Palm Springs redux

A couple of months ago, I visited Palm Springs…. & noted two significant features: lots & lots of wind turbines, & also lots of ‘mid-century modern’ architecture. So I decided to follow up on both fronts, and re-visited the city in January, on my way back home for HNC’s Spring Break…. taking a couple of local tours to check things out in a bit more depth.

San Gorgonia wind farms with Chinese solar

The Palm Springs windmill tour does a really good job of laying out the historical development of renewables in the San Gorgonia mountain pass, a site which now has 40 wind farms, four major solar farms, and a number of natural gas-fired peaking plants. We had a chance to see all of these types of facilities, a harbinger of the mix likely to play an increasingly important role in the electric sector in the future.

Vestas 3 MW unit

What I particularly liked about the tour was that it wasn’t a ‘rah-rah, rose-colored-glasses’ type of renewable energy presentation. Instead, it spent considerable time showing numerous earlier failures – blades that flew off, towers that collapsed, gears that jammed because of wind-blown sand. One of the solar farms (with significant Chinese investment) had its own teething problems, and now has fixed rather than sun-following panels. But it’s very clear where the future lies – and despite the technical learning curves, the tour makes that readily apparent.

Trevor O’Donnell runs PS Architecture Tours, a fun and fact-filled tour of the ‘mid-century modernism’ found in the city – with some interesting learning curves there as well. Albert Frey, the architect who designed the city’s first ‘modernist’ building (& also the gas station/visiting center shown in the previous posting) had worked for Le Corbusier in Paris, and the post-WW II expansion of the city built upon Bauhaus and other internationalist influences.

Kaufmann house

One of the most interesting – and famous – buildings is the Kaufmann desert home, built for the same couple who a decade earlier had commissioned Fallingwater, Frank Lloyd Wright’s masterpiece in the Pennsylvania woods. Their Palm Springs home was not designed by Wright, but rather by Richard Neutra, one of his former employees – and Wright was not exactly happy. After the Kaufmanns divorced, the wife commissioned a new (larger) design that would sit on the hill overlooking the Neutra project….. and Wright’s design was essentially an anti-Neutra one (i.e., curving, feminine lines instead of the sharp, angular plan), with an unflattering image of the former in one rendering. But Wright’s Palm Springs project was never built, and today the site holds one of Zsa Zsa Gabor’s former residences. [Given the twenty marriages of the three Gabor sisters, however, former Gabor residences are not exactly a rarity within the city.]