An Eloquent Modernist: E. Stewart Williams, Architect

The architecture designed by E. Stewart Williams from 1947 until his retirement in 1996 is integral to the fabric of Palm Springs. Educated at Cornell and the University of Pennsylvania, Williams was grounded in the Beaux-Arts tradition, and became a confirmed Modernist. Beginning with his first residential design, a home for Frank Sinatra, Williams used a spectrum of materials―natural and industrial―to create structures that had the elegance and simplicity of Modern aesthetics combined with a textural and chromatic sensitivity to the desert.

With more than 120 photographs by Julius Shulman, Maynard Parker, Tim Street-Porter, Dan Chavkin, and David Glomb; images of Williams’s renderings, drawings, and artwork; and insightful essays by Lauren Bricker, Elizabeth Edwards Harris, Erin Hyman, Volker Welter, Wim de Wit, and Sidney Williams, the book reveals the span and depth of Williams’s fifty-year career in architecture.