Glass, thin steel and deep overhangs mark Santa Fe Federal Savings and Loan Association, later American Savings and now the Palm Springs Art Museum Architecture and Design Center, the Edwards Harris Pavilion. The building is a fine example of the short span when the master architect E. Stewart Williams used the International Style for commercial work in the early 1960s. Its inspiration was the Barcelona Pavilion of 1929 by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, and the debt is not hidden: a single-storey structure with a flat roof, deep overhangs, steel-frame construction, thin steel posts, and large glass surfaces.
Full-height sliding perforated metal panels handled the sun, and that detail is what makes this a desert building rather than a Chicago one transplanted. It is the whole method of Desert Modernism in one elevation — take an International Style vocabulary and bend it until it survives a hundred and twenty degrees. A savings and loan became a museum of architecture, which is a rare case of a building repurposed into an explanation of itself.
Those perforated screens do a job Barcelona never needed.