Edwin Maxwell Fry [commonly known as E. Maxwell Fry] was born in Wallasey, Cheshire, on 2 August 1899. After serving in the Army from 1918 to 1920, he studied at the School of Architecture, Liverpool University under Charles Herbert Reilly (1874-1948) from 1920 to 1923. From 1925 he worked in the London office of the architects Adams & Thompson, formed by Thomas Adams (1871-1940) and Francis Longstreth Thompson (1899-1970) in 1922, and in 1927 was made a partner in the practice, renamed Adams, Thompson & Fry. During his time with the practice, Fry was co-author, with Adams and Thompson, of a series or local and regional town planning reports [see WorldCat - link below]
During the years 1927-1930, Fry was also employed as chief assistant in the Architects Department of Southern Railway in London.
The Adams, Thompson & Fry partnership was dissolved in 1934 and Fry then formed a partnership with Walter Gropius (1883-1969) as Gropius & Fry in 1934. Architectural projects by the partnership included apartments in St. Leonard's Hill, Windsor (1935); Impington Village School in Cambridgeshire (1936); London Film Production Workshops in Denham, Buckinghamshire (1936); a school in Histon, Cambrideshire (1936); and Levy House in Chelsea, London (1936).
The partnership was dissolved in 1936 and the following year Gropius left Britain to take up an appointment as professor of architecture in the Graduate School of Design at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts,
Fry then worked alone. During World War Two he served with the Royal Engineers in the Department of Fortifications and Works at the War Office in London from 1939 to 1942 and on the Gold Coast in West Africa from 1942 to 1944.
In 1942 he married the architect Jane B. Drew (1911-1996) and after working as town planning adviser in West Africa (1944-46), he and Drew co-founded Fry Drew & Partners in 1946. In 1951 Lindsay Drake and Dennys Lasdun joined the partnership which was known as Fry Drew Drake & Lasdun until 1958. When Frank F. Knight and Norman Creamer joined the the partnership in 1973 the name of the firm changed to Fry Drew Knight & Creamer.
Between 1930 and 1940 Fry's architectural activity was confined to Britain and included a showroom for the Westminster Electricity Supply Corporation in London (1933), several private houses (with Walter Gropius), Impington Village College in Cambridgeshire (with Walter Gropius, 1936), Histon School in Cambridgeshire (with Walter Gropius, 1936), London Film Productions Workshops in Denham, Hertfordshire (with Walter Gropius, 1936), the MARS exhibition at Burlington House, London (with Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, 1937), showrooms for Central London Electricity Limited (1938) and Flats in Ladbroke Grove, London (1940). Between 1946-61 Fry designed a number of buildings in Ghana and Nigeria, including a number of schools and colleges, Broadcasting House for the Nigerian Broadcasting Corporation in Kaduna (1948), the Cooperative Bank of Western Nigeria in Ibadan (1950), British Petroleum Offices in Lagos (1961) and offices for Longmans Green in Lagos (1961).
In 1951 Fry and Drew designed the Waterloo Bridge Entrance and Harbour Bar for the Festival of Britain, South Bank site.
Between 1951 and 1956, Fry and Drew worked with Le Corbusier and Pierre Jeanneret in the design of Chandigarh, India.
Later projects by Fry included the Legislative Assembly building in Port Louis, Mauritius (1966), Mid-Glamorgan Crematorium (1969), and the redevelopment of Hatfield Old Hall in Hatfield, Hertfordshire (1972).
Fry was the author of several books and articles on architecture and town planning, and wrote an autobiography - 'Maxwell Fry: Autobiographical Sketches' in 1975.
Fry was elected an Associate of the Royal Institute of British Architects (ARIBA) in 1924 and a Fellow of the Royal Institute of British Architects (FRIBA) in 1939. He was also elected a Fellow of the Royal Town Planning Institute in 1966 and was a member of the MARS. Modern Architectural Research Group. He was also made an Honorary Fellow of the American Institute of Architects in 1972. In 1964 he was awarded the RIBA Royal Gold Medal for Architecture. Fry died in Darlington, County Durham on 3 September 1987.
See:
Historic England [link below]
British Listed Buildings [link below]
Baines, Harry. 'Sun House'. Design (Bombay) vol. 10, December 1966 pp. 23-25 [A description of the Sun House in Hampstead designed by Fry in 1935]
Blutman, Sandra. 'Drawings og the '30's'. RIBA Journal vol. 75, March 1968 p. 112 [Drawings by Fry for a proposed extension to All Soul's College, Oxford, acquired by the Royal Institute of British architects in London]
Brockman, H. A. N. Fry, Drew, Knight, Creamer: Architecture. London: Lund Humphries, 1978
Chipkin, C. M. 'Chandigargh'. South African Architectural Record vol. 43, December 1958 pp. 18-27 [In the 1950s Fry and his wife Jane Drew (1911-1996) worked with Le Corbusier on the design of the city of Chandigargh in India]
Contemporary Architects. Edited by Ann Lee Morgan and Collin Naylor. Chicago and London: St. James Press, 2nd edition, 1987
Darling, Elizabeth. ‘Kensal House: the Housing Consultant and the Housed’ in British Architecture and Design in the 1930s. Edited Susannah Charlton, Elain Harwood and Alan Powers. The Journal of the Twentieth Century Society, no. 8, 2007 pp.106-116
Denby, Elizabeth. 'Kensal House, an urban village' in Flats: Municipal and Private Enterprise. London: Ascot Gas Water Heaters Ltd., 1938 pp. 61-65 [Discusses Kensal House, two blocks of 68 housing association flats at Ladbroke Grove, London, designed by E. Maxwell Fry in 1937]
Drew, Jane. 'On the Chandigargh scheme'. Marg vol. 6, no. 4, 1953 pp. 19-25 [Architect Jane Drew (1911-1996), wife of Fry, discusses their collaboration with Le Corbusier on the design and planniing of the city of Chandigargh in India in the 1950s]
Elliott, David. Gropius in England: a Documentation of the Years 1934-37. London: Building Centre Trust, 1974
Fry, E. Maxwell. Autobiographical Sketches. London: Elek Books, 1975
Fry, E. Maxwell. 'A College in the Tropics'. Zodiac vol. 2, 1958 pp. 127-136 [West African University of Ibadan, Nigeria, designed by Fry and built in the 1950s]
Fry, E. Maxwell. 'Kensal House' in Flats: Municipal and Private Enterprise. London: Ascot Gas Water Heaters Ltd., 1938 pp. 56-60
Fry, E. Maxwell and Drew, Jane B. Architecture for Children. London: Allen & Unwin, 1944 [Revised edition, entitled Architecture and the Environment, London: Allen & Unwin, 1976]
Fry, E. Maxwell and Drew, Jane B. Village Housing in the Tropics. London: Lund Humphries, 1947
Fry, E. Maxwell and Drew, Jane B. Tropical Architecture in the Humid Zone. London: Batsford, 1956
Fry, E. Maxwell and Drew, Jane B. Tropical Architecture in the Dry and Humid Zone. London: Batsford, 1964
Harwood, Elain. Mid-Century Britain: Modern Architecture 1938-1963. London: Batsford, 2021
Harwood, Elain. Space Hope and Brutalism. English Architecture 1945-1975. New Haven, Connecticut and London: Yale University Press in association with Historic England for the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, 2015
Jackson, Iain. 'Maxwell Fry and Jane Drew's early housing and neighbourhood planning in Sector-22, Chandigarh'. Planning Perspectives vol. 28, no. 1, 2013 pp. 1-26 [Contains an extensive bibliography on the Chandigarh scheme]
Liscombe. Rhodri Windsor. ‘Modernism in Late Imperial British West Africa: The Work of Maxwell Fry and Jane Drew, 1946-56’. Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians vol. 65, no. 2, June 2006 pp. 188-215
Pevsner, Nikolaus. Maxwell Fry. Manchester: Monks Hall Museum, 1964 [Catalogue of an exhibition of Fry's work held at Monks Hall Museum, Eccles in June 1964]
Platts, Beryl. 'The architect as collector: the modern collection of Maxwell Fry and Jane Drew'. Country Life vol. 140, 29 September 1966 pp. 782-786 [Discusses Fry and Drew's collection of modern art their studio-home in London]
Powers. Alan. ‘Conservative attitudes: Walter Gropius in Cambridge and Maxwell Fry in Oxford’. Twentieth Century Architecture no.11, 2013 pp.68-81
Powers, Alan. Modern. The Modern Movement in Britain. London: Merrell, 2005
Service, Alastair. The Architects of London and their buildings from 1066 to the present. London: The Architectural Press, 1979
Sharples, Joseph, Powers, Alan and Shippobottom, Michael. Charles Reilly & the Liverpool School of Architecture 1904-1933. Catalogue of an exhibition at the Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool, 25 October 1996 - 2 February 1997. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1996 pp. 170-171 [Contains other references to Fry, unfortunately, the catalogue is not indexed]
Thirties: British Art and Design before the War. Thirties: British Art and Design before the War. London: Arts Council of Great Britain, 1979 [Catalogue of an exhibition at the Hayward Gallery, London, 25 October-13 January 1979]
Tyrwhitt, Jacqueline. 'Chandigrh'. Journal of the Royal Architectural Institute of Canada vol. 32, January 1955 pp. 11-20 [Discusses Fry and Jane Drew's contribution to the planning and design of the city of Chandigargh in India in the 1950s]