The Aluminaire Metal Framed Aluminium Skyscraper & Panel House USA
The Aluminaire House is a three-story house designed as a case study by architects A. Lawrence Kocher and Albert Frey in April 1931. Made of donated materials and built in ten days, it was the first all-metal house in the United States. After being displayed at architecture shows, it was installed at multiple locations in New York, and was later transferred to the Palm Springs Art Museum, where it is currently on view as an exhibit.
Type IVa-V. METAL FRAME SKYSCRAPER ; AND PANEL
Sponsors : A. Lawrence Kocher and Albert Prey
History. Kocher and Frey have offered a great many fertile suggestions in the field of the pre-fabricated house. The Aluminaire house was built at full scale (22′-0″ x 28’~0″ and 27′-0″ high) in Grand Central Palace for the New York Architectural League exhibition in April, 1931. It was erected in eight days and taken down in two. In the summer of 1931 it was re-erected as a permanent country house for Wallace K. Harrison at Syosset, Long Island.
The construction system exemplified in Aluminaire has been further refined and is proposed for a group of summer houses at Shelter Island, New York. An experimental house using similar framing but faced with canvas was built at Northport, Long Island, during the summer of 1934. (See Minimal.)
The purpose of the design was to produce a house meeting the needs of present-day life near the city, planned with a view to giving better light and air with mechanical conveniences and efficiency of arrangement, to use standard materials for walls, floors, and framing, and to build the house dry so that no time would be lost between erection and occupancy.
Structure. The building as constructed carried the wall panels to the ground in only a portion of its area. The architecture was modern, with considerable stress on large areas of fenestration and wall space, flat roof decks, sun glass, etc.
Certain aspects of the framing have been retained in subsequent developments by these architects. The entire building is supported on six duralumin columns 4″ in diameter, arranged with one column at each corner and one at the center of each long side of a rectangle. These columns are spanned in one direction by paired 7″ channels bolted tangentially to their faces (steel does not weld readily to duralumin). At the ends of the building the paired channels are headed off by a 7″ cross channel, and other 7″ channels form the floor framing. These channels support the wall panels and also the floor system. The latter consists of a standard Holorib deck with insulation and linoleum superimposed, with furring channels on the bottom flange which in turn support a ceiling of insulating board. Exterior of the outer of the paired channels, at 16″ centers, two steel angles bolted together form a Z and serve as hangers, supporting Z-shaped studs, also of steel, and also made up of paired angles. The faces of these angles in turn receive insulation outside and inside, nailed to the steel by means of a nailing thimble. The exterior of the house is then faced with corrugated polished aluminium of washboard cross-section.
This entire wall section, it must be remembered, is hung from the paired channels. The insulating board is finished in general on the inside with oilcloth in plain colours. These details have been varied slightly from time to time as to floor joists and as to the nature of the studding, but the fundamental principles have remained intact and the drawing shown represents the combination that the sponsors most favour.
Comment Notes.
This house is unquestionably thoroughly “dry” in construction.
The corrugated aluminium is said to break up the glare, form a waterproof skin requiring little maintenance, and insulate the house by means of reduced radiation. The sponsors estimate the cost of a house of the same size as the one built at Grand Central Palace, containing porch, hall, furnace room, garage, storage room, kitchen, dining, living, and bedrooms, bathroom, library, roof terrace, and shower with toilet, three stories in elevation, at $4,000 if built in quantities. They report considerable elasticity and sway in the structure during erection until the wall panels were erected.
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