Courtesy of Palm Springs Art Museum
Aluminaire House — a distinctive-looking all-metal structure — was once the most hated house in New York City. Now, with great fanfare, it has found a fabulous new life in Palm Springs, Calif.
Almost a century after its 1931 display in Midtown’s Grand Central Palace — where it wowed a record crowd of 100,000-plus visitors as a shining example of European modern design merged with American mass-produced materials — the house has at long last returned to its original glory. During the in-between years, however, it fell on rough times. It was vandalized on Long Island, dismantled into a pile of pipes and panels — and disdained by staunch preservationists in Queens when its keepers aimed to reassemble it and give it a new lease on life.
But last spring, after a seven-year effort, Aluminaire House was resurrected as a museum exhibit in the Southern California resort city — long a mecca of midcentury-modern architecture — where it was welcomed like family, far from its frigid reception in Queens. A coffee-table book on the architecturally significant house was also published earlier this month.
“We had to write a final chapter, and that chapter had not yet happened,” said Frances Campani, one of the two architects who shepherded the house through a journey of nearly four decades, determined to save it from the junk heap.
She and her husband, architect Michael Schwarting, were thrilled to attend last April’s ribbon-cutting at the Palm Springs Art Museum, where the house was reconstructed into a permanent outdoor exhibit.
“We feel great,” Schwarting said. “We are now sending the house off to its destiny.”
‘Home of the future’
The visionary Aluminaire House — made primarily of aluminum, with some glass and steel, and acclaimed as “the home of the future,” by Popular Mechanics — was designed by Modernist architects A. Lawrence Kocher and Albert Frey. Their aim: 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 also 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 was fond of the metal, Schwarting said. “The license plate on his car was ALUMI,” he said. The house’s name is a play on words, a portmanteau of “aluminum” and “luminous,” with allusions to light and air. The house shimmered in the sun.
After the 1931 exhibit, and after a 1932 display at the Museum of Modern Art, the structure went into private ownership and the house was moved to several Long Island locations. And, unlike receiving pride of place on a pedestal, it fell into disrepair. But it drew the attention of Schwarting, who was intrigued by the use of metal panels in 1950s and ‘60s gas stations.
In 1988, the house was moved to the Central Islip campus of 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 completed, but deteriorating. In 2012, when vandals began tagging it, it was disassembled into a sad pile of metal parts and loaded onto a storage trailer.
“It comes apart like a big Erector set,” Campani said.
‘It just didn’t belong there’
The couple started a foundation to save their beloved house, and began the quest for a permanent site. Ultimately, that began a lengthy — and, at times, contentious — process.
On Google Earth, they spotted a vacant corner lot some 44 miles west in Sunnyside, Queens, originally a playground for the Phipps Garden Apartments, dating from the same era. So, in 2013, they proposed situating the house there, within the Sunnyside Gardens Historic District, which was one of the first planned communities in the US. The quarter-acre lot had been fenced off for three decades.
“We thought it was an appropriate site historically and kind of intriguing visually,” Schwarting told The Post. “Sunnyside is low key and brick, and the Aluminaire house is bright and shiny.”
The house — a three-story cube with around 1,200 square feet, includes a drive-through garage with a door on each end. In contrast, the surrounding homes were attached, with no place to park.
The plan also included eight housing units on the site; the house would occasionally be open to the public as a historic monument and teaching tool.
Opposition was not only immediate, but also intense. Locals reportedly stormed a public hearing held by the city Landmarks Preservation Commission in vehement opposition to the proposal, claiming the all-metal aesthetic clashed with the red-brick surroundings.
Former City Council member Jimmy Van Bremer, who represented the neighborhood and still lives there, previously told The Post in retrospect, “This silver, modern, spaceship-looking edifice was going to be plopped 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 disassembled house remained stuffed in its trailer for several more years, with Campani and Schwarting footing the storage bill.
Conceptually, it made sense to place the house in Sunnyside, “though it didn’t look like the neighborhood at all,” said Laura Heim, a Sunnyside architect, whose late husband, Jeffrey A. Kroessler, included a chapter on the house in his 2021 book, “Sunnyside Gardens: Planning and Preservation in a Historic Garden Suburb.”
“Residents testified passionately that the Aluminaire House was wrong for the district and that the abandoned playground meant a great deal to them, speaking as if it were still a vibrant amenity rather than a fenced off lot,” Kroessler wrote.
In 2019, the parcel was bought by the City of New York. “It has remained an eyesore,” Heim said.
Five years later, plans for it are finally afoot. With $3.5 million in funding from the City Council, a public playground will be constructed on the site, a Parks Department spokesman told The Post. “This project is in the procurement phase, and we anticipate beginning construction this winter or spring,” he said.
A house at 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 relocating 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, permits, design and construction, along with the coronavirus pandemic — the house opened to celebration, situated in part of a repurposed museum parking lot. Visitors have free access to roam around the house.
They can’t go inside, however. The building’s integrity would be compromised by current required fire and accessibility codes.
There were two big concerns for the house’s reconstruction. 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 happened on a glaringly sunny day. “We touched the house and it wasn’t hot at all,” he said.
The Aluminaire House exhibition 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 piece of history and its influence can be observed in the tiny house movement today,” said Marmol, who was instrumental in the house’s reconstruction.
Palm Springs, unlike Sunnyside, has fully embraced the house.
“When I run into my neighbors who have nothing to do with 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 right home.”
Timeline of events
- 1931: Display in NYC’s Grand Central Palace for a record 100,000-plus visitors to show “modern” living.
- 1932: On view at the Museum of Modern Art in a modern architecture exhibit.
- 1932 to 1988: Aluminaire House in private ownership among three separate parties, during which time it fell into disrepair.
- 1988: House parts moved to Central Islip campus of New York Institute of Technology, where architecture students reassembled it.
- 2005: That campus shuttered — and the house remained standing, but deteriorating.
- 2012: Aluminaire House became the target of vandalism. It was, once more, disassembled and loaded into a storage trailer.
- 2012 to 2017: Its parts left languishing in storage.
- 2013: Sunnyside, Queens residents voice outrage at a proposal to bring Aluminaire House there.
- 2014: Landmarks Preservation Commission rejected the proposal following community objections.
- 2014: Campani and Schwarting spoke at Modernism Week in Palm Springs, where locals embraced the idea of displaying Aluminaire House there.
- 2017: Its 2,800-mile trek cross-country to Palm Springs.
- 2024: House opened to fanfare after seven years of site-selection, fundraising, permits, design and construction — and COVID-19.