Books
A New Biography Captures Franklin D. Israel’s Brief but Influential Career
Review: ‘Franklin D. Israel: A Life in Architecture,’ by Todd Gannon
We often hear that history flatters the past by forgetting half of it. Although we shouldn’t need to be reminded of the lives taken by the HIV/AIDS epidemic, and the artistic and architectural potential lost because of it, every now and again there is good reason to reflect. Todd Gannon’s newly published biography, Franklin D. Israel: A Life in Architecture, makes that point perfectly. Israel, best known for the Weisman Pavilion (1991) in Los Angeles and the Dan House (1995) in Malibu, was only 50 years old when he died in 1996, the age at which most architects just start to blossom.
Franklin D. Israel: A Life in Architecture, by Todd Gannon. Getty Publications, 256 pages, $60.
One of us (Peter) first crossed paths with Frank, as he was called, in the summer of 1961 at Camp To-Ho-Ne, in the Berkshires. During the McCarthy era and in its wake, summer establishments like this one were euphemistically called “pink-diaper-baby camps,” catering to the children of politically left-leaning parents. Israel was 16 years old and I was only 12 when we met. Nonetheless, we became friends. He even wrote a rhyme about me—I was something of a preteen fashionista—for The Camper, the To-Ho-Ne newspaper, of which he was editor. It began:
Peter Stamberg, of Fire Island fame,
As Beau Brummel has earned his name.
Israel’s life and mine intersected periodically and importantly over the 34 years that followed. But it was at To-Ho-Ne that we were encouraged to think humanistically and to look for ideas that are creative and unusual, not ones hobbled by rules or tradition. This credo guided Israel the architect, as Gannon astutely points out.
Franklin D. Israel, photographed in the installation Architect’s Office at the UCLA architecture gallery in 1992. Photo © Dennis Keeley
Several months after Israel succumbed to illness, the American Academy in Rome, where he had been a fellow, held a memorial in New York. Although an earlier such gathering, which Gannon describes in detail, had been organized in Los Angeles, the city in which Israel had settled, this East Coast gathering is an event that neither of us (Peter and Paul) will ever forget. It took place, appropriately, in the august McKim, Mead and White–designed Metropolitan Club on Fifth Avenue. In attendance was a broad cross section of those involved in the arts and politics. But the core group were the intelligentsia of the architectural world—everyone from the young Turks to the old guard, from the hardcore Modernists to the Postmodernists and the classicists. The crowd was testament to the prescience of Israel’s work and his promise as a rising star in the architectural firmament.
One speaker, Suzanne Stephens, former deputy editor of Architectural Record, presented an anecdote that was ultimately a metaphor about his design process and architecture. She recounted a summer weekend in the 1970s, when she invited Israel to visit her ramshackle East Hampton beach house. On Saturday morning, Israel announced that they should try to get themselves an upgrade, suggesting lunch at the much posher retreat of Robert and then-wife Lynn Stern. (Stephens did not name names during her eulogy, but she later privately told us their identities.) Not wanting to seem gauche, Israel had the idea that Stephens should instead invite the Sterns over, thinking that they would decline the invitation to such modest digs and conversely extend one to their grander house. To Stephens’s and Israel’s surprise (and dismay), Stern not only accepted, but announced his intention to bring along two wealthy, important clients. Panic ensued. What would they serve? There was nothing in the house from which to make lunch, and no time to shop for groceries. But Israel calmly went through the kitchen cabinets and the fridge, pulling out miscellaneous finds. Effortlessly, he whipped up a tasty clam chowder and clam pie for lunch. Lynn even asked for the recipe.
As architects, we strive to be alchemists, spinning dross into gold. As Gannon describes it, Israel had a gift for not only appearing to move architecturally in several directions at once, but to seemingly wander down unpromising paths and ultimately create spaces capable of lifting the spirits of anyone lucky enough to experience them. That was just one of the many talents for which Israel is remembered.
In addition to highlighting the groundbreaking, unique, and important aspects of Israel’s architecture—appropriately, these comprise the main thread of this chronologically organized book—Gannon deftly weaves in discussions of his remarkable personality.
While Israel often said that he felt like an outsider wherever he lived, from New Jersey to New York City to London to Tehran and ultimately Los Angeles, his memorable ability to relate to strangers and friends alike made him an important figure everywhere he went. In each of the places where he spent significant amounts of time, he found his way into intellectual circles and met many luminaries. Always serious about architecture, he also conveyed an astonishing empathy with all points of view. Beyond that, he showed his human side in his remarkable skills as an information-gatherer and in personal insights.
As Gannon quotes Thom Mayne, a member of what became known as the Los Angeles school in the early 1980s, a few years after Israel moved to the city: “He was unlike a group of us that were way more asocial. He was way more connected . . . and understood social graces.” Mayne continues, admitting that he and many of his generation were “just a bunch of angry people. Frank wasn’t like that at all.”
A Life in Architecture carefully brings the story of Frank Israel full circle. At the start of the book, Gannon uses the terms sensitivity, intimacy, humanity, and uncanny—four fitting words, especially the last—to describe the leitmotif of Israel’s work. Gannon moves through his subject’s life, vividly describing a Modernist approach to materials and detail, discussing the dynamism of Israel’s plans, as well as a certain penchant he had for romanticism. When speaking with non-architects about the architecture of the last 40 years and the differences in approaches across the United States, we often say that the practitioners along the eastern seaboard have been busy refining the project of Modernism, while those on the West Coast have forged a distinctly American architecture. This is one way to look at it—but Israel was one of the very few who could bring those two worlds together with an inventiveness that was almost uncanny, and that says so much.
