Palm Springs is building a new park for pioneering prefab Aluminaire House

The long journey to find a permanent home is almost over for the Aluminaire House, considered to be the seminal modernist prefab home.

The house, designed by Albert Frey and A. Lawrence Kocher in 1931, is set to be permanently installed in a new Palm Springs park that will built across from the Palm Springs Art Museum, the Aluminaire Foundation reports.

Construction on the Palm Springs Downtown Park, designed by Rios Clementi Hale Studios, is expected to begin later this year, with completion scheduled for 2020.

This is big news for the prefab house, which arrived in Palm Springs early last year, but has been waiting, disassembled, since then. “Once the Downtown Park is completed, the process of reassembling Aluminaire can begin,” the foundation said in an announcement.

The Aluminaire is acknowledged as the nation’s first all-metal house and is likely the nation’s first prefab too.

The house made its debut at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, where it was assembled in just 10 days, and admired by both critics and the public. The structure has been called one of the “the pivotal works of modern architecture in America.”

Via WikiArcquitectura

The warm welcome Palm Springs has shown the aluminum house—building a new park for it; putting it in a prime downtown spot—is a sharp contrast to the reception it received in New York, where it most recently stood, serving as a vacation house on Long Island as recently as 2012.

But a plan to move the house to the Queens neighborhood of Sunnyside was deeply unpopular with locals. The house was called “the most hated house in New York.”

Palm Springs and the Aluminaire Foundation have been working together since 2014 to install the Aluminaire House in the city.

• New York’s hated prefab masterpiece is on its way to Palm Springs [Curbed LA]
• Modernist prefab gem begins its journey from New York to Palm Springs [Curbed NY]