Design

New Dealers, Architectural Tours, Fundraisers, and More at Modernism Week’s Fall Preview

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Modernism Week’s Fall Preview kicks off on Friday October 21 and will continue through the weekend at the Palm Springs Convention Center, providing a sneak peek of the upcoming 11-day festival in February. Attendees will have the chance to check out a sampling of the show’s 20th- and 21st-century furniture and other objects, art, and textiles at Friday’s Opening Night Party and Early Buying Preview Reception. The pieces on display will come from more than 40 premier national and international decorative and fine arts dealers, including newcomers such as Towne Palm Springs and the Wester Gallery, as well as returning dealers like Danish Modern Noho and Stevens Fine Art.

Outside the convention center, there will be opportunities to see some of the best examples of Palm Springs’s desert modernism on the ONE-PS Neighborhood Home Tour on October 22, which will showcase quintessential mid-century homes all around the city—complete, of course, with the requisite pools and patios. There will also be a chance to attend public tours of Christopher Kennedy’s “Palm Springs Pad,” the prominent designer’s new townhome, which is complete with new updates that are easily implemented in today’s modern lifestyle. This will be an enticing precursor to one of the main festival’s biggest events, “Modernism Week’s Show House: The Christopher Kennedy Compound,” where Kennedy brings together ten of the nation’s most popular trendsetters to create unique rooms inside one of the Indian Canyon Golf Resort homes.

Later that evening, a cocktail reception will be held to raise funds to secure the nomination of several houses and buildings designed by famed Palm Springs architect E. Stewart Williams for inclusion on the National Register of Historic Places. Williams’s most celebrated buildings include the Palms Springs Art Museum, the hillside Edris House, and most notably Twin Palms, the 4,500-square-foot, single-story home of Frank Sinatra, which embodies desert modernism in all its glory: floor-to-ceiling windows, a canted roof, and a large amorphously shaped pool. Peter Moruzzi, the founder of Palm Springs Modern Committee (PS ModCom), who is writing the nomination, will give a brief talk— his preservation efforts last year successfully put 11 Albert Frey–designed buildings on the National Register. The party will fittingly take place at a Williams-designed building, The Shops at Thirteen Forty Five. (More on Williams can be found in MODERN’s Spring 2015 Design Destination).

With the growing popularity of such events, attendance at Modernism Week has surged over the past 11 years, and will likely continue to do so, as more and more people want to take part in the celebration of mid-century architecture and design in Palm Springs and the Coachella Valley. “We are elated by the increasing interest in Modernism Week and the positive effect that our festival has on Palm Springs, our neighborhoods, and the entire valley,” says J. Christ Mobley, Modernism Week Board Chairman.

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Palm Springs Art Museum. Photo by Jake Holt.

Palm Springs Art Museum. Photo by Jake Holt.

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