Modernist Architect Albert Frey Honored At The Palm Springs Art Museum

The enormously popular Palm Springs Modernism Week with its open house tours may have just passed, but no worries if you couldn’t make it. So rich is the city’s and the surrounding Coachella Valley’s architectural heritage that there’s no end to discovering more on the masters who, beginning nearly a century ago, made all of today’s cherished Desert Modernism happen.

Recently opened in the Edwards Harris Pavilion at the Palm Springs Art Museum’s Architecture and Design Center, the show Albert Frey: Inventive Modernist will serve as an introduction for many design fans to the Zurich-born architect and Le Corbusier acolyte who was integral to the development of Desert Modernism (through August 19).

A brief record of Frey’s principal extant works include the Palm Springs City Hall (1952) that stands across from the airport and is still fronted by one of his signature beloved oculi; the Palm Springs Aerial Tramway Valley Station (1963) which he smartly designed to allow rushing mountain water to flow underneath and whose exposed aluminum supports hint at New England covered bridges; and, his gas station (1965, co-designed by Robson Chambers) seen on the approach to the tramway, which was rescued from planned demolition and now houses the city Visitor Center under its iconic swooping wing-shaped roof (a hyperbolic paraboloid, if you’re wondering).

And, feted last weekend in opening ceremonies, Frey’s 1931 experimental Aluminaire House (with A. Lawrence Kocher) now sits permanently right next to the main Palm Springs Art Museum. Having languished for decades in a sorry state of disrepair in Long Island settings, the glass and steel box prototype of a bold concept in affordable housing has been rehabilitated with shiny new aluminum sheet cladding. For all its simplicity, what a stunning work Frey managed within a modest footprint, including having worked in a double-height living room and a sun terrace.

The headline in a faded 1931 front page clip from the New York Herald Tribune proclaims “Aluminum House at Architects Show Marks New Building Era.” In addition to recounting the story behind the Aluminaire House, the current Frey show displays finely detailed original models, including a stunning one of New York’s MoMA—where Frey contributed work—by Theodore Conrad, a prominent architectural model-maker of the day.

Architectural plans and drawings for all kinds of Frey works, along with a number of clever furniture pieces, are on view as well, with much of the material coming from Frey’s own archives. Many of the exhibit’s arresting black and white images were shot by celebrated architectural photographer Julius Shulman.

In contrast to the three-story Aluminaire House, most of Frey’s residential works were low-slung, and some not much larger than what we today label tiny houses. Period photos show his first major commission, the modest cube-like 1934 Kocher-Sampson structure, surrounded by desert earth; now, the unrestored work is barely noticeable among larger buildings in the developed city.

A modest two-bedroom house that Frey built in 1947 for the industrial design genius Raymond Loewy featured boulders in the courtyard and a pool that extended right under a sliding glass wall and into the living room. During one of many Hollywood Golden Age soirées in the house, the Thin Man himself, William Powell, once fell in the pool, with Loewy then jumping in to join him. The Loewy House still stands.

Up the mountain slope above where the Palm Springs Art Museum now stands, the architect built his own Frey House II (1964) right into the boulders. Look out in the exhibit for the delightful late-’90s image by photographer Dewey Nicks of a spry nonagenarian Frey doing a headstand in front of sliding glass doors with the city spread below. The curator of this show, Brad Dunning, was also the coordinator of that shoot shortly before the architect passed away in 1998 at 95 years old.

Dunning designed a nicely fluid exhibit which ends with a wall lined with photos, plans and sketches, along with descriptive information, on dozens of Frey works. Once you take in the broad range of Albert Frey’s work, both buildings happily still standing and those lamentably long gone, you’ll likely never see Palm Springs the same again.

For its part, the Palm Springs Art Museum’s Architecture and Design Center is housed in the former Santa Fe Federal Savings and Loan. After years serving other purposes and with the interior not having been treated well, the 1961 International Style building needed its terrazzo floors resurrected. Its massive vault door is still there as part of the gift shop which has an enormous selection of fine architectural tomes. E. Stewart Williams who built the bank was later also responsible for the Brutalist Palm Springs Art Museum (1976) whose current exhibit on Light and Space artist Norman Zammit is getting great attention. In the small world of celebrated Palm Springs architects, it all comes around full circle, so to speak, in that Williams also built the Palm Springs Aerial Tramway Mountain Station (1963) that complements Frey’s Valley Station.

Accompanying the Frey exhibit, the hardcover catalog Albert Frey: Inventive Modernist with 169 images was edited by curator Brad Dunning, with text not only by Albert Frey, but others including The New Yorker critic Paul Goldberger. Co-published by Radius Books and Palm Springs Art Museum.