Frey House Two, Built Around a Boulder
Near Palm Springs, California
High on the rocky slope above the Palm Springs Art Museum, so small you could miss it, sits the personal home of the man often called the father of desert modernism. Albert Frey was born in Zurich, Switzerland, in nineteen oh three, trained in Europe, and worked in Paris in the studio of the great modernist Le Corbusier before coming to America. He settled in Palm Springs and spent the rest of his life proving that spare industrial architecture could belong in the desert.
Frey House Two, finished in nineteen sixty-four, was his masterpiece of restraint. It measures only about eight hundred square feet, roughly the size of a small apartment, built of steel, aluminum, glass, and concrete block. Frey searched for the right site for years, then spent nearly a year studying how the sun moved across the hillside before he built.
He refused to move a single boulder. Instead he built around them, so that one enormous gray rock crashes right through the glass wall and into the living room, dividing the sleeping area from the rest. When it was finished it stood at the highest elevation of any home in the city.
Frey lived here alone for roughly three decades, watching the city he helped shape spread out below him. He left the house to the art museum when he died.
