On November 9, The Palm Springs Art Museum opened its newly renovated, $5.7 million Architecture and Design Center—The Edwards Harris Pavilion. E. Stewart Williams designed the original 13,000-square-foot glass and steel structure in 1961 for the Santa Fe Federal Savings & Loan. In its new incarnation, the modernist building recognizes architecture and design in its own right, not as a cultural side show to acclaimed art collections.
Williams is a member of the group of early post-World War II architects that landed in the Coachella desert and helped turn the resort into a burgeoning center of modern design. Marmol Radziner conducted the renovation, transforming the old bank building to serve as an exhibition space with a plan that opens up to the sweeping landscape beyond. The facility also houses an archive and design collection in its basement level.
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Inside the pavilion prior to installation (right) former bank apparatus left intact (left).
dan chavkin
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The design of the facility—with its sharp right angles, polished terrazzo floors, and floor to ceiling glass—represents a period of architecture that was sensitive to the user, offering a range of affordable housing to meet the post World War Two demands of growing families. The attractive houses, a favorite of retirees and seasonal residents, are now getting more expensive, as evidenced on a tour of select homes that accompanied a preview of the center. An estimated 45,000 devotees attended the city’s Modernism Week last February.
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Midcentury design objects (right) and building exterior (left).
lani garfield
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When Santa Fe Federal Savings & Loan went bankrupt in the 1980s, the building’s site was proposed for a 4-story retail centerpiece to 19 condos. The proposal galvanized an emerging preservation movement, spurred by the architect’s daughter-in-law, Sidney Williams, which stopped the project in its tracks, declared the building a historic monument, and, in time, launched the rehabilitation of the center. Sidney Williams is now the curator of the new center.
Marmol Radziner’s renovation is based in part on the photographs of Julius Shulman, who documented many of the mid-century modernist buildings in the area.
E. Stewart Williams will be honored in the opening exhibit, entitled An Eloquent Modernist, which is accompanied by an illustrated book of the same title.