PALM SPRINGS — For a small town surrounded by desert, Palm Springs attracts a great many tourists. Visitors flock to the Southern California town for its climate, dramatic landscape, and wealth of modernist architecture. The new Architecture and Design Center, a branch of the Palm Springs Museum of Art that opened in November along the town’s main thoroughfare, will be another draw, with its program of wide-ranging exhibitions and regular tours of local historic buildings. And it also serves another, complementary, function that is readily apparent in the inaugural exhibition, “An Eloquent Modernist: E. Stewart Williams, Architect”: to advocate for local designers whose work is often overshadowed by that of the mid-century juggernauts who built here.
Palm Springs has the highest concentration of mid-century modern buildings in the world. Prominent landmarks include Richard Neutra’s 1946 Kaufmann Desert House, defined by its low, horizontal planes that contrast with the undulating outline of mountains in the background, and John Lautner’s 1973 Bob Hope Residence, infamous for its curved concrete shell roof. Many other structures by world-famous architects were built here between the late 1940s and the late 1970s, when Palm Springs served as a glamorous weekend retreat for the Hollywood elite. Yet the popular narrative about this kind of modernist architecture doesn’t really belong to Palm Springs alone. Neutra and Lautner are even more famous for their residences two hours north in Los Angeles.
E. Stewart Williams never developed a major international profile. He did, however, become the single most prolific Palm Springs architect of the post-war period, designing some of the most significant civic structures and houses in town, eventually wielding more influence than any other contemporary architect over its built environment. Proof of his ubiquity can be found on the museum’s street, South Palm Canyon Drive, where Stewart Williams built three respective bank buildings in the span of several blocks. One of them, designed for the Santa Fe Western Savings Bank, now houses the Architecture and Design Center.
The Center is thus an homage to Stewart Williams, both inside and out, with his original façade dutifully restored by the Los Angeles firm Marmol Radziner and a biographical exhibition documenting his lifework in the restored interior. “We made small adjustments that protect the original character of the building,” explains Leo Marmol, a pioneer in the restoration of desert modernist structures who led the much-lauded 1998 restoration of Neutra’s Kaufmann House with partner Ron Radziner. Their firm restored the distinctive iron grillwork on the building’s western façade and interior, reinforced stairway banisters with glass to bring them up to contemporary construction code standards, and planted native desert landscaping around the building’s perimeter — all of which had fallen into disrepair when the structure languished in the years after its bank moved out.
The structure serves as an essential part of the Architecture and Design Center’s inaugural show. “There’s a conversation going on between the exhibition and the building,” explains Architecture and Design Center curator Sidney Williams, the architect’s daughter-in-law. The furniture, drawings, scale models, and photographs on view trace Williams’s development from his days as an architecture student at Cornell and the University of Pennsylvania in the 1920s and 1930s through to his mature work in Palm Springs on structures of civic significance, like the Palm Springs Museum of Art building. Though Stewart Williams was educated in the Beaux-Arts academic style of his youth, a late-1930s trip through Northern Europe introduced him to modernism, which he brought to the palm desert when he moved there in the mid-1940s to open an architecture firm with his father and brother.
Pieces of furniture designed by Alvar Aalto and displayed in “An Eloquent Modernist,” sourced from the first apartment Stewart Williams shared with his Swedish wife Mari in Palm Springs, point to the origins of his career-long interest in adapting modernism to desert environs. This influence is further evident in Julius Shulman’s photographs of Stewart Williams’s buildings, including the 1954 Edris House, wherein the flat overhang roof sits above native rock that forms the home’s landscaping. Despite the international proliferation of modernism, Stewart Williams brought a distinctly local sensibility to his Palm Springs buildings by integrating the brush, desert, and mountains of the area. “He was very regional in all his work,” explains Williams, the curator. “You get a clear repetition of form and that creates a sense of serenity.”
