Events

Fall 2024 Sciame Lecture Series: Jon Michael Schwarting & Frances Campani

The 1931 Aluminaire House and Housing

This lecture will be in person and is part of the Fall 2024 Sciame Lecture Series, titled "Design Matters: The Housing Question Revisited."

Jon Michael Schwarting (right) and Frances Campani (left) live and practice architecture in Port Jefferson, New York. They established Campani and Schwarting Architects in 2000. They have completed many types and scales of work including urban design. Their work is known for its aesthetic distinction, attention to context, and for its innovative use of materials. Campani is an Associate Professor of Architecture and Schwarting is Professor Emeritus at New York Institute of Technology where the rescue of the Aluminaire House began. They established the Aluminaire House Foundation to save and protect the House, finally giving it to the Palm Springs Art Museum.

"The 1931 Aluminaire House and Housing": The Aluminaire House, by the architects A. Lawrence Kocher and Albert Frey, was built in New York City as an exhibition of modern materials at the Architectural League and Allied Arts and Industries biannual exhibition in 1931. This presentation is about its 93-year history and our 36 years of involvement with it, including rescuing it from demolition in 1987 and rebuilding it with New York Institute of Technology architecture students until its final rebuilding at the Palm Springs Art Museum in 2024. As in the just-published book, The Aluminaire House, the talk will locate the house in relation to the polemics of modern architecture and issues of housing in particular.

Suggested Reading: Mumford, Lewis. “Mass Production and the Modern House.” ARCHITECTURAL RECORD, January 1930.

"Design Matters: The Housing Question Revisited" examines innovative solutions to the global housing crisis. It situates our contemporary dilemma in the powerful arguments made by Friedrich Engels in the 1870s and 1880s. In his revolutionary text, The Housing Question, Engels argued that the dearth of adequate shelter was an inevitable consequence of the Industrial Revolution. As a result of working-class exploitation endemic to capitalist modernity, the housing crisis was resolvable only by a revolutionary reconstruction of workers’ power that would result in the collective ownership of land and the means of production. “Design Matters” inverts Engels’s argument, putting design, architecture, and planning first. It expands his geographic, cultural, and temporal frame to include cities outside of Western Europe, and it probes places damaged by the devastating consequences of war, the climate emergency, and other catastrophes. A bevy of on-the-ground examples, conceived at multiple scales and aimed at reconstruction, are changing policy, politics, practice, and design. In the face of extraordinary challenges, architects, planners, and providers are collaborating to produce humane affordable solutions to the housing crisis, and suggesting that architecture is needed to provoke political change.

All lectures are free, open to the public, and held in the Bernard and Anne Spitzer School of Architecture Sciame Auditorium. For live captioning, ASL interpretation, or access requests, please contact ssadean@ccny.cuny.edu.

This lecture series is made possible by the Spitzer Architecture Fund and the generous support of Frank Sciame ’74, CEO of Sciame Construction.