If you’re looking for local heroes, there are several in Palm Springs with the name Williams. E. Stewart Williams (1909-2005) was an Ohio-born architect who moved to the desert town in 1946, and within a year had designed a house for Frank Sinatra, converting the singer to modernism. During the next four decades, Williams, practicing with his brother and father as Williams, Williams and Williams or, as the locals called it, Williams Cubed, designed dozens of buildings in the Coachella Valley, including many more houses, museums, a synagogue, and several sleek commercial buildings. One of them, completed in 1961 for the Santa Fe Federal Savings & Loan, is a rectangular glass enclosure between a raised plinth and a wide, flat roof—it resembles Mies van der Rohe’s Barcelona Pavilion, complete with cruciform columns.
Stewart Williams’ daughter-in-law, Sidney Williams, is the curator of architecture and design at the Palm Springs Art Museum (whose main building Williams designed). After the Santa Fe bank closed, a developer proposed encircling the delicate Williams building with condos. Sidney Williams had a better idea: she persuaded the museum to buy it and turn it into a satellite branch focused on architecture and design. Sidney Williams enlisted local philanthropists (including one couple living in a Neutra house in Palm Springs, and another restoring a Lautner house in Los Angeles) to support the effort. Eventually, the museum brought in Marmol Radziner, the highly regarded Los Angeles firm known for several Palm Springs renovations, to turn the clock both forwards and back. The firm outfitted the 17,000-square-foot building for its use as a museum while also restoring it, whenever possible, to its original condition. Marmol Radziner was guided by Williams’ original drawings (which he had donated, along with the rest of his archive, to the museum), and Julius Shulman’s serene black-and-white photos of the building.
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