and missing features of its original design.

After securing a grant, the house was recorded, architecture students dismantled it layer by layer and it was moved into storage before it would be reconstructed at the NYIT's Central Islip campus.

"After it was announced (The Aluminaire House) was going to be demolished at Huntington, people were upset. Paul Goldberger wrote an article in the New York Times and he was upset, the American Institute of Architects in Long Island was upset and looking for someone to take care of it," Schwarting said. "I started teaching at the New York Institute of Technology and the dean asked, 'Are you interested in saving this house? People keep calling me about it.'"

When Kocher and Frey designed the Aluminaire House, the duo followed the five principles of Le Corbusier, a Swiss-French architect. The five principles are using reinforced concrete columns, the absence of supporting walls, a free design of the exterior, a horizontal window and a roof garden.

Frey moved to Palm Springs in 1934 and his work spans more than 300 properties in the desert. Some of his notable homes include Frey House I on E. Paseo El Mirador, Frey House II above the Palm Springs Art Museum, the Cree House on the border of Palm Springs and Cathedral City and the Guthrie House on Mel Avenue in Palm Springs.

It was built as a case study home

The Aluminaire House was designed as a case study home made of donated materials and has a metal exterior to display an affordable construction and housing for the 1931 Allied Arts and Industry and Architectural League Exhibition in New York City. The home only took seven days to put together for its debut at the Grand Central Palace Exhibition Hall. While it was there, 100,000 visitors walked through the home.

The exhibit was widely reported on, especially in two notable articles by Douglas Haskell for the journal Parnassus and Catherine Bauer Wurster for The New Republic. Bauer Wurster described it as a "fine piece of work" while Haskell said it was "aesthetically crude" but supported the idea of it.

Harrison bought the home in 1931 and installed it on his property as a summer house and guest house.

According to Schwarting, Harrison grew tired of it, decided it wasn't big enough and started building his own home on the same property. A LIFE magazine article showed Harrison mowing his lawn with the home atop a hill in the background, but it was later relocated further down the hill.

"We found when we took it apart that it hadn't been disassembled, it had been pushed or something," Schwarting said.

The home was disassembled again in 2012

When the Central Islip campus decided to remove its architecture programs from its campus, the house was disassembled again in 2012 in fear of vandalism while the student population diminished. It was transferred to the Aluminaire House Foundation and put into storage.

Threatened by vandalism on the near-empty campus, in 2012 it was decided to dismantle the House and put it in storage until an appropriate site could be found.

"We hired a builder who we worked with a lot, he came with a very small crew and they took it apart in about a week or so. We put the whole thing in a 40-foot trailer and started looking at sites."

After a failed 2013 proposal to reassemble the home at Sunnyside Gardens in Queens and nine years of seeking a permanent home, the structure was donated to the Palm Springs Art Museum in 2017. Modernism Week board member Mark Davis, who is also a founding member of the Aluminaire House Foundation, and other desert-based architecture experts spearheaded a lengthy fundraising drive to raise more than $600,000 to bring it from New York to Palm Springs.

Early estimates to install the home at the Palm Springs Art Museum were not realistic

The Aluminaire House was supposed to be reconstructed by winter 2021-22 at the Palm Springs Art Museum, but the museum was closed for over a year due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Executive Director and CEO Adam Lerner told The Desert Sun in 2023 it would be completed in 2024 and early estimates of $400,000 for construction were not realistic.

At the Palm Springs Preservation Matters 2022 Symposium, Lerner said it would cost $2 million or more to install the outdoor exhibition at the end of the museum's south parking lot, but construction costs were updated to $2.6 million. The museum received $2 million from a capital campaign and needed to raise the remaining $600,000.

On Tuesday, the museum said in a statement it had raised the remaining amount and a $50,000 gift from Modernism Week brought the project over its initial goal set by the capital campaign under the direction of museum board member LJ Cella.

The grand opening is scheduled for March

The Aluminaire House will have its grand opening at 2 p.m. on March 23, seven years after it was announced. However, visitors won't be able to actually go inside. Lerner said in 2023 that upon further examination of previous issues raised by the city related to fire code, lack of air conditioning and insulation and making it ADA accessible to people with disabilities that “it’s not feasible to make it accessible.”

There will be a day of programming dedicated to Frey and docents will lead special tours of the current "Albert Frey: Inventive Modernist" at the Palm Springs Museum Architecture and Design Center and the main museum will sceen Frey's 8mm home movies in its atrum.

Previous reporting by Desert Sun staff was included in this report

Desert Sun reporter Brian Blueskye covers arts and entertainment. He can be reached at [email protected] or on Twitter at @bblueskye.

This article originally appeared on Palm Springs Desert Sun: Grand opening date set for The Aluminaire House in Palm Springs