James Ingo Freed - Career

Career

Freed first worked in Chicago and New York, including with Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, a prominent modernist architect.

In 1956, he began working with I.M. Pei in New York at the firm eventually known as Pei Cobb Freed & Partners.

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.

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, D.C.: 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 1995, Freed was awarded the National Medal of Arts.

He died on December 15, 2005, of Parkinson's Disease, at age 75 in his home in Manhattan, in New York City.