Maxwell Fry
Edwin Maxwell Fry, CBE, RA, FRIBA, FRTPI (2 August 1899 – 3 September 1987) was an English modernist architect, writer and painter.
In the 1940s, Fry designed buildings for West African countries that were then part of the British Empire, including Ghana and Nigeria.
In the 1950s, he and his wife, the architect Jane Drew, worked for three years with Le Corbusier on an ambitious development to create the new capital city of Punjab at Chandigarh.
Fry's writings include critical and descriptive books on town planning and architecture, notably his Art in a Machine Age.
After the war he received an ex-serviceman's grant that enabled him to enter Liverpool University school of architecture in 1920, where he was trained in "the suave neo-Georgian classicism"[6] of Professor Charles Reilly.
The next year he worked for a short time in New York before returning to England to join the office of Thomas Adams and F. Longstreth Thompson, specialists in town planning.
[12] The marriage was not happy: Max described her as "a too well-bred wife without a frolic in her nature ... with the same determination [as her mother] to be well thought of without trying", and he also noted that she was a chain smoker.
[5] In a 2006 study of Fry in the Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, R. W. Liscombe writes that Fry, frustrated at the prevailing conservatism of British architecture and society, renounced Reilly's neo-classicism in favour of "an independent functionalist design idiom modified from the main German and French progenitors of the modern movement".
"[5] Even after his espousal of modernism, Fry remained fond of neo-classical architecture, lending his support to a campaign to preserve Nash's Carlton House Terrace in the 1930s.
[14] Fry was one of the few modernist architects working in Britain in the thirties who were British; most were immigrants from continental Europe, where modernism originated.
Fry first met pioneering social reformer Elizabeth Denby in 1934, whom he described as "a small dynamic woman",[16] at a party in Henry Moore's studio.
He worked again with Denby to create Kensal House, in Ladbroke Grove, London, on a disused corner of land belonging to the Gas Light and Coke Company between the Grand Union Canal and the railway.
Fry opportunistically planned the blocks of flats to curve in front of the site of a disused gasholder which then included a nursery school, and his simple design won the competition for this project.
[6] The Frys opened an office in Ghana (then known as the Gold Coast) and worked there and in Nigeria, primarily on educational establishments, and often in temporary partnership with other British architects.
Together with Pierre Jeanneret and a team of local architects, the Frys worked within Le Corbusier's plan to create Chandigarh; they spent three years there, designing housing, a hospital, colleges, a health centre, swimming pools and shops.
As Fry, Drew and Partners,[24] the pair's major British commission was the headquarters of Pilkington Glass in St. Helens, Lancashire.
Fry and Drew had among their friends contemporary artists such as Henry Moore, Barbara Hepworth, Ben and Winifred Nicholson, Victor Pasmore and Eduardo Paolozzi; and the author Richard Hughes.
