FREED, JAMES INGO

FREED, JAMES INGO (1930– ), U.S. architect. Born in Essen, Freed fled from Germany to France in 1938 and immigrated to the United States with his younger sister in 1939. He rose to become one America's most distinguished architects, winning a long list of awards such as the 1997 Award for Outstanding Achievement in Design for the Government of the United States. He received his bachelor's degree in architecture from the Illinois Institute of Architecture (1953), where he returned as dean of architecture two decades later. After serving with the U.S. Corps of Engineers and then working as an architect and planner in Chicago, Freed joined Mies Van der Rohe in New York in 1955. In 1956 he joined I.M. Pei and Partners, later known as Pei Cobb Freed and Partners. Freed taught architecture at every major architectural school in the United States. As an active participant in the public sphere, he was director of the Regional Plan Association of New York–New Jersey–Connecticut and from 1983 to 1991 served as architectural commissioner of the Arts Commission of New York City. In 1988 Freed was elected to the American Academy of Design. He was also a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Among Freed's major building designs are the Jacob Javits Exposition and Convention Center in New York City (1986) and the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. (completed in 1993). To prepare himself for the design of the Holocaust Museum, Freed visited the sites of the Nazi concentration camps in Europe and memorials in Israel. He studied films, tapes, and books, keeping a bound volume of photographs in his office of what he had seen. "It has been the most moving experience of my life," he said. "It couldn't be just another government building…. We want walls to speak, to impart a certain discomfort, a certain pressure, a certain evocation." Freed decided that his design would be outside current architectural dialogues and outside questions of style The main issue, Freed explained, was how people can be made to understand the Holocaust and keep it from happening again. Certain construction details in the building are evocative of the camps: the design of the lighting, the brick work, and cracked concrete walls. The museum is organized around a long, descending walk through the exhibits and ends in a Hall of Remembrance. In 1996 Freed designed the San Francisco Main Public Library. In 2001 he designed the reorganization of the Israel Museum complex, which includes buildings devoted to archaeology, art, sculpture, and the Shrine of the Book. -BIBLIOGRAPHY: A. Dannat, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum: James Ingo Freed (1995); J.I. Freed, "The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum," in: J.E. Young (ed.), Art of Memory: Holocaust Memorials in History (1994), 89–101. (Betty R. Rubenstein (2nd ed.)