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News September 2014
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Aluminaire House might be moving to Palm Springs
September 28, 2014
Earlier this year after a group of architects failed to win community support for a plan to relocate A. Lawrence Kocher and Albert Frey’s Aluminaire House to a development site in the Sunnyside Historic District in Queens, things were looking pretty glum for the pioneering all-metal, pre-fabricated house. Not so anymore. The mayor of Palm Springs, CA, recently announced the city’s effort to raise $600,000 to transport and reassemble the house in the desert town where Frey lived and where many of his most famous works still stand. There, the Aluminaire House would no doubt add to the narrative of Frey’s life and work.
The Aluminaire House was a case study by A. Lawrence Kocher and Albert Frey for the Architectural League and Allied Arts Exhibition, constructed in 10 days with donated materials. Shortly afterwards it was relocated to Long Island to serve as a private weekend home and was later relocated to the Central Islip campus of the New York Institute of Technology for educational purposes. Last year the university announced it could no longer maintain the house.
“Palm Springs wants to adopt NYC’s all-metal modernist house,” CurbedLA
