James Ingo Freed, an architect and partner of I. M. Pei whose own buildings ranged from the provocatively somber United States Holocaust Memorial Museum to the sprawling crystal palace of the Jacob K. Javits Convention Center, died last week at his home in Manhattan. He was 75.
The cause was complications of Parkinson's disease, said George Miller, a partner in the firm Pei Cobb Freed & Partners.
Freed had most recently been working on the United States Air Force Memorial in Arlington, Va., now under construction, with three stainless-steel spires more than 200 feet high.
According to an obituary in The New York Times, Freed was not as widely known as Pei, who was often credited in the press for the work of both Freed and Henry Cobb, a founding partner of the firm. But his work was regarded as strictly his, from the ethereal Air Force memorial to the brooding Holocaust museum to the intricately faceted Javits Center to the beaux arts solidity of the San Francisco Main Public Library.
“Space is the thing that matters,” Freed said in a 1997 interview as part of an oral history project in architecture by the Art Institute of Chicago. “The ability to see space is like the ability, in a way, to hear music.”
Pei said that the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington was Freed's principal legacy. “He felt it,” Pei said. “He participated in it. He remembered his boyhood. Who else was better qualified to do it than Jim?”
Born in 1930 in Essen, Germany, Freed watched the rise of Nazism until, at the age of 9, he was taken to the United States and settled in Chicago, where he had family. He received a bachelor's degree 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 1950s for George Danforth and A. James Speyer, and then for Mies on the Seagram Building in Manhattan.
His largest mark on New York was the Javits Center, which staggered through political and construction troubles to open in 1986. Not a windowless box like so many other exhibition halls, the Javits was covered in glass on an intricate framework of tubes and nodes. Its luminous 150-foot-high crossing struck Paul Goldberger, then the architecture critic of The New York Times, as “an airplane hangar in which one felt moved to hear chamber music.
“This great, glass-enclosed public space embraces a wonderful contradiction: it seems to call at once for a Boeing 747 and for a string quartet,” Goldberger wrote.