In 1924, when the developer Pearl McCallum McManus opened his Oasis Hotel, in Palm Springs, it was like nothing the desert had seen before. Built with thick “slip-form concrete” walls to withstand the heat, the four-story structure had a sculptural silhouette that blended into the surrounding rock. Mount San Jacinto loomed in the distance. And trench doors opened onto a wisteria-covered terrace, where the view was nothing but dust and sunlight.
A year later, across the Atlantic, the 1925 “Paris Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes” opened at the Grand Palais. Critics would call the style on display—as deployed by young artists such as Francis Jourdain and Maurice Dufrêne—“art moderne.” But the Oasis Hotel came first. It was designed by Lloyd Wright, the eldest son of Frank Lloyd Wright.
McManus was ahead of the curve. The Wild West was vanishing, its spaces slowly filling with cars, concrete, glass, and steel. Over the next two decades, architects arrived from near and far: Hugh Kaptur and John Lautner from Michigan, Paul R. Williams from L.A., Richard Neutra from Austria, Albert Frey from Switzerland. Most followed modernist ideals, but their work began to bend to the landscape—low-slung roofs, concrete-block walls, shaded windows.
Unlike the Prairie School or the Bauhaus, no single manifesto drove the building in Palm Springs. The architects worked in quiet synchronicity, designing what the desert needed: houses, churches, schools, gas stations.
“It is by studying the forms of nature … and those of traditional architecture,” Frey said, “that we will discover the basic principles which guide the creation of shape, space, and composition, and be able to build a living architecture that not only provides us with physical comfort but with spiritual enjoyment as well.”
Two new books—The Palm Springs School, by Alan Hess, and Palm Springs, by Sheila Hamilton—capture Frey’s ethos in vintage and contemporary photographs. Among the featured landmarks are William Krisel’s butterfly-roofed Alexander homes (late 1950s), Victor Gruen’s Bank of America building (1959), and the Twin Palms estate of Frank Sinatra (1947), with its piano-shaped pool. Together, these books capture the enduring appeal of Palm Springs, a place where buildings feel marooned in the landscape, as though they’ve been there forever. —Elena Clavarino
Elena Clavarino is a Senior Editor at Air Mail