Maxwell Fry

Edwin Maxwell Fry, CBE, RA, FRIBA, FRTPI, known as Maxwell Fry (2 August 1899 – 3 September 1987), was an English modernist architect, writer and painter.

Originally trained in the neo-classical style of architecture, Fry grew to favour the new modernist style, and practised with eminent colleagues including Walter Gropius, Le Corbusier and Pierre Jeanneret. Fry was a major influence on a generation of young architects. Among the younger colleagues with whom he worked was Denys Lasdun.

In the 1940s Fry designed buildings for West African countries that were then part of the British Empire, including Ghana and Nigeria. In the 1950s he and his wife, the architect Jane Drew, worked for three years on an ambitious development to create a new capital city of Punjab at Chandigarh.

Fry's works in Britain range from railway stations to private houses to large corporate headquarters. Among his best known works in the UK is the Kensal House flats in Ladbroke Grove, London, aimed at providing high quality low cost housing, in which he collaborated with Elizabeth Denby to set new standards.

Fry's writings include critical and descriptive books on town planning and architecture, notably his Art in a Machine Age. His last book was the Autobiographical Sketches of his life from boyhood up to the time of his marriage to Jane Drew.

Fry was born in Liscard, Merseyside. He describes his father, Canadian-born Ambrose Fry, as a "business man with all sorts of irons in the fire – chemicals, electricals, old property..."; he mentions living in a terrace house converted by his father overlooking the cathedral; and his first job was working in his father's factory, the Liverpool Borax Co. in Edge Street. His mother was Lydia (Lily) Thompson. He had two older sisters, Muriel and Nora, and a younger brother Sydney. To his family and friends he was known as Maxi or Max.

Fry was educated at the Liverpool Institute High School. He served in the King's Liverpool regiment at the end of the First World War. After the war he received an ex-serviceman's grant that enabled him to enter Liverpool University school of architecture in 1920, where he was trained in "the suave neo-Georgian classicism" of Professor Charles Reilly. The curriculum of the course included town planning as an important component, and Fry retained an interest in planning throughout his career. He gained his diploma with distinction in 1923. The next year he worked for a short time in New York before returning to England to join the office of Thomas Adams and F. Longstreth Thompson, specialists in town planning.

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