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The Desert Sun

Editors Note:

A previous version of this article reported 10,000 visitors went through the exhibition Aluminaire House. The correct number is 100,000.

One of the most pivotal — and tiny — examples of early modern American architecture could find a new home in the desert.

Mayor Steve Pougnet is leading the charge to raise the necessary funds to purchase and bring Albert Frey's Aluminaire House to Palm Springs.

The home was designed and built in 1931 as an exhibition piece for the Allied Arts and Industry and Architectural League Exhibition. Frey and A. Lawrence Kocher, managing editor of The Architecture Record, were both disciples of the Bauhaus design movement popular in Europe at the time. And they wanted Aluminaire to explore the use of prefab modern materials like aluminum.

"For the past several months I have been in discussions with a group to bring this here. It is currently in New York. And I am pleased to say that we have gotten to a point that we are going to bring Albert Frey's Aluminaire House to Palm Springs," Pougnet announced to the Palm Springs City Council Wednesday night. "I'm going to help take the lead on the fund-raising for this effort."

The mayor has said the campaign needs to raise about $600,000 to bring the home out here from New York, reassemble it and conduct the sort of restoration an 83-year-old building almost certainly will require. A foundation has already been set up and can be found at http://www.aluminaire.org/.

In the world of architecture and design, the tiny home is regarded as a sort of signpost, one that brought the international style — already popular in Europe through the Bauhaus movement and figures like Le Corbusier — to the United States.

"To have something like this, as iconic as this, and a permanent fixture, will only add to what's been the growing trend of people coming here to tour our wonderful architecture," said Ginny Foat, a Palm Springs councilwoman. "So this is very exciting."

It's unclear where the home will be sited, though a spot near the Palm Springs Art Museum on the grounds of a new outdoor event space in downtown Palm Springs was offered as a possibility at Wednesday's council meeting. Earlier in the night the council voted to purchase the site from Wessman Development to build a city-owned event space.

"I think it's a really, really exciting story for Palm Springs, it's something that could possibly be a game-changer for us in many respects," said Pougnet. "I'm very excited about it."

"The Aluminaire is on the list of some of the most important buildings in the country, on a par with Fallingwater or the Farnsworth House," said Tracy Conrad, a local preservationist and CEO of Smoke Tree Ranch, calling to mind the Frank Lloyd Wright and Mies van der Rohe masterworks, respectively. "So it's a really interesting prospect to bring it to Palm Springs, where people can enjoy it, along with the rest of Albert Frey's work.

"People come from all over the world for Albert's work. And it puts it in some context," she added.

In many ways, the Aluminaire House helped Frey eventually find his way to Palm Springs.

"When they were done with the project, Albert Frey was a new emigre to the United States and was casting about for what he was to do next," said Conrad. "And Lawrence Kocher said, 'go to Palm Springs and build this building for my brother, J.J. Kocher.'"

The Kocher-Samson building, a Class I historic structure, still sits on North Palm Canyon Drive.

"And so he came to Palm Springs for that. And he built that and ended up staying here," she added. "And his whole body of work, basically, is in Palm Springs."

The Aluminaire House's history began with the 1931 exhibition. After that the home landed in several hands, one of the final being the campus of the New York Institute of Technology in Islip.

"It was sitting on that campus for many years and people came from all over the world to see it, as a destination," Conrad explained. The home was eventually disassembled again and put into a crate, where it's been sitting for about the last seven years.

The idea to bring Aluminaire to Palm Springs was born several months ago when Modernism Week hosted a lecture on the home. Conrad and Mark Davis, a member of the board of Modernism Week, and Brad Dunning began brain-storming a route to get the home to Palm Springs. The group began working with the Aluminaire House Foundation, run by architects Frances Campani and Michael Schwarting of Campani and Schwarting Architects, to arrange to have the exhibition house relocated in Palm Springs.

"We kept covering all of our bases and things kept falling into place, and it just kept building, and we couldn't be happier," said Davis.

Once the home is reassembled here, architecture historians plan to begin focusing on the home's interior, said Davis. There are also detailed plans for Albert Frey designed furniture, that was never constructed.

Roughly 100,000 visitors went through the home when it was on exhibit, and furniture would have been in the way, said Conrad.

"People were just fascinated with this new modern home," said Davis.