Mar 27

Mar 27 Albert Frey’s 1931 Aluminaire House sits pretty at the Palm Springs Art Museum. Will its original intention shine through? (Los Angeles Times)

An immaculate metal box built in 1931 to symbolize a modernist future bounced around the East Coast for nearly a century until recently settling in Palm Springs for all to see.

The first American home composed entirely of metal and glass was once an experimental housing prototype in New York. Now the three-story-tall, 1,100-square-foot Aluminaire House is the newest and oldest structure in the city designed by Albert Frey, a Swiss architect hailed in Palm Springs as the father of “Desert Modernism” since he first took residence there in 1934.

“Here in Palm Springs, we often associate modern architecture with luxury, style and elegance,” said Adam Lerner, executive director of the Palm Springs Art Museum, to an audience of 1,000 who gathered to see the grand opening of the structure as a permanent exhibit. “But with the Aluminaire House, we are reminded that modernism is not just a style, but an embodiment of ideas. Modernism is about making good design available to a wide audience.”

Rather than adapt the home to current fire safety and ADA codes, the interior was restored to its original condition but is inaccessible to the public. “This is a little bit disappointing to us,” Lerner said, adding that the museum is raising funds to offer a virtual reality experience of the interior. The home is penned within an 8,000-square-foot gate that is open during museum hours.

Following a ribbon cutting, visitors bottlenecked through a gate to get a closer look. Many tested the door handles and pressed their faces up against the fritted glass along the ground floor in vain attempts at a peek inside, while others opted for the upward view into the stairwell — a gloriously abstract composition of steel beams against pastel-hued walls — visible through the double-height windows on its southern elevation.

The long journey the Aluminaire House has taken to Palm Springs reveals that its conception, as well as its bouts with acclaim and abandon, is inseparable from American media and its shifting attitude toward modernism as either an effort of pragmatism or of spectacle.

“When Frey was in Paris working for [architect] Le Corbusier in the late 1920s,” says Joseph Rosa, a historian and author of Albert Frey’s eponymous 1990 monograph, “he was enamored by the methods of architectural prefabrication and standardization on display throughout Sweet’s Catalog,” an American building material and product periodical that sent shock waves through European architecture firms for its highly rational approach toward mass-produced design.

In the hopes of combining European modern design ideals with American manufacturing capabilities, 27-year-old Frey set sail for New York in 1930 and found a creative partner in A. Lawrence Kocher, the managing editor of Architectural Record, who was then organizing the 1931 Allied Arts Exhibition held within the Grand Central Palace in Manhattan. “Kocher did the writing and publicizing while Frey did the design,” says Rosa of their collaboration on the Aluminaire House, the apparent centerpiece for the landmark event.

Frey wrote in 1988 that he and Kocher “had been discussing the need for low-cost housing in those Depression years. We thought that a small, single-family house, using the new methods of prefabrication and maintenance-free materials, would be both popular with visitors to the Exposition and offer a solution for the housing shortage of the times.” Aluminum was a lightweight yet durable cladding material, and its cost had dropped considerably following WWI.

During the eight-day event, more than 100,000 visitors poked around the features of its multifunctional interior, which included built-in radios, overhead garage doors, and a roll-away dining table. Surfaces were partially unfinished to reveal the steel frame and other novelties unique to the structure. Visitors peered into the interior from the second-floor balconies of the exhibition space circling the house.

The architect Wallace K. Harrison paid for the model to be disassembled, relocated to his Huntington estate on Long Island, and reconstructed as a second home for his family. Frey, meanwhile, took his passions to Palm Springs, where he designed several modernist structures across the region while cruising around town in a convertible sporting a license plate that read ‘ALUMI.’ The Aluminaire House now sits on the corner of Museum Drive and Tahquitz Canyon Way, at the bottom of the long, winding road to Frey House II, the spartan home Frey built for himself in the foothills in 1964 and bequeathed to the Palm Springs Art Museum upon his death in 1995.

Following Harrison’s death in 1981, the Aluminaire House was on the path to demolition before gaining the attention of New York Times architecture critic Paul Goldberger, whose 1987 article championed the timelessness of its principles, if not its aesthetics. “There is nothing, at first glance, particularly appealing about the Aluminaire House,” Goldberger wrote. But here, “the dream that modernism would show a new way of life to the masses actually had a flicker of reality to it.”

The New York Institute of Technology was soon called upon to relocate the home to its campus in Islip, Long Island. “We decided to make it part of the teaching curriculum,” said Michael Schwarting, a former professor at the institute who, with a state preservation grant of $131,000, brought architecture students to the site to disassemble the house before cataloging the elements and transporting them within a storage container. “A screwdriver and a wrench is pretty much all you need to take it apart,” said Frances Campani, a former institute professor who, with her husband Schwarting, established the Aluminaire House Foundation. For many years, Schwarting’s design studios approached the Aluminaire House as a hands-on, full-scale case study for historic preservation.

In 2004, the home was taken apart once again following the dissolution of the Islip campus. As they struggled to attract New York-based institutions to erect their kit of parts, Campani and Schwarting were invited by Modernism Week, an annual celebration of the mid-century modern architecture visible across Palm Springs, to not only lecture on the Aluminaire House, but to consider the city as its permanent home. A truck filled with building parts headed West in 2017, and a capital campaign seeking $2.6 million inspired local philanthropists to chip in.

“The entire structure we received is original to 1931, along with the doors, windows, and stairs,” says Leo Marmol, a museum board member and managing partner of the architecture firm Marmol Radziner, who coordinated the design team onsite. Among the more challenging tasks were refabricating parts of the interior and the exterior aluminum siding and choosing its location near the main museum building. They decided on a former parking lot on the southern edge, where its front elevation now glows every morning at sunrise.

Two blocks south, the exhibition “Albert Frey: Inventive Modernist,” now on display at the museum’s Architecture and Design Center until June 3, lovingly depicts Frey as the creative lifeblood of 20th century Palm Springs while gesturing to the first energetic sketches of the Aluminaire House. “I can't think of any other town that has such a complete timeline of an architect's work from the very first house he did in America to his very last,” said Brad Dunning, the curator, during a public tour of the exhibition.

As an image, the Aluminaire House is, and will remain, as pristine as it did the first day it was unveiled in 1931. But as a meaningful attempt to build dignified affordable housing — an amenity severely lacking in Riverside County — the city of Palm Springs would be wise to feel the full weight of its new aluminum box. More than an impenetrable monument to a style, Frey knew that the principles beyond its surfaces would be tough for the masses to internalize, but could be accepted with instruction. “Appropriate education and explanation of form evolution will speed up the process of assimilation,” Frey wrote in his 1939 treatise, “In Search of a Living Architecture,” “and make possible the simultaneous creation of modern means and respective forms.”