Aluminaire House

The Aluminaire House was designed as a case study by architects A. Lawrence Kocher and Albert Frey in April, 1931. The three-story house, made of donated materials and built in ten days, was the first all-metal house in the United States. It was shown in the Grand Central Palace exhibition hall on Lexington Avenue in New York City as part of the Architectural and Allied Arts Exhibition. In 1932 the house was exhibited again, this time at the Architectural League of New York show sponsored by the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA). The MOMA show was titled The International Style - Architecture Since 1922, which became the basis of a book by Philip Johnson and Henry Russell Hitchcock, The International Style, a manifesto for the International Style of architecture.

After the shows the house was sold to architect Wallace K. Harrison for $1000, who disassembled it and moved it to his Long Island estate, where it became the core of an extensive complex. By 1940 the so-called "Tin House" was once again disassembled and moved to another portion of the property, where it became a guest house.

The property was subdivided by new buyers in the 1980s who planned to demolish the Aluminaire House. An attempt to designate the house as a landmark failed, but the owners agreed to donate the house to the New York Institute of Technology, which reassembled the house on the school's Central Islip campus. The house was transferred to the Aluminaire House Foundation after the Central Islip Campus was closed, disassembled and put into storage. A 2013 proposal to reassemble the house on a site in Sunnyside Gardens, Queens, as part of a housing development met with opposition from Sunnyside Gardens residents, who expressed concern that the house's design did not fit with the neighborhood's traditional brick housing. In early 2015 it was announced that the Aluminaire House would be moved to Palm Springs, California, home of other works by Frey. It will be assembled on a site opposite the Palm Springs Art Museum at a cost of about $600,000. Completion is expected in 2017.

The 1,200-square-foot (110 m²) house is roughly cubic in shape, resting on six columns, with five rooms. Exterior walls consist of corrugated metal sheathing backed by waterproof paper over a structure of two-inch steel angles. The interior finish is thin insulation board covered with fabric.