Architecture of dislocation: the L.A. school - Los Angeles, California, architects - includes bibliography

Art in America, Feb, 1994 by Jayne Merkel

Similar structural gymnastics characterize the Lindblade Tower warehouse next door, also 1987-89, the Gary Group of 1988-90 and a fourth building that was on the drawing boards when Moss's book went to press. (Charles Jencks's book includes some later work, including a whole group of Culver City warehouses in the Hayden Tract which are being rebuilt jointly by private developers and public agencies.) In these flamboyant renovations, in this "totally run-down, nowhere place" (as Moss describes Culver City), the architect and the developer made such an impact that "the City Council actually gave Frederick Smith... an award for resurrecting the city." In all his projects, Moss uses complicated structural systems to produce esthetic effects. Rather than aiming for simplicity, economy and straightforward structures, he likes the idea of challenging the people who use his buildings. He wants his architecture to reveal "possibilities that stretch their understanding."

Frank Israel's inspiration comes from many of the same sources as those of his Californian contemporaries, but since he started out as a set designer, he is also influenced by his experience with the movies. From having designed spaces one frame at a time, Israel learned to skillfully control the spatial sequences in his architecture. He works from drawings, as he did when designing movie sets, instead of the three-dimensional models that Moss and Morphosis use in their designs. And the typically confused relationship between inside and outside that occurs during movie-making has become a major theme in his work. Whereas the other Californians put buildings within buildings, Israel in 1988 created offices for Propaganda Films by placing a whole "urban village" (as he calls it) of separate structures "inside the shell of a classic, bow-string truss warehouse building on a dusty street in Hollywood." In its modulated progression of spaces, cutout wall slabs, circular shapes, balcony-like bridges and its cylindrical tower, the renovation resembles both Morphosis projects and Mess's Culver City buildings.

But Israel emphasizes color, surface and emptiness more than his contemporaries do-especially in later projects like the 1991 offices for Keith Bright and Associates in Venice. Subtly colored, with sumptuously textured, sunburst orange walls and inside/outside spaces (the distinction almost melts away here), this project reveals Israel's immense, and undisguised, debt to Luis Barragan. In another 1991 project, an office complex for Virgin Records set in a 28,000-square-foot warehouse in Beverly Hills, the interior "village" has become a little town, complete with cross streets and shop fronts (offices actually) arranged along "paths." Here, not only the plaster walls and inventive steel hardware are well finished, but also the exterior steel beams and interior metal partitions, which shimmer, sparkle, reflect and absorb light-- rather like David Smith's Cubi sculptures. In Israel's work, potentially brutal surfaces are given gorgeous patinas, particularly in some of his recent commissions, which have included intriguing renovations of houses on spectacular sites or with spectacular views. He has also designed a special pavilion purely for the exhibition of art on the Weisman estate in Beverly Hills--a structure whose identity appealingly hovers between high-tech Japanese tea house, California dwelling of the 1920s and renovated industrial warehouse.