James Ingo Freed (June 23, 1930 – December 15, 2005) was an American architect born in Essen, Germany. After coming to the United States at age nine with his sister Betty, followed later by their parents, he studied at the Illinois Institute of Technology, where he graduated with a degree in architecture.
In the late 1970s, he was a member of the Chicago Seven and dean for three years of the School of Architecture at his alma mater. He worked for most of his career based in New York, and went beyond the Internationalist and modernist styles. In partnership with I.M. Pei, in their firm known as Pei Cobb Freed & Partners, he worked on major United States public buildings and museums.
Early life and education
James Ingo Freed was born in 1930 in Essen, Germany to a German-Jewish family. The family left Germany in 1939, when Freed was nine years old, to escape the regime of Nazi Germany. They immigrated to the United States and settled in Chicago. He graduated from Hyde Park High School.[1]
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.
