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ALBERT FREY
 
 
 
 
  Name   Albert Frey
       
  Born   October 18, 1903
       
  Died   November 14, 1998
       
  Nationality   USA
       
  School    
       
  Official website    
     
 
BIOGRAPHY        
   

Albert Frey holds a unique place in the history of 20th century Californian architecture as an uncompromising modernist of the European school, a pupil of Le Corbusier, and an exponent of high-tech and rationalist architecture who lived out his long life in the hills above Palm Springs, California.

Frey spent the early part of his career working for Belgian modernist architects Jules Eggericx and Raphael Verwilghen in Brussels, where he was involved with rebuilding housing following the Great War. He returned to Switzerland in 1927 to work for the firm of Leuenberger, Fluckiger before moving to Paris in 1928 to work for Le Corbusier and Pierre Jeanneret for nine months. In Le Corbusier’s atelier he sat between Charlotte Perriand and Jose Louis Sert, working on the Centrosoyus Administration Building in Moscow (1933) and the Villa Savoye (1931) at Poissy. Here he was introduced to Sweet’s Catalogue and, like Richard Neutra before him, found himself drawn to the American dream of a technological future.

Upon his arrival in New York in September of 1930, Frey began working with A. Lawrence Kocher, architect and editor of Arch itectural Record, in a partnership that would last until 1935. The most significant building of Frey’s early career was the exhibition house designed for the 1931 Allied Arts and Building Products exhibition at the Grand Central Palace in New York. Called the “Aluminaire House” because of its ribbed aluminum cladding and its qualities of lightness and airiness, it was strongly influenced by Le Corbusier’s Maison Citrohan (1920) projects and Maison Cook at Boulonge-sur-Seine (1926–27), as well as Frey’s own investigations of mass housing, as evidenced in schemes published in Architectural Record in April 1931. The aluminum- and steel-framed house, with its innovative floor and wall construction, was subsidized by subscriptions Frey raised from manufacturers and erected in ten days. Following the exhibition it was bought by the architect Wallace Harrison, disassembled in six hours and moved to his estate on Long Island. It has now been rebuilt at the New York Institute of Technology, at Islip, Long Island.

In 1934 Frey traveled to Palm Springs, California, to supervise the building of the Kocher-Samson office building for Kocher’s brother, a medical doctor. While there he met John Porter Clark and, terminating his partnership with Kocher, began working with Clark in a partnership that continued almost uninterrupted until 1957. A brief interlude in New York in 1938–39, where he worked on the Museum of Modern Art for Philip L Goodwin, and on a design for the Swiss Pavilion for the World’s Fair with Kocher that is reproduced most memorably in his book, In Search of a Liv ing Architectu re. Frey’s philosophy was evinced in the first house he built for himself in 1940. Assembled out of industrial-type materials, Frey House 1 (Palm Springs, 1940) was a simple cubic cabin with extending wall planes and an over-reaching, flat roof probing the landscaped desert around it. These ideas were further explored in the Hatton House and Guest House (1945) and the Loewy House (1947), all in Palm Springs. The extension of Frey House 1 in 1947 and again in 1953, with the introduction of bright, electric colors and profiled metal and ribbed fiberglass cladding, gave it a noticeably futuristic quality while at the same time incorporating it within the planting and water pools of its natural site. Although an experimental house, its idiosyncrasies were a direct responses to the particularities of its desert condition.

With Clark he built a number of crisp, more conventionally modernist buildings, including elementary and secondary schools in Palm Springs and Needles, and hospitals at Banning and Palm Springs. These long, low, planar buildings spread out against the desert landscape, external circulation, play or convalescing areas taking advantage of the climate. Joined in partnership in 1952 by Robson Chambers, Clark and Frey built the Palm Springs City Hall (1957) using a palette of traditional and industrial materials. The design was sensitive to both function and climate, the administrative offices forming a low, steelscreened T-shaped building with the council chamber expressed as a jagged, masonry block at one end. Concrete and steel portes cochère, one circular and the other square, marked the respective entrances to the council chamber and the city hall, the circular form of the former corresponding to the void within the latter.

Frey House 2 (1965) was built on a mountainside on axis with and overlooking the centre of Palm Springs, the City Hall visible in the distance. Raised on a concrete-block podium which incorporated the car port below and the swimming pool above, the house appeared to be no more than a glass and steel lean-to cabin, carelessly decaying in the desert landscape. The architecture is literally subsumed in Nature as a giant rock pushes through a glass wall, separating the sleeping from the living area and providing, by way of its mass, a thermal regulator.

NEIL JACKSON

 
 
 
 
 
 
TIMELINE        
   

Born in Zürich, Switzerland, 18 October 1903;

studied architecture at the Institute of Technology in Winterthur, training in traditional building construction;

worked in 1925 for architects Jean-Jules Eggericx and Raphael Verwilghen in Brussels, Belgium, where he was involved with rebuilding housing following the Great War;

returned to Switzerland (1927) where he worked for Leuenberger, Fluckiger before moving to Paris (1928) to work for Le Corbusier and Pierre Jeanneret for nine months.

Arrived in New York, 5 September 1930;

worked with Philip L.Goodwin (1938–39) on the design of New York’s Museum of Modern Art.

Established partnership with John Porter Clark, Palm Springs, 1934–57;

Died 14 November 1998 in Palm Springs.

 
 
 
 
 
 
FURTHER READING        
   

Golub, Jennifer, Albert Frey: Houses 1 and 2, New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1999

Jackson, Neil, The Modern Steel House, London and New York: Spon, 1996

Jackson, Neil, “Aluminaire House, USA (Kocher and Frey),” in Modern Movement Heritage, edited by Allen Cunningham, London: Spon, 1998

Jackson, Neil, “Desert Pioneer,” The Architectural Review 1147, no. 9 (1992) Rosa, Joseph, Albert Frey, Architect, New York: Rizzoli International, 1990

 

Selected Publications

In Search of a New Architecture, New York: Architectural Book Publishing, 1939, and Santa Monica: Hennessey+Ingalls, 1999

 

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