Who’re the architects who constructed Palm Springs? Hailed as a spot of modernist structure pilgrimage for lovers of midcentury types, this desert metropolis has attracted a number of the main brains in modernism. Richard Neutra, Albert Frey, Hugh Kaptur, John Lautner, E Stewart Williams, William Cody, and William Pereira had been all prolific right here, and have been a number of the key architects who made Palm Springs what it’s in the present day. With Palm Springs Modernism Week 2024 launching this week, we glance again, zoom in, and rejoice their legacy.
The architects who constructed Palm Springs
Richard Neutra
(Picture credit score: Pictures: Joe Wolf)
Richard Neutra’s (1892–1970) structure is eternally preserved at its peak midcentury second in Julius Shulman’s pictures – stuffed with party-goers on heat all-year-long summer season evenings. The slim-line, seemingly weightless construction of Neutra’s Kaufmann home in Palm Springs was the right setting for these scenes – the place dialog flowed by the open plan entertaining areas and throughout the elongated rectangle swimming pool.
In-built 1947, the Kaufmann home in Palm Springs is one in every of Neutra’s best creations. So, how did this Vienna-born architect, who studied structure underneath Adolf Loos and developed his profession in Germany on the Berlin workplace of Erich Mendelsohn, find yourself reaching his architectural peak in California?
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Albert Frey
(Picture credit score: Palm Springs Artwork Museum)
While you have a look at the low, lengthy and linear types of Albert Frey’s buildings, which seem fashionable, but additionally immediately at one with the arid panorama of the USA’s Coachella Valley, it’s laborious to consider that this founding father of Desert Modernism in truth hails from the snowy mountains of Switzerland. But a have a look at Frey’s illustrious profession on the forefront of his career, which led him from the center of European modernism to working for Le Corbusier in Paris and designing buildings in New York, and it turns into clear that his worthy accolades are not any accident.
Born in Zurich in 1903 and coming from a extra conventional, building-orientated tutorial background – slightly than being influenced by the extra fashion led actions of his time, predominantly the Beaux-Arts – Frey labored in his dwelling nation and Belgium, earlier than discovering a place at Le Corbusier’s Paris workplace. There, he labored on seminal initiatives with the good grasp, resembling Villa Savoye, along with co-workers of the likes of Josep Lluís Sert and Charlotte Perriand.
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Hugh Kaptur
Hugh Kaptur (b. 1931) is one in every of Palm Springs’ most prolific architects and a part of a gaggle of modernists who outlined Desert Modernism. Pictured right here, his home for Hollywood actor Steve McQueen. Pictures: Mark Davidson, excerpted from the publication Hollywood Trendy (Rizzoli, 2018)
(Picture credit score: Mark Davidson)
Few of the creatives who got here to outline Palm Springs’ explicit model of modernism truly got here from the Coachella area. Hugh Kaptur, one of many Californian city’s most prolific architects, was no exception, hailing in truth from the chilly expanses of Michigan and Detroit. But he lived and labored in Palm Springs most of his skilled life, rapidly turning into the true architectural embodiment of the Desert Trendy spirit.
Born in 1931, Kaptur studied architectural engineering on the Lawrence Institute of Expertise, earlier than opting, in an nearly spur-of-the-moment determination, to remain in Palm Springs for good, throughout a visit there in 1956. He rapidly arrange store and started what would turn out to be an over 50-year-long profession spanning many typologies from personal and multi-family homes, to civic and business buildings.
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John Lautner
Sheats-Goldstein residence
(Picture credit score: Jeff Inexperienced)
With out the futuristic, concrete creations of celebrated American architect John Lautner (1911-1994), you marvel what Hollywood movie administrators would do for fictional lairs for the wealthy, highly effective… and infrequently, evil. His gravity-defying residential initiatives have most likely appeared in additional motion pictures than the work of every other architect; the outlandish cliff-side constructions usually eclipsing the actors of their cinematic splendour. Not cosy maybe, however usually cosmic.
Lautner’s memorable display screen stars embody the Sheats-Goldstein residence, aka the pornographer’s pad in The Large Lebowski (now donated to LACMA), with its expansive, angled, coffered ceiling punctuated by 750 drinking-glass skylights; the UFO-like Malin Home or ‘Chemosphere’, which appeared in Physique Double; and the Elrod Residence, outlined by a ‘sunburst’ concrete cover that featured as the house of Willard Whyte within the Bond movie Diamonds Are Eternally.
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E Stewart Williams
Twin Palms, designed by E Stewart Williams for Frank Sinatra in 1946
(Picture credit score: press)
It’s laborious to think about snow in Palm Springs, however on the Aerial Tramway Mountain Station 2,600m above the city within the San Jacinto Mountains, it’s doable and pretty common. A refuge for hikers and wildlife lovers, the station designed by architect E. Stewart Williams (1909-2005) is a modernist three-storey chalet with concrete wraparound viewing decks, full with cosy cocktail lounge with fireplaces and sweeping curved glazed facades overlooking Palm Springs and the valley past.
Of all of the architects who formed Palm Springs, Williams was the one who formed public life essentially the most. His legacy may be seen throughout city. He’s the architect behind the Palm Springs Artwork Museum (1976) and the Santa Fe Federal Financial savings & Mortgage constructing (1960), purchased by the museum and reopened because the Palm Springs Artwork Museum Structure and Design Middle in 2014, after a renovation by LA-based apply Marmol Radziner.
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William Cody
Goldberg Home designed by William Cody in Palm Springs in 1962
(Picture credit score: press)
Palm Springs is likely one of the international epicentres of tasteful large ‘m’ modernism, a sprawling desert metropolis the place the goals of structure’s new technology got here to wonderful fruition, often unrestricted by budgets and the tiresome burden of inclement climate. It was right here within the desert that architects might discover the boundaries of glass and metal to their coronary heart’s content material; the ensuing spindly paeans to open-plan dwelling introduced the arid desert panorama into the center of the post-war home.
Palm Springs continues to take pleasure in its modernist heritage, with an annual celebration of design, exhibitions and open homes and a robust ongoing custom of innovation structure. The pioneers who formed town included Albert Frey, Lloyd Wright and Richard Neutra, whose Kaufmann Home continues to be the defining picture of desert modernism. John Porter Clark, Donald Wexler and Richard Harrison and Palmer & Krisel had been additionally prime movers, working hand in hand with property builders and hoteliers to rework Palm Springs right into a vacation spot for holidaymakers and weekenders, eager to flee the smog and stress of Los Angeles (the resort began life within the early Twentieth-century as a well being retreat).
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William Pereira
Chicago-born architect William Pereira (1909-85), who settled in Los Angeles, was behind some key public buildings in Palm Springs, such because the Conference Middle, pictured right here
(Picture credit score: Palm Springs Conference Middle)
The structure and profession of American modernist William Pereira (1909-85) has been lengthy celebrated and properly documented. After founding William L Pereira & Associates in Los Angeles in 1958, Pereira went on to turn out to be broadly recognised for a sequence of iconic buildings – with an spectacular 400-or-so buildings in whole to his identify. Examples embody a number of college masterplans and buildings (together with the distinctly brutalist Geisel library), a number of expansions to the Los Angeles Worldwide Airport, in addition to its signature Googie-style Theme Constructing, the unique three buildings of the Los Angeles County Museum of Artwork (LACMA), the Disneyland Lodge, and the Transamerica tower in San Francisco.
Virtually inevitably – since Palm Springs turned the nexus of aspirational movie star life and fashionable structure within the second half of the Twentieth century – Chicago-born Pereira was quickly drawn to the Coachella Valley. And though he accomplished only some seminal initiatives they got here to outline the small city’s wealthy architectural heritage. It was there that his fashion tailored and developed, with landmark buildings drawing from the panorama and the spirit of desert modernism.
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Supply: Wallpaper
