Join us on our journey of discovery, and in our day-to-day adventures
of a mid-century modern prefabricated aluminum + steel + glass house.
Listed on the National Register of Historic Places on August 21, 2020.
It’s a little bit of california modern in the mid-west.
Learn more about the short history of Alside Homes Corp.
1961-1964 [manufacturing for 10 months].
It is thought that ninety-four Alside Homes were built.
This is our pursuit to find them.
Learn about Emil Tessin,
the architect and engineer behind Alside Homes.
“Shortly after Valentine and Coscarelli purchased the home in 2016, they began to unearth nuggets of information about its pedigree. Their realtor had provided a brochure that identified the prefab as designed by architect Emil Tessin for the now-defunct Alside Homes Corporation based out of Akron, Ohio, which had held a patent for the structure’s aluminum paneling.” read more here …
“We knew we wanted to preserve this time capsule – it was too perfect to touch,” they said. “Changing the house in the condition it was in would be the equivalent of buying a Piet Mondrian painting to reuse as a canvas.” – read more here …
“Constructed of steel and aluminum modules in different colors, the Frost House winks at passing drivers like a Mondrian painting in the middle of a forest.” read more here …
“In all its optimism and predictability, prefabricated housing was once the hopeful icon of a modern future—with floor plans that laid out a scheme of public harmony and glossy mail-order catalogs that presented placid scenes of domestic living. But since its zenith in the early years of the twentieth century, the glowing possibilities of the prefabricated abode have long since dimmed. Now preferring the bespoke to the standardized, homeowners have deemed the housing typology, with its rigidly defined comforts, a thing of the past. But for Karen Valentine and Bob Coscarelli, one mid-century prefab design in Michigan City, Indiana, spoke not of uniformity, but uniqueness.” read more here …
“For people who love old homes, a time capsule—a house that remains mostly unaltered since construction—is the ultimate find. After all, as years go by, remodeling and trends have a way of erasing original details. But the definition of an architectural time capsule may need to be rewritten in the case of Bob Coscarelli and Karen Valentine. The couple’s midcentury Michigan City, Indiana, home not only came to them with all of the architectural features intact, it was also fully furnished with period Knoll furniture and a Paul McCobb kitchen and built-ins.” read more here …
The Frost House 