James Ingo Freed was an architect and educator best known for his role as a founding partner of Pei Cobb Freed and Partners. His major works include the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, the U.S. Air Force Memorial and the Ronald Regan Building and International Trade Center, all in Washington D.C., as well as the Jacob K. Javits Convention Center in Manhattan, and the San Francisco Main Public Library.
Born in Germany in 1930, Freed emigrated to the United States as a child and settled in Chicago. He received a BA in architecture in 1953 from the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago, which was then under the direction of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. Freed worked briefly in the 1950's for George Danforth and A. James Speyer and then for Mies on the Seagram Building in Manhattan. In 1956 he began working at I.M. Pei & Associates where his projects included the Kips Bay Plaza housing complex (1963) and the University Plaza towers (1967) in Greenwich Village.
From 1975 to 1978 Freed returned to the Illinois Institute of Technology where he was dean of the School of Architecture. During this time he was also part of a group of architects known as the Chicago Seven who challenged the prevalent Miesian orthodoxy. Freed taught at The Cooper Union, Cornell University, the Rhode Island School of Design, Columbia University, and Yale University. In recognition of his contributions to both architecture and academia, Freed was awarded honorary degrees from the New Jersey Institute of Technology, Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion, and the Illinois Institute of Technology.
Freed was the recipient of numerous professional awards including the R. S. Reynolds Memorial Award for Excellence in Architecture; the Arnold W. Brunner Prize in Architecture from the American Academy of Arts and Letters; and the first annual Thomas Jefferson Award for Public Architecture, conferred for lifetime achievement by the American Institute of Architects.
A fellow of the American Institute of Architects, Freed was elected to membership in the American Academy of Design and the American Academy of Arts and Letters and was a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He served as a director of the Regional Plan Association of New York-New JerseyConnecticut and was architectural commissioner of the Art Commission of New York City from 1983 to 1991. In 1995, Freed was awarded the National Medal of Arts.
This text has been adapted and compiled from the following sources: “James Ingo Freed.” James Ingo Freed | Pei Cobb Freed & Partners. Accessed November 8, 2019. “Obituary: James Ingo Freed, Architect.” The New York Times. The New York Times, December 19, 2005. “James Ingo Freed.” Wikipedia. Wikimedia Foundation, November 29, 2018.