Maxwell Fry

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Maxwell Fry and Jane Drew (1984)

Edwin Maxwell Fry (born August 2, 1899 in Wallasey , Cheshire , Great Britain , † September 3, 1987 in Cotherstone , Durham ) was a British architect , author , poet and painter . He was an advocate of New Building in pre-war England, from 1944 a pioneer of tropical architecture and realized projects in partnership with Walter Gropius , Le Corbusier ,  Pierre Jeanneret , and from 1946 to 1973 with his wife Jane Drew .

Life

Maxwell Fry, Margate Railway Station (1926), Kent, England; Main entrance
Maxwell Fry, Sun House (1936), Frognal Way, Hampstead London
Maxwell Fry & Walter Gropius, Imprington Village College Cambridgeshire (1937), front; Photo: 2006

Fry studied architecture from 1920 to 1923 at the School of Architecture at Liverpool University a . a. with Professor Charles Reilly Neo-Georgian Classicism. After working briefly in New York and at the Adams & Thompson city planning office in London, he became chief assistant in the architecture department of the Southern Railway and built the stations in Margate , Ramsgate and Dumpton Park in neoclassical style from 1924 to 1926 . In 1930 he returned to Adams & Thompson as a partner.

In 1933, Fry joined the concept of New Building and founded the Modern Architectural Research (MARS) group with Wells Coates and FRS Yorke . That being said, Fry continued to appreciate neoclassical architecture and supported a campaign to preserve John Nash's Carlton House Terrace in the 1930s .

In 1937 he realized the housing development Kensal House (1937) in Ladbroke Grove, London, together with the pioneering social reformer Elizabeth Denby, and with Walter Gropius the Impington Village College in Impington, Cambridgeshire, as part of their partnership Gropius & Fry, which ran from 1934 to 1936 to for Gropius to move to Harvard University in the USA. From 1937 to 1942 he was secretary to Arthur Korn , chairman of the administrative committee of the MARS group, which drew up a plan for the reconstruction and rehabilitation of London.

During the Second World War he served with the Royal Engineers . From 1944 to 1946, Fry was an urban planning advisor to Lord Swinton, the resident minister for British West Africa . Together with Jane Drew, Fry took over construction contracts from the British colonial authorities in West Africa from 1946, where they ran a branch office in Ghana in addition to their headquarters in London and in the following years they built embassies and educational institutions in partnership with other British architects. a. from 1953 to 1959 the University of Ibadan , Nigeria.

In the early 1950s, Maxwell Fry Le Corbusier recommended Indian city planners, who then commissioned Le Corbusier to develop the master plan for Chandigarh , a new capital for the Indian state of Punjab . There he worked with Le Corbusier and Pierre Jeanneret and built with Jane Drew apartments, a hospital, schools, shops, swimming pools, the Waterloo entrance and the Harbor Bar for the Festival of Britain until 1953.  

Maxwell Fry & Walter Gropius, Imprington Village College Cambridgeshire (1937), side wing; Photo: 2006
Maxwell Fry & Jane Drew, Trenchard Hall, University of Ibadan, Nigeria (1955), Photo: 2016

From 1954 to 1957, Fry was the founder and director of the Graduate School of Tropical Architecture at the Architectural Association School of Architecture in London. He taught there together with Otto Königsberger and handed over the management to him so that he could devote himself exclusively to his construction projects.  

Kevin Roche , Cedric Price and Dennis Ludson were young architects who worked with Maxwell Fry and Jane Drew, who worked and were friends with Ove Arup , the founder of the Arup engineering company.

Others

Since 1939 a member of the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) Fry was a council member and from 1961 to 1962 Vice President of the RIBA. In 1964 he was awarded the Institute's Royal Gold Medal . He was also a member of the Royal Fine Arts Commission and the Council of the Royal Society of Arts . He was appointed to the CBE in 1955 , a corresponding member of the Acádemie Flamande in 1956 and an honorary member of the American Institute of Architects in 1963 . Towards the end of his life he became a professor of architecture at the Royal Academy.

In 1973 Fry retired and lived with his wife from 1982 in a cottage near Cotherstone, County Durham. They were friends with Henry Moore , Barbara Hepworth , Ben Nicholson , Winifried Nicholson, Victor Pasmore , Eduardo Paolozzi and Richard Hughes .  

Fry, who also wrote and painted, exhibited at the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition and in 1974 had a solo exhibition at the Drian Gallery in London.  

Fonts

Together with Jane Drew he published numerous books on tropical architecture. Her books "Village Housing in the Tropics" (1947; with Harry L. Ford) and "Tropical Architecture in the Humid Zone" (1956) are considered standard works; his books “Das Bauhaus und die Moderne” (1968) and “Art in the Machine Age” (1969) are other important works.

Web links

Commons : Maxwell Fry  - Collection of Images, Videos and Audio Files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Jane Drew and Maxwell Fry. In: http://www.modernism-in-metroland.co.uk . Modernism in Metroland, accessed October 4, 2019 .
  2. ^ Iain Jackson: Tropical Modernism: Fry and Drew's African Experiment. The Architectural Review, July 4, 2014, accessed October 4, 2019 .
  3. ^ E. Maxwell Fry and Jane B. Drew: Chandigarh and Planning Development in India . In: Journal of the Royal Society of Arts . Vol. 103, no. 4948, April 1, 1955, pp. 315-333 .
  4. ↑ Sarbjit Bahga: Maxwell Fry-Designed, India's First Glass Façade Government Press Building At Chandigarh, Revisited. In: Indian Architecture News. worldarchitecture.org, June 7, 2019, accessed October 4, 2019 .
  5. ^ Isabelle Priest: Watershed in housing history: Edwin Maxwell Fry. In: The RIBA Journal. RIBA, October 24, 2018, accessed October 4, 2019 .
  6. ↑ Maxwell Fry. In: Architects Architecture Archtectuul. Retrieved October 4, 2019 .
personal data
SURNAME Fry, Maxwell
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Fry, Edwin Maxwell
BRIEF DESCRIPTION British architect, author, poet and painter
DATE OF BIRTH August 2, 1899
PLACE OF BIRTH Wallasey , Cheshire , UK
DATE OF DEATH 3rd September 1987
Place of death Cotherstone , Durham