Gregory Free
American Gulf: An Architectural Story
Gregory Free received the 2005 Kress Mid-Career Grant for a study of the architecture of the American Gulf Coast and define a context for the region’s domestic architecture, stretching from Matamoros, Mexico to Key West, Florida. Free is President of Gregory Free & Associates, an Austin, Texas design firm specializing in historic preservation. Free completed a great deal of his primary documentary research prior to Hurricane Katrina in September, 2005. Now his photographs are among the last documentary evidence of some of the region’s most important buildings and sites. Understanding of the unique Gulf Coast culture created through the synthesis of centuries of European and African tradition and the architecture it produced will be critical to the preservation and restoration of the buildings lost in Hurricane Katrina.