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The popular Palm Springs Modernism Week and its open houses may have just passed, but don’t worry if you can’t make it. The architectural heritage of the city and the surrounding Coachella Valley is so rich that there is no end to the search for the masters who, beginning nearly a century ago, created all of today’s treasured desert modernism.
The exhibition recently opened in the Edwards-Harris Pavilion of the Palm Springs Art Museum’s Center for Architecture and Design Albert Frey: Creative Modernist will introduce many design enthusiasts to the Zurich-born architect and associate of Le Corbusier who was integral to the development of Desert Modernism (as of June 3).
A brief record of Frey’s major surviving works include the Palm Springs City Hall (1952), located across from the airport and still fronted by one of his beloved signature eyes; the Palm Springs Aerial Tram Valley Station (1963), which he masterfully designed The station, which allows the rushing mountain water to flow below, its exposed aluminum supports suggesting the covered bridges of New England; and his gas station (co-designed by Robson Chambers, 1965) Located at the entrance to the tramway, the tramway was salvaged from planned demolition and now houses its iconic swooping wing-shaped roof (a hyperbolic paraboloid, in case you were wondering).
Frey’s experimental Aluminaire House, designed in 1931 (in collaboration with A. Lawrence Kocher), received a warm welcome at its opening last weekend and is now permanently housed at the Palm Springs Art Museum ) next to the main building. The glass-and-steel box prototype of this bold concept for affordable housing, which had languished in disrepair for decades on Long Island, has been restored with shiny new aluminum cladding. Despite its simplicity, Frey accomplished a stunning job within a modest footprint, including working on a double-height living room and sun terrace.
A headline in a faded front-page clip from the New York Herald Tribune proclaimed “Aluminum Homes at Architects’ Show Signals New Age of Architecture.” In addition to telling the story behind the Aluminaire House, the current Frey exhibition also showcases exquisite original models, including one he made for the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
Architectural plans and drawings of various works by Frey are also on display, as well as some clever furniture pieces, with much of the material drawn from Frey’s own archives. Many of the striking black-and-white photographs in the exhibition were taken by renowned architectural photographer Julius Schulman.
Compared to the three-story Aluminaire House, most of Frey’s residential works were low-slung, some not much larger than what we would call a tiny house today. Period photos show his first major project, the austere, cube-like Kocher-Sampson structure built in 1934, surrounded by desert land; now the unrestored work is barely noticeable among the larger buildings in the developed city Attention.
In 1947, a modest two-bedroom home with boulders in the courtyard and a swimming pool was built for industrial design genius Raymond Loewy. A sliding glass wall extends underneath into the living room. At one of Hollywood’s Golden Age galas, the Thin Man himself, William Powell, once fell into the pool and Loy jumped in to join him. The Lowe House still stands.
On the hillside where the Palm Springs Art Museum now stands, the architect built his own Frey House II (1964) in boulders. Look out for photographer Dewey Nicks’s delightful late-’90s photos in the exhibition, which show a spirited nonagenarian Frey standing on his head in front of a sliding glass door with the city below. The exhibition’s curator, Brad Dunning, was also the coordinator of the shoot, shortly before the architect’s death in 1998 at the age of 95.
Dunning designed a flowing exhibition, with the final walls filled with photographs, plans and sketches of dozens of Frey’s works, as well as descriptive information. Once you appreciate Albert Frey’s extensive work, both the surviving buildings and those long gone, you may never see Palm Springs the same again.
The Palm Springs Art Museum’s Center for Architecture and Design is located in the former Santa Fe Federal Savings and Loan Bank. The 1961 International Style building had been used for other purposes over the years and the interior had not been treated well, so the terrazzo floors needed to be reintroduced. Its massive vault door still exists as part of the gift shop, which has a large selection of beautiful architectural books.E. Stewart Williams, who built the bank, also later directed the Palm Springs Museum of Brutalist Art (1976), which currently has an exhibition on the artist of light and space Norman Zammit getting highly anticipated. Everything came full circle, so to speak, in the small world of Palm Springs’ famous architect, who also built the Palm Springs Aerial Tram Mountain Station (1963) to complement the Frey Valley station.
The hardcover catalog accompanying the Frey exhibition, Albert Frey: Creative Modernist, contains 169 images and was edited by curator Brad Dunning, with text not only by Albert Written by Albert Frey, with contributions by New Yorker critic Paul Goldberger and others. Published by Radius Books and the Palm Springs Art Museum.
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