This film tells the story of the Aluminaire House, influenced by Albert Frey’s time in Paris with the great architect, Le Corbusier, and designed by Frey and A. Lawrence Kocher.   

It begins when Aluminaire was designed for a 1931 exhibition in New York City, and follows its convoluted history as, immediately following the exhibition, it was relocated to the grounds of architect Wallace Harrison’s Long Island, NY estate, where over the years it became seriously deteriorated, then saved from demolition and reconstructed on the grounds of the New York Institute of Technology, then to again be dismantled when the Islip, NY campus was closed, and finally stored away in a shipping container for years.

After a presentation at Modernism Week by the architects who saved Aluminaire from destruction, local architectural enthusiasts believed that Palm Springs would be the perfect home, and rallied to bring Aluminaire to Palm Springs and find a permanent location there. In 2020 the Palm Springs Art Museum accepted it into their permanent collection and Aluminaire will be reconstructed on museum grounds in 2021. 

This film was commissioned by the Aluminaire Foundation for Modernism Week.

$15

This program qualifies for .5 AIA/CES Learning Units (LU).




The organizer of this program is Aluminaire Foundation. This program is streaming through March 31, 2021.