Archinect - News

Marmol Radziner talks reinstallation strategy for Aluminaire House in Palm Springs

2024-10-09T10:21:00-04:00

“We also had to reassess the structure — we’re now in earthquake country and in a very challenging desert environment [...] To make this a permanent installation, we had to work with the city to assess how to permit it. We couldn’t classify it as a habitable structure because that would trigger the ADA and energy requirements, so we had to classify it as an exhibit."

The house had sat dormant in a Long Island storage facility until its relocation was finally worked out in March of 2015. Site preparations took until last year to commence after the museum added the house to its permanent collection in 2020. The entire 37-year process earned an Advocacy Citation of Merit at the 2024 Modernism in America Awards last month.

"We understand that frustration, but we would have had to have made the entire structure accessible and install an elevator," Marmol explained of the exhibition's limitations. "It’s tiny, the stairs are too narrow and steep, the doors are too narrow. There was no way to comply with ADA accessibility and fire safety codes without redesigning the entire house."

Palm Springs Art Museum announces the Aluminaire House's public opening and permanent exhibit

2023-09-29T18:07:00-04:00

The Palm Springs Art Museum has shared an update on the future of the Aluminaire House three years after acquiring the Albert Frey and A. Lawrence Kocher masterpiece to its permanent collection.

The home, which had been lingering in a local storage space since 2017, will now be reassembled and displayed in the museum's south parking lot. ADA compliance mandates had postponed the project even further after the museum was forced to refabricate many of the materials used in its construction, an effort that was not made possible until recently thanks to an ongoing $2.6 million capital campaign effort. According to the museum, $2.3 million in funding has been generated so far.

The house will be erected and placed on view in February 2024, following the opening of a retrospective exhibition of Frey’s other modernist designs around the Coachella Valley on January 13, 2024.

Aluminaire House™ on-site at Palm Springs Art Museum, 2023. Rendering by Claudia Cengher | Courtesy of the Palm Sprin...

Albert Frey’s futuristic Aluminaire House is still holed up in desert storage limbo

2022-04-26T13:26:00-04:00

The Albert Frey Aluminaire House that was donated and shipped to the Palm Springs Art Museum about five years ago will remain disassembled in its shipping container for at least another year or longer. Key issues raised by the city may keep visitors from ever walking through the Aluminaire House, even when reconstructed.

Frey’s experimental 1931 house (created in partnership with A. Lawrence Kocher) first came into the museum’s coffers in 2020 after a six-year bout in storage and a $600,000 gift, which was supposed to go towards its permanent installation on a corner plot on the Palm Springs Art Museum’s campus.

The PSAM and its staff are however working closely with DW Johnson to address previously unforeseen mandates for ADA accessibility and temperature control, a process which will involve the refabrication of many of its metal panels and cost upwards of $2 million, according to the director’s statements in The Desert Sun.

Previously on Archinect: Albert Frey's Aluminaire House acquired by the Palm Springs Art Museum

“There’s a big difference between a building that’s installed temporarily for an exhibition and a permanent building,” museum director Adam Lerner explained of his institutional predicament. “[It] is like somebody left a puppy at your doorstep. And you’re like, well, I have other p...

Albert Frey's Aluminaire House acquired by the Palm Springs Art Museum

2020-09-04T12:15:00-04:00

The Palm Springs Art Museum has announced its acquisition of Albert Frey and A. Lawrence Kocher's Aluminaire House, a futuristic prefabricated home that will be installed at the foot of the museum adjacent to a new public park.

The Desert Sun reports that the nonprofit Aluminaire House Foundation, the group that trucked the disassembled house from the East Coast to Palm Springs in 2017, hopes to finally erect the structure once again sometime next year.

Site plan for the RIOS-designed Palm Springs Downtown Park showing the Aluminaire House in the lower left corner. Image courtesy of RIOS.

The house was originally exhibited in New York in 1931 and changed locations several times, ultimately ending up on the campus of New York Institute of Technology before architects Michael Schwarting and Frances Campani created the Foundation as part of an effort to find a permanent home for the building. After raising the necessary funds, the building was shipped across the country and has sat in ...

Eye candy: enjoy these freshly digitized, gorgeous contemporary photos of Southern California's finest midcentury modern architecture

2016-03-25T18:29:00-04:00

No longer confined to collecting dust in storage rooms, over a thousand slides documenting modern architecture's emergence in Southern California have been digitized by the USC Library, and are now available to view for free online.

The approximately 1300 slides were culled from the collections of Fritz Block and Pierre Koenig, which both belong to the USC Libraries. Koenig himself chose which slides he wanted digitized in the late 1990s, for a project that never fully came to pass, but from which a delightfully dated prototype website is still accessible. The slides feature work by various architects, mostly within Southern California.

Check out the full collection here, and a few select images below:

↑ John Lautner's Foster Residence in Sherman Oaks, from Pierre Koenig's collection.

↑ Frank Lloyd Wright's Millard Residence in Pasadena, from Fritz Block's collection.

↑ Pierre Koenig's Schwartz residence in Santa Monica (1996), from Pierre Koenig's collection.

↑ Albert Frey's Frey Residen...

The Aluminaire House to relocate to Palm Springs

2015-03-13T14:27:00-04:00

When it was unveiled in New York City in April 1931, the starkly modern Aluminaire House was an overnight sensation that emboldened an architectural movement. Designed as a case study by architects A. Lawrence Kocher and Albert Frey, the three-story house, which was built in 10 days, became the first all-metal prefabricated house in the U.S.

After Sunnyside Gardens was a no-go, it looks like the Aluminaire House will be heading to sunny Palm Springs, California, according to an announcement by Palm Springs Mayor Steve Pougnet during a fundraising event at Palm Springs Modernism Week last month. The Aluminaire House Foundation plans on placing the all-metal prefab house right across the Palm Springs Art Museum to become another modernist attraction in the city -- where Frey lived and practiced from 1935 to his death in 1998.

Previously: The Aluminaire House looks to Sunnyside Gardens as its possible new home

The Aluminaire House looks to Sunnyside Gardens as its possible new home

2013-07-25T18:31:00-04:00

Lawrence Kocher and Albert Frey built the Aluminaire House in 1931 for an exhibition in New York City mostly out of mass-produced building materials donated by manufacturers. The project became recognized as an exemplary prototype of modern building forms and techniques at the time, while also introducing the idea of mass production and affordable home building in highly populated neighborhoods, a pressing issue that remains today. Over time, the Aluminaire House has been bought, relocated, redesigned, faced past threats of demolition, and even vandalized.

As explained in the press release below, the non-profit Aluminaire House Foundation, which was established to preserve the House, is currently aiming to relocate the structure to Sunnyside Gardens in Queens where it will be reconstructed to its original purpose for the first time since it was built.

The following article was submitted to us by Michel Schwarting...

Aluminaire house foundation, inc.
150-3 east main street ...

Tom Kundig on the Frey House II

2012-03-16T18:09:00-04:00

Mr. Kundig first visited Frey House II about 25 years ago. "The design is a bit strange, but it completely resonated with me," he said. "I'm influenced by architecture that toes the line between rugged and beautiful, that demonstrates how they can be the same thing." He notes that Mr. Frey's simple design nodded to the local vernacular of humble miners' shacks.