James Ingo Freed

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Tetrahedral Skylight in the Ronald Reagan Building, Washington D.C.

James Ingo Freed (June 23, 1930 – December 15, 2005) was an American architect born in Essen, Germany during the Weimar Republic.

His family, which was Jewish, fled to the United States when he was 9 to escape the regime of Nazi Germany.

In 1953 Freed received an architectural degree from the Illinois Institute of Technology. He then worked in Chicago and New York, including work with Mies van der Rohe. He began working with I.M. Pei in 1956 at the firm eventually known as Pei Cobb Freed & Partners. From 1975 to 1978, he was dean of the School of Architecture at the Illinois Institute of Technology, whose campus had been designed by Mies van der Rohe. He also taught at Cooper Union, Cornell University, the Rhode Island School of Design, Columbia University, and Yale University.

His major works include the Jacob K. Javits Convention Center in New York City, the San Francisco Main Public Library, and the United States Air Force Memorial in Arlington, Virginia next to the Pentagon, which was still under construction at the time of his death. He designed several major buildings in Washington, D.C.: the Ronald Reagan Building and International Trade Center and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

He died on December 15, 2005, of Parkinson's Disease, at age 75 in his home in Manhattan, in New York City.

[edit] External links

• Biography at Pei Cobb Freed & Partners website
• Special focus page: Biography on James Freed - United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
• "James Ingo Freed, 75, Dies; Designed Holocaust Museum", The New York Times, December 17, 2005. 

[edit] Gallery

Ronald Reagan Building, Washington, D.C.