Time Traveler: Mojave Modern

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I've always found the two-hour drive from Los Angeles to Palm Springs, Calif., to be deeply dislocating, in the best sense of the word. Route 111, the main approach to town, veers suddenly off from Interstate 10 to cut a jazzy angle across the desert, unplugging you at last from the freeway grid. Past the turnoff, the six-mile drive into town, with its surreal juxtaposition of ancient mountains and shiny new energy-producing windmills, seems to further separate you from the everyday. And then the big, welcoming surprise: the sharply angled roof of the Tramway Gas Station looming over a low wall at the entrance to the desert resort, like a jet poised for takeoff. Tramway Gas, designed by Albert Frey and Robson C. Chambers in 1965, is iconically modern. Balancing restraint and exuberance, it promises an infinitely perfectible future. And it opens the door not just to Palm Springs but to one of the richest collections of Modernist architecture anywhere.

It seems odd at first, all this low-slung elegance in the middle of a desert. In fact, it was almost inevitable, as Tony Merchell, an amateur architectural historian who has been deeply involved in the town's historic-preservation movement, told me. Wealthy Eastern and Midwestern business people followed movie stars to Palm Springs in the 1940s and '50s, at just the moment when Modernism was taking hold in California.

The combination of wealth and a dominant regional style (plus, says Merchell, "a certain amount of keeping up with the Joneses") led to a flurry of Modernist-home construction that lasted into the '60s, and a parallel boom in Modernist public buildings and tract houses. The style fell out of favor in the '70s, and Palm Springs suffered a two-decade recession, from which it has only recently emerged. In 1997 a developer's threat to demolish Tramway Gas sparked a preservation movement and in turn a rush to snap up and restore the area's stock of '50s and '60s homes. Today, although the preservation community is far from having the upper hand, there is at least a fresh focus on the town's wealth of mid-century architecture.