I cannot stop thinking about Albert Frey’s Aluminaire house which was recently acquired and dutifully reconstructed onsite at the Palm Springs Art Museum, and why it feels relevant to our Steel Hut building system. It’s fitting that after multiple relocations and periods of neglect the 1931 prototype house has landed permanently in Palm Springs, a nucleus of modernist architecture and design.
Frey ‘s own “Desert Modernism” was coined after his many significant design contributions to the Coachella Valley, his legacy aesthetic and form a result of studying the elemental desert landscape coupled with the investigation of post war industrial materials. A daring collation of commercial materials within a residential context.
As the Aluminaire house develops as a reaction to the availability of aluminum sheeting a result of wartime airplane production, the Quonset Hut emerges as a system for quick deployment housing and barrack solutions. Both structures responding to a need for habitation in the context of a global war. Both acting as solution-based space where a form follows function ethos is primary to the design process.
Frey’s aluminum case study home which debuted in 1931 at the Architectural and Allied Arts Exposition in Grand Central Palace, aimed to provide affordable mass production housing. Affordability, quick deployment, and non-precious off the shelf materials. These exact same qualities of the Quonset Hut are why we continue to invest and investigate in the Steel Hut architectural system. These design principles are much more that the stylistic or aesthetic language we understand and translate as modernism. These are ideological rubrics pivotal for societal improvement, access to sustainable and affordable housing amongst a continued need for habitation.
I’ve been seeing quite a bit of buzz on social media posts and periodicals about the recent Aluminaire unveiling in Palm Springs and it was on a recent site visit for our upcoming Courtyard House build, that I couldn’t help but continue to draw parallels of what Steel Hut hopes to accomplish that the Aluminaire house failed to do. Nicknamed the “Canned House” the prototype never made it to production. A cheeky retrospective comment by Frey sums up its failure to reproduce as “People seem kind of lazy-minded.” I’d like to believe there’s a readiness now to embrace alternative architecture and housing that wasn’t timely then. Surely there’s a more prescient and pressing understanding of what challenges we are facing from a climate and social perspective.
As the planning starts to take shape for our Courtyard House / Pioneertown Case Study No.4, we return back to the desert landscape as test site and workshop. We aim to prove the concept of a modernist steel panel home. Affordable, pre-engineered, 100% recycled steel and fire resistant, these are our guiding principles. The resulting form being a generous single floor residence with beautiful sweeping roof lines and a protected interior courtyard from Desert wind and sun.
It is with the same level of idealism that Frey presented his Aluminaire house that we work to prove the Steel Hut model. And it’s with confidence that we hope for more market readiness to accept a shiny metal mid-century re-imagining, glinting in the desert landscape. Beaconing a bit of optimism for the future and looking good doing it!
