Franz Alexander House
The Palm Springs International Jazz Festival kicks off with a special invitation to the swankiest of parties at the inimitable Franz Alexander House. Dr. Alexander was a prominent German psychiatrist in the mid-20th century.
Designed in 1954 by ground-breaking architect and industrial designer Walter S. White. The Alexander House, appears to emerge from the boulders and the rocky mountains it embraces. Seamlessly integrating into the natural surrounds.
Tour the house for a luxe cocktail party befitting the best
of the midcentury. Live music in architectural splendor.
Majestic Mountain Views
Indulge in delectable hors d'oeuvres and open bar cocktails poolside as you take in the panoramic mountain views.
Lounge Poolside
This extraordinary avant-garde house, listed on the National Register reflected life in dreamy Palm Springs in the 1950s and 60s.
Live Jazz
The Lance Conrad Quartet will set the vibe with some soothing jazz.
The divine desert architecture of Walter S. White
Walter S. White - circa 1950s
White’s concern for the local landscape and the earth’s environment led him to design buildings that took advantage of their natural settings while also caring for nature and sitting lightly on the land. He freed the roof from the plan, creating complex shapes that captured light and cross ventilation, and maximized views while providing shelter. His expressive roofs became a signature of his work. The Alexander, Bates, and Willcockson houses are among his most significant buildings because of their innovative roof structures.
© courtesty of AD&A Museum UC Santa Barbara
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Franz Alexander House (1955)
As did many young designers in this period, White experimented with plans that “opened the box,”influenced by Frank Lloyd Wright and other forms of modernism. White's meticulous detailing with mitered glass corners illustrates the true mien of an architect. Creating an unsupported corner of glass was expensive and technically difficult and is now synonymous modern architecture. Not part of structural system, the glass is sheltered below an impossibly empyrean roof.
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Miles C. Bates Wave House (1955)
His 1955 Bates house in Palm Desert is a giddy confection. The small house is topped with a rapturous wave breaking above the clerestory glass and simple block.The Wave House built in 1955 for Miles C. Bates, is distinctive for it's “wave” roof, which White patented and created by using wooden dowels with bi-concave intermediate elements.
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Rev Max Willcockson House (1959)
White employed his patented hyperbollic-paraboloid roof plan in Indio in 1959 when he designed a home for Rev. Max E. Willcockson, a minister of education at First Congregational Church in Los Angeles. The roof of the Willcockson house, is even more ambitious and ecstatic than his wave house. Its anchoring supports touch down atop a sand dune on two cement feet that seem impossibly dainty from a distance. The expanse of the roof hovers above the desert like outstretched wings of a spacecraft from another world. An engineering marvel, especially from someone who was not formally trained, the roof was supremely impressive and pre-dates architect Albert Frey's now-famous hyperbolic paraboloid Tramway Gas Station by half a decade.
