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 ...

Brooke Hodge named Palm Springs Art Museum's first Architecture & Design Director

2016-04-05T18:29:00-04:00

The Palm Springs Art Museum has named Brooke Hodge as their very first Director of Architecture & Design. Hodge comes by way of the Cooper Hewitt in New York, where she served as the Deputy Director since 2014, but is already well-versed in the southern Californian architecture and design milieu, having also been the Director of Exhibitions and Publications at Los Angeles’ Hammer Museum, as well as the Curator of Architecture and Design at the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) in Los Angeles.

Hodge's name may also be familiar for her curatorial work at other institutions. Last year, she curated "Provocations: The Architecture and Design of Heatherwick Studio", displayed at the Hammer in Los Angeles, the Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas, Texas, and the Cooper Hewitt. She has also curated shows featuring the works of Frank Gehry and Dame Zaha Hadid.

Palm Springs is itself an architectural treasure chest, generously populated with midcentury modern homes styled with the distinct flair o...