Brise soleil made of aluminum tubing creates a shaded walkway at Palm Springs City Hall.
PHOTO BY FREDRIK BRODÉN
Albert Frey had a simplistic but accurate view of history. “We had the Stone Age, Bronze Age, and Iron Age,” the architect said in 1987. “I believe we’re in the Age of Aluminum.”
Frey began using aluminum with the experimental Aluminaire House of 1931. Originally built in New York, the lauded structure was gifted to the Palm Springs Art Museum, where it has been meticulously reconstructed over the last six months. The museum will officially open the three-story structure, now part of its permanent collection, on March 23 with a community celebration.
For his futuristic build, Frey sourced interior support columns and beams — as well as ribbed panels for the outside — from Alcoa Corporation (also known as the Aluminum Company of America). The house looked as peculiar as the Ford Trimotor airplane of the late 1920s. Rather than a fabric-covered fuselage, à la Charles Lindbergh’s Spirit of St. Louis, the Trimotor’s fuselage wore corrugated aluminum panels, becoming known as the Tin Goose. The Aluminaire provoked less affectionate terms. Aghast about “the canned house,” a New York Times reviewer deadpanned, “If father wants a new door cut through to his room, he doesn’t get a saw. He gets a can opener.”
Frey, who partnered with A. Lawrence Kocher on the design, brushed off the yucks at his expense. He was answering reasonable questions posed by an abundance of new materials. Among those new commodities: Thousands of cubic yards of concrete went into grain elevators in the 1890s in Buffalo, New York; plate glass was perfected on an industrial scale in 1918; vinyl — a Frey favorite — rolled onto the market in 1920. Design-minded people were inspired.
Perfected by 1895 in Pittsburgh, the first allotments of mass-produced aluminum served automotive, military, and nautical applications. The America’s Cup winner that year was Defender, an all-metal yacht. Aluminum wire worked well in power lines, but breakthroughs in building construction required more time.
The Aluminaire’s skeleton, midconstruction in Palm Springs.
PHOTO BY FREDRIK BRODÉN
“New structural systems use skeleton frames, take advantage of tensile strength in materials, and combine frames with stressed coverings,” Frey wrote in his 1939 tract, In Search of a Living Architecture. He hoped public tastes would develop favorably with increased exposure to the new material. It didn’t widely catch on. Some 58 years later, in conversation with The Desert Sun, Frey lamented, “People seem kind of lazy-minded.” He was a staunch proponent of cost-effective industrial materials. Even at the end of his life, Frey’s gold Plymouth Reliant wore a vanity plate emblazoned with “ALUMI.”
The architect’s job was to figure out how to make desert houses — consisting of precise modules and representing “the static equilibrium between vertical and horizontal masses,” as Frey wrote — nestle into creosote and boulder fields and look as if they belonged. The irregular ridges and spiky shapes of nature presented a harmonic challenge, one full of possibilities.
“The ever-changing natural surroundings become an indispensable element of composition for avoiding monotony,” Frey wrote.
In 1934, the Kocher-Sampson Building — Frey’s first project in the nascent village of Palm Springs — exemplified his thinking at 766 N. Palm Canyon Drive. No villagers had ever seen anything like this live-work building. Its narrow profile and glassy countenance suggested commerce, as did signage above the entrance. Yet the upstairs living quarters, an offset cube with a striking westward view and an exclusive pool terrace, supplied a resort feel. Demonstrating economic principles of construction, the office level bore a corrugated aluminum ceiling, a feature present in many of Frey’s structures.
Around this time, aluminum had become known as “frozen energy.” It is the most abundant metallic element in the Earth’s crust and the third most abundant element overall after oxygen and silicon. But there are no great veins of aluminum, no mother lodes, no eureka moments. In fact, aluminum doesn’t exist in a metallic state. Instead, it must be refined from chunky bauxite ore into an oxide-rich substance called alumina.
Shown here in New York in the 1930s, the prototype Aluminaire House has been disassembled and reassembled three times prior to relocating to the Coachella Valley. The structure officially opens March 23 at the Palm Springs Art Museum.
PHOTO COURTESY SPECIAL COLLECTIONS, JOHN D. ROCKEFELLER JR. LIBRARY, THE COLONIAL WILLIAMSBURG FOUNDATION
Historically, alumina was combined with cryolite crystals, a flux agent, inside a cell or pot. After applying intensive heat and a jolt of electricity, the translucent cryolite dissolved, carrying away carbon dioxide and fluorocarbons. The result was pure, bluish-white, molten aluminum.
Mass production of aluminum became practical when big hydropower stations opened. The first was at Niagara Falls in 1895, and its debut roughly coincided with the perfection of the Hall-Héroult smelting process. Eventually, such places as the Tennessee River Valley produced hydropower too, and aluminum production spread. With its glacial meltwaters, Iceland has abundant hydropower; it also has three aluminum smelters, which use 80 percent of the country’s energy. Upon depletion of the world’s only cryolite mine at Ivittutt, Greenland, in the 1980s, the refining process evolved to use caustic soda, a synthetic, in place of the mineral.
The corrugated aluminum ceiling at Frey House II.
PHOTO LANCE GERBER
In 1885, aluminum cost $8 per pound — a luxurious indulgence. Henry Clay Frick, chairman of the Carnegie Steel Company, “papered” a wall of his Pittsburgh home with decorative aluminum leaf. The historic site now draws visitors from all over to marvel at the preserved Gilded Age design. By the early 1940s, the price had fallen to 15 cents per pound. Especially because of airplane production, aluminum became a strategic metal during World War II. It could be rolled into a sheet, poured molten into a mold for casting into a solid shape such as a wheel, or extruded into architectural forms like window frames. (Aluminum siding became popular in the midcentury period.) It took a while to develop the technique, but pieces of aluminum could be welded together using advanced, low-temperature equipment. The metal also accepted adhesive bonding. And yet another attribute of aluminum is endless recyclability.
“It doesn’t rust or corrode,” Frey said. “It is less expensive, light, and easier to work with than steel.” It fit well with art deco applications and perfectly represented streamlined shapes. Aluminum could accept a coat of paint, but some, including furniture designer Warren McArthur, worked with anodized aluminum, colorized through an electrochemical process. After dipping the metal into a sulfur bath, oxides emerge, and the surface becomes porous. Then a dye bath suffuses the metal with fade-free color.
“The color tones that resulted, marketed in shades like Golf Green and Alice Blue, were incredibly popular and soon became an icon of 1930s Hollywood,” writes Quentin R. Skrabec in Aluminum in America: A History. In McArthur’s Hollywood debut, he supplied 2,700 seats to the Warner Grand Theatre. Additional product development occurred, and by the late 1950s, colorful anodized drinkware became popular; although, Frey’s collection of tumblers (still on display at Frey House II in Palm Springs) embraced a natural metallic hue.
Aluminum drinkware is among the collection on display at Frey House II.
PHOTO BY LANCE GERBER
Then came art applications. After starting in Burbank, C. Jeré, a midcentury maker of decorative objects, delivered innovative, mass-produced sculptural accessories of aluminum. Also dating from the early 1960s, Neal Feay of Santa Barbara explored multicolor anodizing in architectural artwork that toyed with texture and shape. In the contemporary sphere, visual artist and architectural designer Burzeen Contractor, a Palm Desert resident, creates aluminum wall art through a sublimation printing technique. His exhibition Light Air Sky is on view through March 15 at Desert Island Country Club in Rancho Mirage.
The Big Three midcentury manufacturers of aluminum were Alcoa, Reynolds, and Kaiser. They could make all sorts of claims. When Alcoa participated in House Beautiful’s 1960 Pace Setter Home project by contributing an aluminum roof, an ad declared, “Reflective Alcoa aluminum roof keeps the Pace Setter Home many degrees cooler in summer; it helps air conditioning work more efficiently, more economically by reducing the load. Naturally corrosion-resistant Alcoa Aluminum can’t discolor masonry or trim with unsightly streaks; it won’t warp, split, or buckle ever.”
Frey’s vanity plate, on view through June 3 in the exhibition Albert Frey: Inventive Modernist at the Palm Springs Art Museum’s Architecture and Design Center.
PHOTO BRANDON HARMAN
With so many possible uses, aluminum allowed architects to get their ya-ya’s out. Before World War II, Richard Neutra worked aluminum into the Grace Miller House on North Indian Canyon Drive, including the creation of a trap door next to the kitchen sink for garbage disposal. In 1946, Neutra completed a definitive example of International Style modernism for Edgar and Liliane Kaufmann, of Pittsburgh. Their Fallingwater House by Frank Lloyd Wright was well integrated into its Bear Run mountainside setting. The Kaufmann Desert House was different, “a machine,” according to Alan Hess in Palm Springs Weekend, “or rather a precise, artificial expression of a machine.” Most conspicuous is the system of long aluminum fins, or brise soleil, at ground level that shade and ventilate the patio. Additional fins glimmer on the upper-level “gloriette” or sun terrace.
“The delicate-looking vertical aluminum striations … are actually a sturdy stockade against the onslaughts of wind and sand that sometimes blow in viciously from the north and west,” author John Peter observed in Aluminum in Modern Architecture, Volume I, published in 1956 by Reynolds Metals Co.
Aluminum brise soleil at the E. Stewart Williams–designed Architecture and Design Center.
PHOTO BY FREDRIK BRODÉN
The book also introduced readers to the John Porter Clark House of 1939. Clark, a longtime collaborator of Frey’s, built the house for himself and his wife, Louisa, with glass, steel, and aluminum. In the book, Peter described the heat-reflecting qualities of aluminum before revealing, “The corrugated aluminum walls and crimped aluminum wind screens also provide sturdy protection against the desert wind. The two surface patterns are used in combination to make an attractive contrast of textures.” A further note about the elevated second-floor addition referred to “economical” aluminum pipes being suitable for supporting the lightweight structure.
The Clark residence shared much in common with Frey’s own desert homes, known as Frey House I and Frey House II. “Plaster, block, and concrete retain heat even at night,” the Swiss architect said in 1987. “Once the day starts to cool, the aluminum cools off in 10 minutes. It’s like living in a porch.”
Neutra and Frey weren’t the only ones enamored of aluminum’s practical and aesthetic qualities. E. Stewart Williams found applications as part of his varied style of modernism. Williams used structural aluminum in Frank Sinatra’s 1947 Twin Palms estate, and two of his bank buildings feature the material in functional and ornamental ways. The earlier example, circa 1957, was built for the Santa Fe Federal Savings & Loan Association — now the Palm Springs Art Museum’s Architecture and Design Center. It was Williams’ version of the Barcelona Pavilion by Mies van der Rohe, but wide eaves and moveable aluminum screens reduced the glare.
The other bank, completed in 1961, was the Coachella Valley Savings & Loan Association; it’s a Chase Bank today. Behind the inverted arches, Williams applied a façade of grooved aluminum panels that are anodized a handsome bronze. Their vertical rhythms play against the insobriety of yuccas in the landscaping and the zigzag profile of the terrazzo staircase.
Great possibilities were imagined for aluminum from the time of ancient Rome and China, when alchemy rendered small quantities of the precious stuff. “How many things have been denied one day, only to become realities the next!” Jules Verne wrote in 1865. His sci-fi novel From the Earth to the Moon envisioned an aluminum spaceship. Verne’s writing saturated Frey’s youthful heyday in Switzerland. The architect and his peers in Palm Springs translated a related vision for aluminum to explore practical possibilities and solve the unique problems of desert living.
Take a closer look at Frey’s experiments with aluminum and other materials at the Architecture and Design Center, where Albert Frey: Inventive Modernist, an Albert Frey retrospective, is open through June 3.