Maxwell Fry
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Edwin Maxwell Fry, usually known as Maxwell Fry (born 2 August 1899; died 3 September 1987) was an English modernist architect.
He was trained at the School of Architecture at the University of Liverpool.
Maxwell Fry was one of the few modernist architects in working in Britain in the thirties who was British; most were emigrants from continental Europe where modernism originated. In 1933 he co-founded the MARS Group, a modernist architectural think tank.
His best known buildings are Kensal House, in Kensal Green, London, a pioneering example of social housing, completed in 1937, and Impington Village College, in Impington in Cambridgeshire designed in collaboration with Walter Gropius.
During World War II he worked in Nigeria, where he designed buildings for the University of Ibadan. Later he worked with Le Corbusier in Chandigarh where he worked on much of the housing. Together with his wife Jane Drew, also an architect, he published a book about tropical architecture. Fry and Drew designed one of the buildings 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.[1]
Maxwell Fry won the Royal Institute of British Architects gold medal in 1964.
[edit] Publications
- Edwin Maxwell Fry and Jane Drew, Tropical Architecture in the Dry and Humid Zones.
- K. Joshi, E. M. Fry, J. Drew, Documenting Chandigarh: The Indian Architecture of Pierre Jeanneret, Edwin Maxwell Fry, Jane Beverly Drew ISBN 1-890206-13-X.