How Extreme Climate Helped Shape Palm Springs Modernism

Extreme climate has helped shape modern architecture from its beginnings. Frank Lloyd Wright, well aware of Chicago’s cold winters and steaming summers, incorporated long, wide, horizontal eaves that startled passersby. In summer months, these eaves shut direct sunlight out of the interior of the Frederick C. Robie House but welcomed the low winter sun into the house as it warmed the concrete floor and brick pillars and walls.

The simplicity of uninterrupted geometries where the material’s color and texture provided decorative richness came to define early modern architecture. They impressed young European architects—especially Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Walter Gropius—in their search for the age’s architectural expression. The desert climate provoked similar inventive forms in midcentury Palm Springs. Sunscreens, trellises, visors, covered walkways—a vast catalog of architectural devices passively responding to the desert environment became a key creative motif.

E. Stewart Williams placed movable sunscreens on the glassy east and west sides of Santa Fe Federal Savings and Loan; the screens added a metal filigree stretching between two protruding slabs of roof and floor floating above the ground. Albert Frey’s turret-shaped second-story addition to Frey I in 1953 features circular windows with cylindrical fixed visors, each sliced at specific angles to keep the sun from entering the interior. Before starting a design, Frey would regularly plot out the changing sun angles through the year for the site, and he planned the windows, overhangs, and views accordingly. Such technical knowledge shaped Frey’s modern buildings.

Enormous sun visors integral to the turtle-shell roof of the Bob and Dolores Hope House by John Lautner each frame a different view from its ridgetop perch while controlling sunlight: one frames Mount San Gorgonio in the far distance, one the south valley, and one the rugged hillside.

And so on. Responding to the same challenge of passively controlling direct sunlight and heat load, each architect integrated his own inventive solution into the aesthetic of his buildings. Until the adoption of mechanical air conditioning in the 1950s, much of Anglo Palm Springs—like the Agua Caliente Band of Cahuilla Indians migrating to higher, cooler ground—escaped in summertime to homes and offices in Los Angeles, Pasadena, or Orange County. Some buildings updated a historical technique used by Middle Eastern desert dwellers by integrating ponds of water into buildings to cool the air through evaporation. Ever a student of history, Richard Neutra included a pool of water for that purpose in his desert house for Grace Miller.