Aluminum is such a ubiquitous material in 20th-century architecture that it is hard to
appreciate how relatively late it came on to the scene. Aluminum had considerable
advantages, including its light weight, its malleability, its corrosion resistance, and its
alloyability for special properties. For the first third of the 20th century, however, it had
to compete with similarly reliable materials, especially steel. Nevertheless, aluminum
was seen as a thoroughly modern material without historical associations, making it
indispensable to the Modern movement. This did not preclude some designers from using
the material for historicist styles, but its functional role in architecture kept pace with
architectural design and building technology.
The particular strengths of aluminum were proven during World War II in a wide
range of applications. However, after the war, the primary producers put aluminum into
large-scale market development to advocate for its use in all sectors, architecture being
no exception. In fact, by 1965 an estimated 905,000 tons of aluminum were used in
building construction in the United States, more than in any other field of application.
Aluminum’s most significant and specific contributions to 20th-century architecture have
been in windows, storefronts, and curtain walling. Aluminum has also been widely
employed in decorative features and hardware, windows and doors, and siding for a range
of structures.
Although aluminum had been known for much of the 19th century, one of its first
architectural uses was for the capping of the Washington Monument (Robert Mills,
1884). Aluminum was introduced commercially after 1886, when American Charles Hall
and Frenchman Paul Héroult independently and almost simultaneously discovered that
alumina, or aluminum oxide, would dissolve in fused cryolite, which could then be
decomposed electrolytically to become a crude molten metal. A low-cost technique, the
Hall-Héroult process remains as the major method used for the commercial production of
aluminum.
Another early application of aluminum in architecture came in 1891, when Burnham
and Root used the material for the interior fittings of the Monadnock Building (1889–91)
in Chicago. In 1897 Raffaele Ingami used unalloyed aluminum sheets with aluminum
rivets to surface the cupola of the Church of San Gioacchino (1897) in Rome. In the same
year in Montreal, the Canada Life Building (Brown and Vallance, 1897) was finished
with a decorative aluminum cornice. In all these cases, the metal was used as a practical
substitute and did not contribute significantly to the design.
The Austrian Otto Wagner developed the use of aluminum as a deliberate and specific
architectural feature in his Post Office Savings Bank (1904–06) in Vienna. He used
aluminum bolts to hold the exterior marble panels, and he used aluminum for interior
cladding and details, such as the grilles and vents. Although it would be some 30 years
before the material came into the mainstream of architecture, Wagner’s designs
represented a breakthrough and began to establish aluminum as a modern material, one
that could be associated with the ideals of modern architecture, including technology and
theories of modernism.
Despite these early precedents, aluminum’s large-scale application as a constructive
and decorative architectural material was developed most significantly during the 1930s.
Entries A–F 69
Even in Pittsburgh, the aluminum capital of the United States, the tower of the Smithfield
United Church (Henry Hornbostel, 1926) used aluminum, but still only as a substitute for
other metals and in a design that was strangely traditional and imitative.
Modernist architects began to value aluminum as a building material with vast
potential. With the development of steelframed skyscrapers and curtain walls, architects
used aluminum for glazing bars and spandrels. Aluminum could save space, reduce
weight, and shorten building time. Aluminum’s strengthto-weight ratio meant that thinner
and lighter sections could be used for spandrels and windows, thus significantly
increasing rentable floor area. In addition, these elements could be prefabricated and
hoisted into position on-site, thus saving considerable time and money over conventional
materials. These factors were directly related to considerations of industrial building and
mass production of component parts. Many skyscrapers were fitted with aluminum
spandrels in the 1930s, including the panels of the Empire State Building (Shreve, Lamb
and Harmon, 1930). The Daily Express Building (1931) on London’s Fleet Street by Ellis
and Clarke combined glazing bars with glass panels. Another noteworthy use of
aluminum was in the fabrication of storefronts and window frames. During the 1930s, the
American Kawneer Company developed extrusion technology that was particularly
appropriate for fabricating metal windows and storefronts. The combination of reduced
maintenance, technical efficiency, and ease of assembly encouraged the use of
prefabricated aluminum components.
These applications to commercial buildings were paralleled by experiments in housing
and space frame architecture. In 1931 the Aluminaire House was erected by Lawrence
Kocher and Albert Frey as a demonstration building within the Allied Arts and Building
Products Exhibition in New York City.
The house was built using aluminum-pipe
columns and panels fixed on the interior frame with screws and washers. The Aluminum Company of America subsidized
the aluminum parts, probably with the intention of developing another area of aluminum
application. In the late 1920s, Buckminster Fuller intended his 4D house to be fabricated
from aluminum alloys, which at that time were yet to be developed. By the early 1930s,
new heat-treated alloys were available, yet Fuller’s experimental ideas were not accepted
by the American Institute of Architects (AIA), where prefabrication in domestic building
was disfavored. These early attempts at prefabrication did nonetheless set a precedent for
later postwar architects who produced a range of prefabricated buildings that employed
aluminum in many different applications.
This potential for prefabrication and portability was developed after World War II. For
example, the British aircraft industry produced 86,000 prefabricated bungalows using
aluminum as the main material immediately after 1945, and in America after 1940 the
National Homes Corporation designed and manufactured prefabricated houses using
aluminum cladding and roofing. The prefabrication ideal was also used in England for
schools and portable buildings. During the 1950s, a British firm developed the supply of
prefabricated, pressed, aluminumframed huts for use in rural areas of Africa.
After World War II the aluminum companies began promoting their material for use in
construction and architecture. In 1947 the R.S. Reynolds Company, a specialist
aluminum supplier, set up a Memorial Award, which was offered by the AIA for
architects who “made the most significant contribution to the use of aluminum
aesthetically or structurally, in the building field.” Notable examples of award winners
include I.M.Pei’s 88 Pine St., New York (1974), Philip Johnson’s Pennzoil Place (1978),
Foster and Partner Hong Kong Shanghai Bank Headquarters (1986), and Helmut Jahn’s
United Airlines Terminal, Chicago (1988). In France, the work of Jean Prouvé (who had
already developed an interest in aluminum prior to 1940) was greatly enhanced when, in
1949, the French trade association L’aluminium Français purchased an interest in his
workshop. He used aluminum curtain walls for the Féderation Nationale du Bâtiment
building in Paris and continued to develop aluminum components for commercial,
residential, and overseas commissions.
The demand for “space frames” grew with a demand for exhibition halls, aircraft
hangars, warehouses, and storage facilities. One of the most elegant solutions for space
frames was the dome. The Festival of Britain’s Dome of Discovery (1951) was fabricated
mainly from extruded triangular lattice aluminum framework and, at a span of 110
meters, was the largest aluminum structure at the time. By the later 1950s, the American
Kaiser Aluminum Corporation was developing a prefabricated dome system that use
shaped panels to create domed space frames. Structures, with a diameter of 145 feet and
able to hold up to 2,000 people, could be erected in a matter of hours. A gold-anodized
Kaiser dome was erected in Moscow in 1959 for a U.S. cultural and industrial exhibition.
Although these structural uses of aluminum were impressive, the most successful
postwar application was undoubtedly the further development of the curtain wall. The
aluminum-clad 30-story Alcoa Building (1950) in Pittsburgh by Harrison and
Abramovitz was the lightest permanent office building of its size in the world at one time
and required approximately less than half the constructional material of a similar building
that used structural steel in the framework. In Chicago, where skyscraper curtain walls of
the post-World War II era consisted of stainless steel, rusting steel, and glass, Naess &
Entries A–F 71
Murphy’s Prudential Building (1955) was significant not only for its temporary status as
the city’s tallest building but also for its limestone and aluminum facade.
Modern Japanese architects have also embraced the material. Arata Isozaki’s
Prefectural Museum of Modern Art (1971–74) in Gunma and the Museum of
Contemporary Art (1981–86) in Los Angeles make extensive use of aluminum panels.
The use of aluminum as a component in the structure of buildings continued in the 1970s,
especially as an element of High-Tech style. The works of Norman Foster, including the
Sainsbury Centre for the Visual Arts (1977) at the University of East Anglia and his
Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank (1985); parts of the Lloyds Building (1979–87) in
London by Richard Rogers; and the outer frameworks of I.M.Pei’s Bank of China (1990)
in Hong Kong exemplify this trend.
Aluminum is now a standard and unexceptional material for buildings. It has been
specified for cladding, roofing, and interior applications of all kinds, including partitions,
ceilings, ducting and trunking, grilles, and hardware fittings, including gates grills,
balcony rails, lamp casings, and ornamental and practical fittings of all kinds.
ALUMINAIRE HOUSE
Designed by Albert Frey; completed 1931
Long Island, New York
Designed by Albert Frey and Lawrence Kocher and completed 1931, the Aluminaire
House represents one of the earliest examples of European-inspired Modern architecture
in the eastern United States. The Aluminaire was one of only six American buildings
chosen by Henry-Russell Hitchcock and Phillip Johnson in 1932 for the New York
Museum of Modern Art’s International Style exhibition and book, and of those six, it was
the only private residence other than Richard Neutra’s Lovell House (1927–29). Like the
Lovell House, the Aluminaire represented a merger of advanced building technology and
advanced architectural expression, and as such, it exemplified many of Le Corbusier’s
five points of architecture. This was mainly the result of the contributions of Albert Frey,
a Swiss-born designer who worked in Le Corbusier’s studio before imigrating to the
United States in 1930. Co-designer Lawrence Kocher, a Beaux-Artstrained architect from
California, was managing editor of A rchi-tectural Record at the time of his partnership with Frey, and it was
through the journal’s contacts that the firm received the Aluminaire commission.
Designed for the 1931 Allied Arts and Building Products Exhibition in New York, the
Aluminaire House was intended as an attention-getting display to draw in the public.
Eventually, more than 100,000 visitors toured the full-scale model of what the architects
described as “a House for Contemporary Life,” filled with light and air
(“alumin”+“aire”). To be occupied by a couple living near a city, the house contained a
covered porch, entrance hall, boiler room, and garage on the ground floor; a kitchen,
living and dining rooms, bedroom, bathroom, and exercise room on the second floor; and
a skylit library, toilet, and terrace on the third floor. As a model dwelling, the Aluminaire
was intended as a prototype for prefabricated housing that, if produced in adequate
quantities (10,000 units),, would have been relatively low cost ($3,200). As a three-story
block with pilotis , ribbon windows, a roof garden, and freely composed facades, the Aluminaire
House had much in common with a building that Frey knew firsthand: Le Corbusier’s
detached single-family house (1927) in the Weissenhofsiedlung (the exhibition of
domestic modern architecture initiated by the German Werkbund in Stuttgart). If the
Aluminaire lacked the spatial complexity typical of a Corbusian plan libre, it nonetheless featured
a combination living and dining area that stretched the full width of the house, with
a double-height ceiling above the living space. This gave the house a feeling of openness
despite its small size, a perception augmented by folding screens and translucent
partitions that transformed individual rooms into flexible, multiuse spaces.
Using lightweight skeletal construction, the house was erected in the exhibition hall in
less than ten days. All building materials, many of which were experimental, were
donated by national manufacturers eager to associate themselves with modern
architecture. Of these materials, aluminum and steel were prominent in the structure and
fittings. Six five-inch aluminum pipe columns set in concrete supported the entire weight
of the building, with many columns left exposed. Fastened to the columns was a
framework of channel girders and steel beams supporting steel floor decking and steel
stairs. Steel-framed windows were used throughout the house, as were steel-faced,
chrome-trimmed doors, including the overhead doors of the drive-through garage. The
non-load-bearing, exterior walls were only three inches thick, consisting of a steel frame,
wood nailers, and insulation board. They were sheathed in three-foot panels of corrugated
aluminum fastened with aluminum screws and washers. Practically, the panels’ vertical
corrugations added rigidity, and the polished surface deflected the sun’s rays, but they
also gave the Aluminaire a desirable metallic sheen and a gloss of the modern.
A similar effect was evident inside in the nontraditional details and finishes. Fabrikoid
covered the walls in the living spaces, and black Vitrolite clad those in the bathroom.
Neon tubes running above the windows lit the interior with dial controls, allowing the
Entries A–F 67
occupant to adjust the level and color of illumination. The house also featured built-in
metal, glass, and rubber fixtures designed by Kocher and Frey to save space and
minimize maintenance. Beds were suspended from metal cables. A combination china
cupboard and retractable dining table had legs on wheels to allow easy extension. A suite
of air-filled rubber chairs could be deflated for easy storage; although never fabricated,
these designs anticipated the inflatable furniture of the 1960s.
Public response to the Aluminaire House was generally positive, as evident in the
extensive coverage the house received in the general and architectural press in the early
1930s. Local journalists were impressed with its ease and rapidity of construction,
dubbing it the “zipper” and “magic” house and heralding it as a portend of future
dwellings. In The Modern House (1934), British architect F.R.S.Yorke praised the weather-resistant
qualities of its laminate wall structure and noted that its design was well adapted to
standardization.
After its display at the Allied Arts exhibition, the Aluminaire House was dismantled in
only six hours and transported to Syosset, Long Island, to the estate of architect Wallace
K.Harrison, who had purchased it for $1,000. In the spring of 1931, it was reerected as
Harrison’s weekend retreat, but it was structurally compromised because of construction
delays. Harrison altered the house during the next decade, adding two one-story
additions, enclosing the roof deck, and relocating it to a hillside site that transformed the
first floor into a basement. The Aluminaire gradually deteriorated in the ensuing four
decades, and in 1986, after the Harrison estate was sold, it was threatened with
demolition. Although the Harrison estate was listed on the National Register of Historic
Places, the Aluminaire House itself did not have the individual local listing needed to
ensure its protection. Largely through the efforts of Joseph Rosa, an architect researching
a book on Albert Frey, the architecture community in New York City rallied to save
the Aluminaire House, deeming it too significant a landmark of American modernism not
to be preserved. In 1987 the house was moved to the Central Islip campus of the New
York Institute of Technology, where, under the auspices of the School of Architecture,
the Aluminaire is gradually being reconstructed and restored to its original condition.
Long Island, New York
Designed by Albert Frey and Lawrence Kocher and completed 1931, the Aluminaire
House represents one of the earliest examples of European-inspired Modern architecture
in the eastern United States. The Aluminaire was one of only six American buildings
chosen by Henry-Russell Hitchcock and Phillip Johnson in 1932 for the New York
Museum of Modern Art’s International Style exhibition and book, and of those six, it was
the only private residence other than Richard Neutra’s Lovell House (1927–29). Like the
Lovell House, the Aluminaire represented a merger of advanced building technology and
advanced architectural expression, and as such, it exemplified many of Le Corbusier’s
five points of architecture. This was mainly the result of the contributions of Albert Frey,
a Swiss-born designer who worked in Le Corbusier’s studio before imigrating to the
United States in 1930. Co-designer Lawrence Kocher, a Beaux-Artstrained architect from
California, was managing editor of A rchi-tectural Record at the time of his partnership with Frey, and it was
through the journal’s contacts that the firm received the Aluminaire commission.
Designed for the 1931 Allied Arts and Building Products Exhibition in New York, the
Aluminaire House was intended as an attention-getting display to draw in the public.
Eventually, more than 100,000 visitors toured the full-scale model of what the architects
described as “a House for Contemporary Life,” filled with light and air
(“alumin”+“aire”). To be occupied by a couple living near a city, the house contained a
covered porch, entrance hall, boiler room, and garage on the ground floor; a kitchen,
living and dining rooms, bedroom, bathroom, and exercise room on the second floor; and
a skylit library, toilet, and terrace on the third floor. As a model dwelling, the Aluminaire
was intended as a prototype for prefabricated housing that, if produced in adequate
quantities (10,000 units),, would have been relatively low cost ($3,200). As a three-story
block with pilotis , ribbon windows, a roof garden, and freely composed facades, the Aluminaire
House had much in common with a building that Frey knew firsthand: Le Corbusier’s
detached single-family house (1927) in the Weissenhofsiedlung (the exhibition of
domestic modern architecture initiated by the German Werkbund in Stuttgart). If the
Aluminaire lacked the spatial complexity typical of a Corbusian plan libre, it nonetheless featured
a combination living and dining area that stretched the full width of the house, with
a double-height ceiling above the living space. This gave the house a feeling of openness
despite its small size, a perception augmented by folding screens and translucent
partitions that transformed individual rooms into flexible, multiuse spaces.
Using lightweight skeletal construction, the house was erected in the exhibition hall in
less than ten days. All building materials, many of which were experimental, were
donated by national manufacturers eager to associate themselves with modern
architecture. Of these materials, aluminum and steel were prominent in the structure and
fittings. Six five-inch aluminum pipe columns set in concrete supported the entire weight
of the building, with many columns left exposed. Fastened to the columns was a
framework of channel girders and steel beams supporting steel floor decking and steel
stairs. Steel-framed windows were used throughout the house, as were steel-faced,
chrome-trimmed doors, including the overhead doors of the drive-through garage. The
non-load-bearing, exterior walls were only three inches thick, consisting of a steel frame,
wood nailers, and insulation board. They were sheathed in three-foot panels of corrugated
aluminum fastened with aluminum screws and washers. Practically, the panels’ vertical
corrugations added rigidity, and the polished surface deflected the sun’s rays, but they
also gave the Aluminaire a desirable metallic sheen and a gloss of the modern.
A similar effect was evident inside in the nontraditional details and finishes. Fabrikoid
covered the walls in the living spaces, and black Vitrolite clad those in the bathroom.
Neon tubes running above the windows lit the interior with dial controls, allowing the
Entries A–F 67
occupant to adjust the level and color of illumination. The house also featured built-in
metal, glass, and rubber fixtures designed by Kocher and Frey to save space and
minimize maintenance. Beds were suspended from metal cables. A combination china
cupboard and retractable dining table had legs on wheels to allow easy extension. A suite
of air-filled rubber chairs could be deflated for easy storage; although never fabricated,
these designs anticipated the inflatable furniture of the 1960s.
Public response to the Aluminaire House was generally positive, as evident in the
extensive coverage the house received in the general and architectural press in the early
1930s. Local journalists were impressed with its ease and rapidity of construction,
dubbing it the “zipper” and “magic” house and heralding it as a portend of future
dwellings. In The Modern House (1934), British architect F.R.S.Yorke praised the weather-resistant
qualities of its laminate wall structure and noted that its design was well adapted to
standardization.
After its display at the Allied Arts exhibition, the Aluminaire House was dismantled in
only six hours and transported to Syosset, Long Island, to the estate of architect Wallace
K.Harrison, who had purchased it for $1,000. In the spring of 1931, it was reerected as
Harrison’s weekend retreat, but it was structurally compromised because of construction
delays. Harrison altered the house during the next decade, adding two one-story
additions, enclosing the roof deck, and relocating it to a hillside site that transformed the
first floor into a basement. The Aluminaire gradually deteriorated in the ensuing four
decades, and in 1986, after the Harrison estate was sold, it was threatened with
demolition. Although the Harrison estate was listed on the National Register of Historic
Places, the Aluminaire House itself did not have the individual local listing needed to
ensure its protection. Largely through the efforts of Joseph Rosa, an architect researching
a book on Albert Frey, the architecture community in New York City rallied to save
the Aluminaire House, deeming it too significant a landmark of American modernism not
to be preserved. In 1987 the house was moved to the Central Islip campus of the New
York Institute of Technology, where, under the auspices of the School of Architecture,
the Aluminaire is gradually being reconstructed and restored to its original condition.
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