Aluminaire House
The Aluminaire House was designed by Modern architects, A. Lawrence Kocher and Albert Frey in 1931 for the Architectural League of New York. The pavilion was to be used as a temporary, indoor exhibition for the 45th Annual Exhibition of Architectural and Allied Arts. The three-story house was built entirely of prefabricated, composite aluminum walls and light steel. After only 10 days of construction the pavilion was finished and meant to promote the use of standardized, interchangeable parts and lower the cost of residential construction. When the exhibit ended, the Aluminaire House was purchased by Wallace Harrison and moved to his property in Huntington, NY. After being reconstructed and altered twice, the property was sold and the house was left to deteriorate. Then in 1986 it was saved by the New York Institute of Technology (NYIT). Here, the architecture program used itas an educational tool for preservation methodologies. Students documented and analyzed the materials and reconstructed it as it was initially on the Harrison property. But in 2006, the architectural program was discontinued, leaving the Aluminaire House. Finally in 2010, the Aluminaire House Foundation was created to help restore, relocate and maintain the house as a museum. Because the Aluminaire House’s history, the question is: do we preserve a building that was meant to be destroyed, moved and reconstructed over and over again? I believe we should. When the house was constructed, it was the first all metal structures and the first Le Corbusier-like villa in the United States. By preserving this structure, the house can continue to stand to not only represent optimistic design of Kocher and Frey, but also the move to mass-production of housing materials of the 1930s.
Tweet
