The Albert Frey films in the Architecture & Design Film Festival this week, in two parts, make for less organic filmmaking but they are instructive about an architect who abandoned the possibility of fame in New York for the desert southwest, especially Palm Springs. A very old fashioned multiplicity of talking scholarly heads makes for a didactic filmed lecture more than anything else, but the architect himself rescues the project with his own color films he took of his many global travels.

Frey began in Zurich, made his way to Brussels, Paris and Le Corbusier, then to New York's Architecture League and Architecture Record and a hand at the Philip Goodwin MoMA, but after a few trips cross country by car became enamored of the freedom and difference of the desert. Adapting the historicism of Corbu's five points of architecture, and the corrugated roofs of his childhood, he developed a vernacular modernism in this growing desert city.

The lightness and light of the projects from his Long Island Aluminaire house to his own houses to the Palm Springs City Hall, a Salton Sea club and the tram station make for luscious viewing and the self effacing architect, heard in voice over and a few interviews is very appealing.

A dedicated loner whose personal life is left slightly mysterious, Frey took what he learned from Corbusier, Mies and the desert and made it his own.