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.
Should you take a spin around the area truffle-hunting Frey’s extant projects, you’ll find the expansive Palm Springs City Hall (1952), whose brise-soleils and palm-tree-studded porticoes nod to Brazilian modernism; the deceptively modest Fire Station No. 1, a 1955 collaboration with Robson Chambers that is still in active use; the Tramway Valley Station (1963), inspired by New England’s covered bridges; and the Palm Springs Visitor Center, once the Tramway Gas Station (1965). Often exhibiting the dreamy pink and turquoise shades that became a Frey signature, these are dynamic, stylized structures that draw from many traditions but still integrate successfully into their desert surroundings.
Before his heady early days in Le Corbusier’s atelier, in Paris, Frey worked in Belgium. He began his new-world trajectory in New York, where he partnered with the architect and editor A. Lawrence Kocher. Most notable among their designs is the sleek, boxy Aluminaire House, built in 1931 as a template for low-cost, modernist pre-fab living. Recently shipped to the Palm Springs Art Museum, where on an adjacent lot restoration is underway, the bones of this Corb-inflected structure, as well as Frey’s coup de foudre for its reflective, futurist exterior material, shine through.
Though he would return to New York in 1937, to assist Philip Goodwin on the design of a new building for MoMA, Frey knew that the desert city had become his muse. Under the pervasive heat and light, however, those rigid Corbusier principles underwent something of a meltdown. Frey emerged with a more relaxed and openhearted aesthetic, while staying true to the socialist ideals he had absorbed in Paris. Harmony with nature and design values that serve as many as possible were the tentpoles of his creativity.
Guest-curating the exhibition and the felicitous design of its installation is the designer Brad Dunning, an acolyte of the architect’s. Leading a tour of Frey’s house—fiercely attached to a large granite boulder that pierces the glass-enclosed aerie—Dunning scrambles along the rocks like one of the lizards or bighorn sheep that historically inhabit the area. As we move through the interiors, which Dunning recently refreshed, he points out the corrugated fiberglass Frey re-purposed for sliding cabinet covers, the raised angular dining table that doubled as his desk, and the cotton nautical ropes that were added to off-the-rack aluminum chairs. While other architects of the period were similarly minimalist, Frey’s projects possess an inviting communal spirit.
Adam Lerner, the director and C.E.O. of the Palm Springs Art Museum, lived in the house for six weeks. In the book that accompanies the exhibition, Lerner writes, “Here the grandfather of architecture, in a city known for its images of celebrities in posh modern homes, designs modest buildings.” Frey, he says, “is a guiding spirit for people who care more about authentic living than owning things.”
“Albert Frey: Inventive Modernist” is on display at the Palm Springs Art Museum Architecture and Design Center until June 3
Patricia Zohn has contributed to numerous publications, including Wallpaper, Artnet, the Huffington Post, The New York Times, and the Los Angeles Times
