Franklin D. Israel: A Life in Architecture by Todd Gannon. Getty Research Institute, 256 pp., $60.
The very first biography of the Los Angeles architect Franklin D. Israel ends in a quandary. Author Todd Gannon quotes from the eulogy Frank Gehry delivered at the June 1996 UCLA memorial service for his younger colleague, who died of AIDS. Gehry, who testily grappled with his own rise to the pantheon, hardly offered a panegyric to a prodigious talent lost. “Architects,” he said,
practice their craft for many years, and like fine wine mature slowly. Personal vocabulary takes honing, trying, making mistakes, perfecting. The vision and voice start to truly appear when one is fifty. It is not a law, but it seems about right. Frank Israel died at fifty. He defied the illness so bravely and pushed the outer edges of his talents in a big hurry.… He took big risks with his work. Results that would take time to assess oneself and to build from. He didn’t have the time. The work was beginning to jell. Was he a great architec…