Maxwell Fry
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Edwin Maxwell Fry, CBE, RA, FRIBA, FRTPI, usually known as Maxwell Fry (2 August 1899 – 3 September 1987) was an English modernist architect. He was born in Liscard, near Wallasey in Cheshire; his father Ambrose Fry, a commercial traveller, was born in Canada[1] and his mother was Lydia Thompson. He trained at the Liverpool Institute and the University of Liverpool School of Architecture where he gained his Diploma in 1923.
Maxwell Fry was one of the few modernist architects working in Britain in the thirties who was British; most were emigrants from continental Europe where modernism originated. One of his earliest commissions was Margate railway station which opened in 1926.[2] In 1933 he co-founded the MARS Group, a modernist architectural think tank.
His best known buildings are Kensal House, in Ladbroke Grove, London, completed in 1937, where he worked with pioneering social reformer Elizabeth Denby to create a spacious estate with modern shared amenities[3]; Miramonte in New Malden, Kingston, Surrey[4]; and Impington Village College, in Impington, Cambridgeshire designed in collaboration with Walter Gropius.
From 1934 to 1936 he practised with Walter Gropius as Gropius & Fry. During World War II he served with the Royal Engineers and worked in Nigeria, where he advised the authorities on town-planning and designed buildings for the University of Ibadan. Together with his second wife Jane Drew, he published books about tropical architecture. In the early 1950's, together with Pierre Jeanneret and Jane Drew, as senior architects, they did much of the housing of Chandigarh, the new capital of Punjab, India. Fry and Drew designed the New Schools building, the Waterloo Entrance and the Harbour Bar for the Festival of Britain. Both Maxwell Fry and Jane Drew often collaborated with and were close friends of Ove Arup, the founder of the engineering firm Arup.[5]
As Fry, Drew and Partners (1946-1973) the pair's major commission was the headquarters of Pilkington Glass in St. Helens. The building includes a number of modernist art commissions with works by Victor Pasmore.
Maxwell Fry was also a painter, writer and a poet, and he and Jane had among their many friends contemporary artists such as Henry Moore, Barbara Hepworth, Ben and Winifred Nicholson, Victor Pasmore and Eduardo Paolozzi; and the author Richard Hughes. He was an ARA, exhibited at the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition, had a one-man show in 1974 at the Drian Gallery in London, and continued painting in his retirement.
In 1927 he married his first wife Ethel Speakman, by whom he had one daughter. He married Jane Drew in 1942, and they worked and lived together, retiring to a cottage in Cotherstone, Co. Durham where he died in 1987.
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[edit] List of Works
- 1923-1940 many houses and flats including Ridge End at Wentworth, Virginia Water, Surrey and Club House at Sittingbourne, Kent
- 1926 Margate railway station
- 1935 Flats on St. Leonard's Hill, Windsor (with Walter Gropius)
- 1935 The Sun House, 9 Frognal Way, Frognal, Hampstead, London
- 1936 Levy House, 66 Old Church Street, Chelsea, London (with Gropius)
- 1936 House at Chipperfield Common, Hertfordshire
- 1936 Miramonte house in Coombe, New Malden, Kingston, Surrey[6]
- 1936 Sassoon House (modern worker's flats), Peckham, South-East London
- 1937 Kensal House, Ladbroke Grove, Kensington, London
- 1938 Showrooms for Central London Electricity, Regent Street, London
- 1938 Village College, Histon (with Gropius)
- 1938 Flats at 65 Ladbroke Grove, London
- 1939 Impington Village College, Cambridge (with Gropius)
- 1949-60 University of Ibadan, Nigeria
- 1950 St. Francis College, Ho Hoe, Togoland
- 1951 Work for the Festival of Britain
- 1951 Adisadel College, Ghana
- 1951-1954 Housing in Chandigarh, Punjab, India
- 1952 Passfield House and other flats in Lewisham, South-East London
- 1953 School at Mawuli, Ghana
- 1954 School and College at Aburi, Ghana
- 1955-58 Design of the Usk Street Housing Estate at Bethnal Green, London (with Denys Lasdun)
- 1956 Co-operative Bank at Ibadan, Nigeria
- 1958 Teacher Training College in Wudil, Nigeria
- 1958 Oriental Insurance Building, Calcutta, India
- 1959 Schools in Lagos, Nigeria
- 1960 Pilkington Bros. (Glass), office and social housing, St. Helens, near Liverpool, Lancashire
- 1960 BP office in Lagos, Nigeria
- 1960 Office building for Dow Agrochemicals Ltd., King's Lynn, Norfolk
- 1970 Crematorium at Coychurch, Mid-Glamorgan[7]
[edit] Honours
[edit] Publications
- Maxwell Fry, Fine Building. London: Faber & Faber, 1944
- Jane and Maxwell Fry, Architecture for Children, London: George Allen and Unwin, 1944 ISBN-13 978-0047200014 (Republished 1976 Architecture and the Environment)
- Maxwell Fry and Jane Drew, Village housing in the tropics with special reference to West Africa, In collaboration with Harry L. Ford, London: Lund Humphries, 1947
- E. Maxwell Fry and Jane Drew, Tropical Architecture in the Humid Zone, London: Batsford, 1956
- E. Maxwell Fry and Jane Drew, Tropical Architecture in the Dry and Humid Zones, New York: Reinhold, 1964
- Maxwell Fry, Art in a Machine Age: A Critique of Contemporary Life through the Medium of Architecture, London: Methuen, 1969 ISBN-13 978 4016040807
- Maxwell Fry, Tapestry and Architecture: An Address Given at the Opening of an Exhibition of Tapestries by Miriam Sacks at the Ben Uri Gallery October 22, 1969, London: Keepsake P., 1970
- Maxwell Fry, Autobiographical Sketches, London: Elek, 1975 ISBN-13 978-0236400102
- Jane and Maxwell Fry, Architecture and the Environment, London: George Allen and Unwin, 1976 ISBN-13 978-0047200205 (Republication of 1944 Architecture for Children)
[edit] References
- ^ England and Wales census 1901
- ^ Margate Railway Station. Images of England. Retrieved on 2007-12-28.
- ^ Maxwell Fry and Kensal House
- ^ Miramonte, New Malden, Kingston, Surrey (The Twentieth Century Society)
- ^ Jones, Peter: "Ove Arup: Master Builder of the Twentieth Century", Yale University Press, 2006
- ^ Miramonte, New Malden, Kingston, Surrey (The Twentieth Century Society)
- ^ The Twentieth Century Society: New Ways of mourning: Coychurch Crematorium (1970)
- From Here to Modernity: Maxwell Fry
- Kiran Joshi, Documenting Chandigarh: The Indian Architecture of Pierre Jeanneret, Edwin Maxwell Fry, Jane Beverly Drew, Grantha Corporation, 1999 ISBN 1-890206-13-X
- Obituary, The Daily Telegraph, September 9th 1987
[edit] External links
- (Edwin) Maxwell Fry (1899-1978), Architect, painter and writer - bronze head and photographs
