Education
After coming to the United States at age nine with his parents, he studied at the Illinois Institute of Technology, where he graduated with a degree in architecture.
architect university professor
After coming to the United States at age nine with his parents, he studied at the Illinois Institute of Technology, where he graduated with a degree in architecture.
He worked for most of his career based in New York, and went beyond the Internationalist and modernist styles. James Ingo Freed was born in 1930 in Essen, Germany to a German-Jewish family. The family left Germany in 1939, when Freed was nine years old, to escape the regime of Nazi Germany.
They immigrated to the United States and settled in Chicago.
In 1953, Freed received a bachelor"s degree in architecture from the Illinois Institute of Technology. Freed first worked in Chicago and New York, including with Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, a prominent modernist architect.
From 1975 to 1978, Freed was dean of the School of Architecture at the Illinois Institute of Technology, whose campus had been designed by van der Rohe. He also taught at Cooper Union, Cornell University, the Rhode Island School of Design, Columbia University, and Yale University.
Freed"s major works include the Jacob K. Javits Convention Center in New York City, the San Francisco Main Public Library, and the United States Air Force Memorial in Arlington, Virginia next to the Pentagon, which was still under construction at the time of his death.
He designed several major buildings in Washington, District of Columbia: the Ronald Reagan Building and International Trade Center and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. He worked with I.M. Pei on the design of the Kips Bay Plaza project in New York City. In 1988, he was elected into the National Academy of Design as an Associate member, and became a full Academician in 1994.
He died on December 15, 2005, of Parkinson"s Disease, at age 75 in his home in Manhattan, in New York City.
In the late 1970s, he was a member of the Chicago Seven and dean for three years of the School of Architecture at his alma mater. In the late 1970s, Freed was a member of the Chicago Seven, a group which emerged in opposition to the doctrinal application of modernism, as represented particularly in Chicago by the followers of Mies van der Rohe.