Frank I. Goes to Hollywood

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,

Gehry truly liked Israel and, with rare bonhomie, helped him throughout his abbreviated career. Yet his frugal assessment forever colored the latter man’s legacy, and the remark haunts Gannon’s book, even though we don’t encounter it until its last pages. Gannon is a thorough and sympathetic chronicler, but raising his subject’s profile isn’t his key concern. Instead, he is led along by a smoldering question: Can merely good work be as meaningful as really great work?

Israel, born in 1945 to left-leaning Russian Jewish parents, grew up in “a kind of clunky” Cape Cod saltbox house in suburban Elizabeth, New Jersey—a place he was always escaping. Manhattan in the late 1950s was booming with architectural enterprise, and his father indulged him on forays into Midtown. Standing on Park Avenue, the thirteen-year-old Israel watched in awe as workers installed the tawny glass curtain wall of Mies van der Rohe’s Seagram Building (1958). He took in Frank Lloyd Wright’s Guggenheim Museum (1959), then too under construction. He savored the Gilded Age opulence of McKim, Mead & White’s Penn Station (1910). Later, on clandestine trips into the city, he drifted into the East Village, where, Israel recalled, “being gay was radical. Being gay was looking for alternatives to the banal world of suburbia.” Yet, as Gannon reports, when toward the end of his life he was enlisted “in a project of ‘queering modernism’” along with Philip Johnson, Charles Moore, and the critic Aaron Betsky, among others, Israel demurred. “I don’t think my sexuality has impacted the choices I have made as a designer or the creative direction my work has taken.”

As a teenager, Israel attended a socialist-run summer camp near the Tanglewood Music Festival, in the Berkshire Hills of Western Massachusetts. There, in the summer of 1959, he spent time as an assistant to the composer Aaron Copland, who left a deep impression on him. Indeed, Gannon analogizes the architecture Israel would go on to make to Copland’s scores for compositions such as Appalachian Spring (1944) and Billy the Kid (1938), borrowing a quote of Leonard Bernstein’s: “Jazz rhythms, and wide-open optimism, and wide-open spaces, and the simplicity and sentimentality and mixture of things from all over the world. A noble fanfare, a hymn, everything.”

Although his formal schooling was checkered, Israel proved adept at ingratiating himself to his betters. While at Penn, he was barred as an undergraduate from taking Louis Kahn’s master class, yet somehow managed to score a brief stint in Kahn’s Chestnut Street office. After enrolling and promptly dropping out of the Yale School of Architecture—but not before getting chummy with Robert Venturi—he migrated south to Columbia University, where he linked up with Robert A. M. Stern, Johnson, and future UCLA architecture school chair Richard Weinstein. Nearly a decade later, it was Weinstein who lured Israel west; the move turned out to be permanent. In 1977, fresh off a short-term teaching post at UCLA (many more were to come), he began designing sets at Paramount Pictures, falling in with a Hollywood klatch that included directors Robert Altman, Roger Corman, and Roger Vadim; Warner Bros. executive Terry Semel; and actor Joel Grey. (Both Altman and Grey hired him to design homes.) His close friendship with Andrea Rich, a powerful UCLA administrator who would leave academia to head up LACMA (this was before Michael Govan entered the picture) secured more introductions still. Israel was known to draw on this arsenal of acquaintances when tactfully dropping a name (or three) into the urbane patter that so endeared him to his clients.

From Hollywood Israel acquired a taste for the eclectic, freewheeling, and indulgent—or, as he put it in a 1988 interview, the “mix of the decorative and the commonplace.” Meanwhile, the so-called LA School, into which Gehry, Thom Mayne, Craig Hodgetts, and Eric Owen Moss were lumped, pursued a subversive strategy of deconstruction: The stuff the city itself was made of needed to be pulled apart, shredded, then harnessed and repurposed, in a rebellion against the commonplace. “In contrast to more bellicose contemporaries,” Gannon writes, “Israel attacked the rules while admiring the traditions from which they sprang, aiming at tactical adjustments rather than violent overthrow.”

Gannon has this distinction right. The single-family homes and commercial spaces Israel sprinkled around town often tiptoed into defiance. For a 1988 remodel in Hancock Park, he slammed a lofted, glass-enclosed pavilion into the crotch of a clapboard colonial from 1940. Demonstrating a proclivity for exaggeration, he endowed the addition (itself a winking allusion to Charles and Ray Eames’s Case Study House #8 [1949] in Pacific Palisades) with an oversized and unnecessary exposed steel structure that overpowered the older house. His clients, the French-born fashion designer Michèle Lamy and the performance artist Richard Newton, had demanded the “outrageous.” They got flash and mockery, but they didn’t get an insurrection.

That same year Israel began construction on his first large-scale project, the headquarters for Propaganda Films, the production company that would soon release  Twin Peaks (1990–1991); Beverly Hills, 90210 (1990–2000); and Madonna: Truth or Dare (1991). He made over the inside of a prop rental warehouse in Hollywood into a pseudovillage of cockeyed constructions–cum–meeting rooms arrayed along axes purported to follow white-collar workflows. At Bright and Associates, an advertising agency landed inside a trio of buildings occupied by the Eames Office from 1943 to 1989, he perfected this magic-lantern approach, delivering a collage of demiurban fragments recalling the East Village clutter of his youth and the baroque campos he encountered as a recipient of the American Academy’s 1973 Rome Prize in Architecture. A palate of mustardy yellow, navy blue, burnt orange, and white completed the hodgepodge ensemble.

“Taken together,” Gannon writes, “these commercial interiors place Israel squarely among the inventors of the ‘creative office spaces’ that became the hallmark of progressive corporate culture during the tech boom of the 1990s.” This seems charitable. Studies in the revved up, over-caffeinated workplace of the late millennium, these walls, if they could talk, would shout at you, “I need it yesterday!” The rhetoric of deafening urgency conceals the flimsiness of a shrinking pomo turned inward on itself. These projects (both now destroyed) were a conceit of the moment that faded in due time, as surely as style stales and buzz wears off.

We begin to rub against a problem Gehry enunciated, sotto voce, in his eulogy of thirty years ago. As Gannon readily acknowledges, there is more than a hint of mimicry in much of Israel’s output. He was borrowing: from the Eameses, Rudolf Schindler, Wright, Kahn, and as is apparent in the abundant historical quotations and color schemes, from Venturi and the postmodernists. The sham urbanism of Propaganda Films and Bright and Associates plainly owed a debt to Gehry’s own Loyola Law School (1980) and his Edgemar Mall in Santa Monica (1988). (Israel obtained the Bright and Associates commission at Gehry’s recommendation.)

“Undogmatic catholicity” is how Gannon summarizes Israel’s architecture. If it is thin, and at times unoriginal, it is nonetheless meaningful—and counterintuitively so—for its pleasing visual effects. Gannon refers to these picturesque rather than didactic attributes (spatial swings and surprises, the changing tapestry of moments) in the aggregate as “dreamlike artifice.” He offers that Israel’s achievement, “like Los Angeles itself,” was poised between “cultural significance and triviality, insecurity and sophistication, and discontent and fascination.” Opposed to monumentality, the architect embraced the “intensification of uncertainty” on the long slide toward oblivion of the American Century, with Los Angeles, as always, glittering on the precipice. You don’t build for the ages—you don’t aim for the pantheon—if history is over. His peers wanted to hurl themselves, like Evel Knievel, at the avalanche of debris. Israel, Gannon insists, preferred to surf the powder cloud at its rumbling edge.

Fair enough. But is that enough? Gannon wants us to believe that Israel refused the role of heroic artist who cuts a solitary path to greatness. He was, instead, an assembler of fragments, “irrepressibly Angeleno and quintessentially American.”

This feels like an elaborate apologia for a life sadly cut short and for work that is sparse and brittle and, as Gannon himself says, “frankly derivative.” Did Israel produce some delights? Was there promise left behind on the drawing board? Yes. But one still wonders just how much Israel impacted the city he adopted, how deeply it was reflected in his work, what we might learn from his “dreamlike artifice.” Even lesser gods inspire. But reaching the end of Gannon’s book, I felt a bit like Gehry, wondering what Israel’s oeuvre truly meant—and means. I wish I’d found an answer.