Spotlighting the Aluminaire House’s Next Chapter

Aluminaire House, one of the earliest examples of modernist architecture in America that for a time lived on the Central Islip campus thanks to the leadership of School of Architecture and Design Associate Professor Frances Campani and Professor Emeritus Michael Schwarting, was featured in a lengthy profile in The New York Times: “A Beacon of Modern Architecture Lands in the Desert.” The structure is soon to be displayed permanently in the Palm Springs Art Museum. Built in 1931, the house was set to be demolished in 1986  “until the architect Michael Schwarting raised the money to dismantle and move the house to Central Islip, N.Y., where it became an educational project” at New York Institute of Technology,” the article reads, continuing, “Schwarting and the architect Frances Campani worked with students on it until 2004… Eventually, to protect it from vandalism, they dismantled the house again and stored the pieces in a 40-foot-long tractor-trailer. ‘It took five days,’ Schwarting recalled. “It comes apart like a big erector set.”