Modernist Architect Albert Frey Honored At The Palm Springs Art Museum

28.03.2024 - 16:43 / forbes.com / 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 June 3).

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 the one he made of New York’s MoMA.

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