W HISTORY
L
MAXWELL FRY,
MODERNIST ARCHITECT
BY ANDREW WOOD
Edwin Maxwell Fry, known as Maxwell or
‘Max’ Fry (2 August 1899 – 3 September
1987), was a modernist architect, writer
and artist. He was born in Liscard, Wirral.
He described his father, the Canadian-
born Ambrose Fry, as a “business man with
all sorts of irons in the fire – chemicals,
electricals, old property...” He remembered
living in a terrace house converted by his
father overlooking the Mersey and the
Anglican Cathedral; and his first job was
working in his father’s factory, the Liverpool
Borax Company in Edge Street.
Originally trained in the neo-classical style
of architecture, Fry grew to prefer the new
modernist style, and practised with eminent
colleagues including Walter Gropius, Le
Corbusier and Pierre Jeanneret. Fry was a
major influence on a generation of young
architects. Among the younger colleagues
with whom he worked was Denys Lasdun, best
known for designing the National Theatre in
London.
In the 1940s Fry designed buildings for West
African countries that were then still part of the
British Empire, including Ghana and Nigeria.
In the 1950s he and his wife, the architect Jane
Drew, with the French architect Le Corbusier,
worked for three years on an ambitious
development to create a new capital city of
Punjab at Chandigarh. Fry’s works in Britain
range from railway stations to private houses
to large corporate headquarters. Among his
best known works in the UK is the Kensal
House flats in Ladbroke Grove, London, aimed
at providing high quality low cost housing, in
which he collaborated with Elizabeth Denby to
set new standards.
Educated at the Liverpool Institute High
School, he served in the King’s Liverpool
Regiment at the end of the First World War.
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” of Professor Charles
Reilly. He gained his diploma with distinction
in 1923. The next year he worked for a short
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time in New York before returning to England
to join the office of Thomas Adams and F
Longstreth Thompson, specialists in town
planning. His next post was chief assistant
in the architect’s department of the Southern
Railway, where in 1924-6 he was the architect
of three neo-classically styled railway stations,
at Margate, Ramsga te and Dumpton Park.
In a 2006 study of Fry, 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
[...] the “austere formalism and social idealism”
of continental modernism appealed to Fry’s
moral outlook and his desire for social change.
His biographer, Alan Powers, writes that the
change in Fry’s aesthetic views came gradually;
he continued to design in the neo-classical
style for some years: “As a partner in Adams,
Thompson and Fry, he designed a garden
village at Kemsley near Sittingbourne in 1929,
and a house at Wentworth, Surrey, in 1932, in
the refined neo-Georgian style typical of the
Liverpool school.” Wells Coates, a colleague
at Adams, Thompson and Fry tried to enthuse
Fry with the example of Le Corbusier, but his
conversion to modernism, in Powers’ words,
“came principally through his membership of
the Design and Industries Association, which
introduced him to modern German housing.
[Fry] was also influenced by the Congrès
Internationaux d’Architecture Moderne, and
was closely involved in its English branch,
the Modern Architectural Research (MARS)
Group, following its establishment in 1933”.
Even after his conversion to modernism, Fry
remained fond of neo-classical architecture,
lending his support to a campaign to
preserve John Nash’s Carlton House Terrace,
Westminster, in the 1930s.
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. Among them was Walter Gropius,
former director of the Bauhaus, who fled from
Nazi Germany in 1934 and with whom Fry set
up a practice in London in the same year. The
partnership lasted until 1936, when Gropius
decided to emigrate to the US. Gropius wanted
Fry to go with him, saying “your country will be
at war”, but although Fry agreed, he “could not
face the prospect of being a refugee, however
honourably accompanied”. Among their
joint works was Impington Village College,
Cambridgeshire: Gropius created the original
design, and Fry revised it and supervised
construction after Gropius had gone.
Fry first met the pioneering social reformer
Elizabeth Denby in 1934, at a party in Henry
Moore’s studio. Denby had a sponsor, Lady
Mozelle Sassoon, for the flats - R E Sassoon
House - they had designed as part of a working-
class estate around the Pioneer Health Centre
in Peckham, London. Pleasant social housing
at minimum cost, Sassoon House became Fry’s
first collaboration with Denby. He worked
again with her to design Kensal House, in
Ladbroke Grove, on a disused corner of land
belonging to the Gas Light and Coke Company
between the Grand Union Canal and the
railway. The project, completed in 1937, for
which Fry planned the blocks of flats which
then included a nursery school, to curve in
front of the site of a disused gas-holder, and
his simple design won the competition for
this project. The result was a spacious estate
for working-class people with modern shared
amenities which set new standards for its time.
From 1937 to 1942, Fry worked as secretary on
the governing committee of the MARS group
plan for the redevelopment of postwar London,
the results of which were outlined in his 1944
work “Fine Building”. The plan was described
by Dennis Sharp, one of Fry’s collaborators, as
“frankly Utopian and Socialistic in concept.”
In 1939, Fry became a fellow of the Royal
Institute of British Architects. In 1942, recently
divorced from his first wife, Fry married the
architect Jane Drew, whom he had met during
his work on the MARS plan. She shared his
zeal for architectural and social modernism,
and they became professional as well as
personal partners, establishing Fry, Drew and
Partners, which existed from 1946 to 1973.