E. Stewart Williams (1909–2005) was an American architect based in Palm Springs, California, whose mid-century modern buildings did much to shape the architecture of the Coachella Valley. The son of an architect from Dayton, Ohio, who had moved his practice to Palm Springs, he studied at Cornell and the University of Pennsylvania. In 1946 he joined his father and brother in the Palm Springs firm Williams, Williams & Williams, whose first house, in 1947, was Twin Palms for Frank Sinatra.
Read moreShow less
His houses from 1947 to the end of the 1960s, such as the Koerner House (1955), pair shed roofs and deep overhangs with large sliding glass walls, post-and-beam timber frames and built-in furniture that join inside and out. In the early 1960s he turned to the International Style, as at the Palm Springs Unified School District Educational Administrative Center (1960) and the Santa Fe Federal Savings and Loan Association (1960), a steel-framed glass pavilion inspired by Mies van der Rohe's Barcelona Pavilion, shaded by sliding perforated metal panels; it now houses the Palm Springs Art Museum's Architecture and Design Center. He later designed the Palm Springs Art Museum (1976) itself.