The pioneering Swiss-born architect Albert Frey (1903–98) was known to welcome students, colleagues, neighbors, and seekers to the home he perched on a mountain foothill overlooking Palm Springs—known as Frey House II and completed in 1964—with a soft-spoken, egalitarian demeanor. Often appearing in a T-shirt and yoga pants, simplicity that echoed the aesthetic of the house, Frey was in tune with the desert sands and boulders that captured his imagination on his very first visit to the city, in 1934.
“Albert Frey: Inventive Modernist”—a comprehensive exhibition opening today at the Palm Springs Art Museum Architecture and Design Center—displays Frey’s artistic development and expressive talents in a sophisticated installation redolent of the master. Though many architects contributed to the one-story modernist aesthetic of the Palm Springs School, Frey was arguably the most influential.
