This Iconic House Launched a Movement Before Settling in Palm Springs

Just in time for Modernism Week in Palm Springs, California , the iconic 1931 Aluminaire House has arrived in town, its new and permanent home. Designed by then-28-year-old Swiss modernist architect Albert Frey, a disciple of Le Corbusier, and A. Lawrence Kocher, the managing editor of Architectural Record, the ready-to-assemble cubic dwelling demonstrated a new style of domestic design and is broadly credited with launching an architectural movement in the U.S. Made of metal and comprising five rooms over three levels and 1,200 square feet, the modest structure, made entirely from off-the-shelf materials, boasts large windows and even a top-floor terrace intended to connect inhabitants with the outdoors.

“It was because of Modernism Week, when I invited the architects who had worked tirelessly over the years to save Aluminaire, to lecture on Aluminaire and Frey in 2014, that the idea came up—that Palm Springs, more than anywhere else, would be the best home for the then-homeless Aluminaire,” says Mark Davis, treasurer and board director of Modernism Week. Having just arrived, components of the house will soon be assembled and sited in a new downtown park, directly across from the Palm Springs Art Museum.

Despite its current popularity, the Aluminaire has endured several decades of relocation and exile, risking demolition in the 1980s until being rescued by a group of preservationists, who arranged to have it donated to the New York Institute of Technology on Long Island. When the campus shuttered in 2012, Aluminaire was taken apart and put unceremoniously into a shipping container. When residents of Sunnyside, Queens, found out, in 2013, that the Aluminaire House might be erected in their historic-district neighborhood as part of a new townhouse development, a number of them reportedly held a protest before a public hearing of the Landmarks Preservation Commission. So disliked was the prefabricated domicile that it’s been called “NYC’s most hated home” by the New York Post.

For his part, Davis couldn’t be more delighted about the new aluminum-and-steel fixture in town. “[It’s] the classic story of not knowing or appreciating what’s in your own backyard—until the world comes calling,” he says. “And now we will have Aluminaire as an important part of our treasured architecture.”