Albert Frey
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Albert Frey (b. October 18, 1903, Zurich - d. November 14, 1998, Palm Springs, California) was a prolific architect who established a style of modern architecture centered around Palm Springs, California that came to be known as 'desert modernism.'
Born in Zurich, Switzerland, Frey received his architecture diploma in 1924 from the Institute of Technology in Winterthur, Switzerland. There Frey trained in traditional building construction and received technical instruction rather than design instruction in the then popular Beaux-Arts style. During the period prior to receiving his diploma Frey apprenticed with the architect A.J. Arter in Zurich and worked in construction during his school vacations.
It was also around this time that Frey became aware of the Dutch De Stijl movement, the German Bauhaus school and movement, and the modernism movement developing in Brussels. All would prove to be significant influences to Frey's later work.
From 1924 through 1928 Frey worked on various architectural projects in Belgium. In 1928 Frey secured a position in the Paris atelier of the noted International Style architect Le Corbusier and Pierre Jeanneret. Frey was one of two full-time employees of the atelier and coworkers included Jose Luis Sert, Kunio Maekawa, and Charlotte Perriand. During his period of working for Le Corbusier, Frey worked on the Villa Savoye project and other significant Le Corbusier projects. In 1929 Frey left the atelier to take up work in the United States, but continued to maintain a friendship with Le Corbusier for many years.
In September, 1930, Frey arrived in New York. Frey was the first architect in America to have worked directly with Le Corbusier. Frey began working with the American architect A. Lawrence Kocher, who was also the managing editor of Architectural Record. Their collaboration would last until 1935, and they would reunite for a brief collaboration again in 1938.
Although only four buildings were built by the pair, they contributed significantly to the American modernist movement through their numerous articles published in Architectural Record on urban planning, the modernist aesthetic, and technology. One of their commissions was an office/apartment dual-use building for Kocher's brother, Dr. J.J. Kocher, of Palm Springs, California. This project introduced Frey to the California desert, which was to become his home and the backdrop for most of his subsequent work.
From 1935 to 1937 Frey worked with John Porter Clark (1905-91), a Cornell-educated architect, under the firm name of Van Pelt and Lind Architects as both were yet unlicensed in California. April of 1937 saw Frey briefly return to the east coast to work on the Museum of Modern Art in New York. While in New York Frey married Marion Cook, a writer he had previously met in Palm Springs.
Upon completion of his work on the Museum of Modern Art in 1939 he and Marion returned to the California desert to resume his collaboration with Clark, which was to continue for nearly twenty more years. Frey and Marion divorced in 1945 and neither remarried.
At the end of World War II Palm Springs' population almost tripled, and the city experienced a building boom. Known as an escape for the Hollywood elite and a winter haven for east coast industrialists, Palm Springs emerged post-war as a premier resort community for a broader segment of the American populace who would now enjoy more time and money for leisure than any previous generation.
Frey and Clark were well positioned to capitalize on this, and both the city and their firm benefited from an unprecedented and yet-to-be paralleled period of construction. Significant buildings by Frey during this period include his private residences, Frey house I and II, the Loewy House, built for industrial designer Raymond Loewy, the 1952 Palm Springs City Hall, the Cree House II, the now abandoned North Shore Yacht Club on the northeastern shore of the Salton Sea, the Palm Springs Aerial Tramway Valley Station and the iconic "flying wedge" canopy of the Tramway Gas Station at the foot of the entrance to the tramway on the northern edge of Palm Springs, now used as a visitor's center.
After some consideration, a worn shopping center at the corner of Sunrise Way and Ramon Road in Palm Springs that bore a Frey-designed façade was demolished and replaced with an entirely new center that incorporates a great deal of architectural touches in Frey's style.
Frey's buildings contributed significantly to establishing Palm Springs as a progressive desert mecca for innovative modern architecture during the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s. He produced designs for the entire spectrum of architectural commissions, from bespoke custom homes to institutional and public buildings, most of which are still in use today. According to Frey, his preferred form of expression was the residence as opposed to commercial and large-scale projects. Viewed in comparison to his contemporary and fellow European transplant, Richard Neutra, Frey's designs are more integrated into the surrounding landscape and draw from the local surroundings for color and metaphor.
Architectural scholars have noted that in contrast to Neutra, Frey's designs are decidedly more commercial and less philosophically dogmatic, and hence more accessible to a wider audience. By embracing the American idiom while incorporating the modernist philosophy he absorbed from Le Corbusier, Frey's resulting designs produced a new unique regional vernacular.
Frey died in Palm Springs, California aged 95 and was buried at Welwood Murray Cemetery.
[edit] References
- Rosa, Joseph. Albert Frey, Architect. New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1999.
