30 Architects Who Designed Palm Springs

An architectural ocean liner moored in a sea of rock, it captures Erle Webster and Adrian Wilson’s infatuation with transportation — a machine-age theme they explored in commercial work, including façades for Los Angeles’ New Chinatown. Ship of  the Desert gained wide attention after appearing on the cover of Sunset in 1937, securing its place in the modernist imagination.

S. Charles Lee

(1899–1990)

With training at the Chicago Technical College and the Armour Institute of Technology, this Midwesterner brought an industrial grasp of modern construction to the many Los Angeles movie palaces he designed. Some took the profiles of Streamline Moderne or Art Deco; others embraced revivalist modes, including the French Baroque fantasy of Los Angeles Theatre.

In the Coachella Valley, developer Walter H. Morgan hired him to design the Desert Club in La Quinta, completed in 1938. Its rounded corners, stacked horizontal lines, and riverboat-like massing made it a local landmark until it was demolished for fire-training exercises in 1989.

S. Charles Lee also designed Tamarisk West in Rancho Mirage, a 1964 condominium mini-subdivision organized around shared desert gardens and a distinctive S-shaped community pool. He owned and lived in one of  its largest units through his golden years.

Victor Gruen

(1903–1980)

Victor Gruen believed that public life could be designed into pedestrian-friendly urbanism — a conviction that earned him the epithet “father of the shopping mall.” Trained at Vienna’s Academy of Fine Arts, he brought those ideas to the United States, where his Los Angeles–based firm is credited with an unrealized master plan for Section 14 in Palm Springs, envisioning a hospitality district for the Agua Caliente Band of Cahuilla Indians at a denser, more walkable urban scale than the region had known. The firm’s best-documented desert commission is the 1959 City National Bank (now Bank of America), recently restored to its bulbous buoyancy.

Charles DuBois

(1903–1996)

Known for the highly stylized silhouettes he developed for Alexander Construction Company tracts — which later critics have likened to theme-park architecture — Charles DuBois understood how a roofline could sell a house and conjure a lifestyle.

Trained at UCLA and MIT,  he applied that thinking most visibly with his early-1960s A-frames. Often mischaracterized as Swiss or chalet-inspired, the designs are more accurately understood as Alohaus, drawing from Polynesian forms. In Vista Las Palmas, the steeply pitched roofs create soaring interiors and deep shade, while the inverted V shrinks to gables in the Desert Lanai and select Sunrise Lanai buildings, echoing the structure of a Polynesian hale. At Canyon Estates, the form widens and flattens.

DuBois’ lasting contribution to desert modernism may lie in proving that modern tract living could still retain a measure of playful  individuality.