Albert Frey’s Desert Modernism Had a Sense of Humor

Albert Frey had a very good sense of humor. How else do you explain the dimmer he mounted directly on the gigantic boulder that he built his Palm Springs house around?! There’s a convenient headboard nearby, but Frey went to a lot of trouble to chisel the wire into the stone and mount the dial right at eye level. Very droll.

The whole idea of a giant boulder intruding into the house is, I suppose, a tell that this is no ordinary house. It’s quite compact, just 800 square feet (75 square meters), and that includes the boulder! The pool is built over the carport (the least cool part of the house; it looks like a 1980s addition), and the whole thing was, at the time, the highest elevation that anyone had built a house in Palm Springs. The town thought he was a bit nuts (maybe they had no sense of humor) but approved his design anyway; it was completed in 1964, and Frey lived there until his death 34 years later.

Frey’s provenance is impeccable; Swiss, he worked for Le Corbusier in the early days of the Villa Savoye when he, José Luis Sert, and Charlotte Perriand were the only employees of the office. He landed in New York City (the only architect then in America who had worked for Le Corbusier) and joined with Lawrence Kocher to design the Aluminaire House. The first all-metal house in the U.S. was built in ten days for an exhibition; dismantled; exhibited again at the International Style show at MoMA in 1932; disassembled again; installed at Wallace K. Harrison’s estate; disassembled again and moved to another location at Harrison’s place as a guesthouse; disassembled (and saved) by moving it to New York Institute of Technology campus in Central Islip; dismantled again when that campus was closed; stored for years; and now in Palm Springs (to be near its brethren), reassembled, hopefully for the last time.

Albert Frey built hundreds of buildings in Palm Springs, and not all are laugh riots. But the Palm Springs City Hall has an oversize canopy with a giant hole through which three palm trees grow, so it isn’t all deadly serious, either.

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Excerpted from The Architect and Designer Birthday Book by James Biber, published by Princeton Architectural Press, an imprint of Chronicle Books. Copyright © 2024 by James Biber. All rights reserved.

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Top photo of Frey House II exterior courtesy Palm Springs Art Museum

Related Reading:

The Circuitous Journey of an Early Prototype for U.S. Affordable Housing

Before & After: A Mother-Daughter Duo Rescue a Forgotten Albert Frey Design in Palm Springs