The New York Times, June 11, 1996, p. B12.
Frank Israel, Architect Inspired by California, Is Dead at
50
By Herbert Muschamp
Franklin D. Israel, an architect whose designs for private
houses and offices for film production companies epitomized
the creative ferment of contemporary Hollywood, died
yesterday in Los Angeles. He was 50 and lived in Los
Angeles.
The cause was complications from AIDS, said Mr. Israel's
companion, Thomas Haase.
Widely regarded as one of the most extravagantly gifted
architects of his generation, Mr. Israel died at an age
when most architects are just beginning to build. Yet he
had already accumulated a body of work sufficiently
impressive to be the subject of several books and of a
retrospective exhibition, held earlier this year at the
Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles. The
retrospective confirmed Mr. Israel's reputation as an
architect who, whlle strongly influenced by pioneer
modernists llke Rudolf Schindler, Richard Neutra and Frank
Lloyd Wright nonetheless managed to develop his own highly
distinctive voice.
Mr. Israel was born in New York City in 1945. He received
a bachelor's degree from the University of Pennsylvania and
later studied architecture at Yale University and at
Columbia University, where he received his Master of
Architecture degree in 1971. In 1973, he received the Rome
Prize and spent two years as a resident fellow at the
American Academy in Rome. He worked for several firms,
including Llewelyn-Davies, where he was a senior architect
on a major urban development commissioned by the Shah of
Iran.
He moved to Los Angeles in 1979 to teach at the School of
Architecture at the University of California at Los
Angeles. An avid moviegoer, he spent his first several
years in Los Angeles working in the entertainment industry
as a set designer for several films, including "Star Trek:
The Motion Picture" and Roger Vadim's "Night Games." In
1979, he also designed the first of a kind of building in
which he would excell: offices for independent movie
production companies. These included the headquarters for
Propaganda Films designed in 1988, and for Limelight
Productions and Virgin Records, both designed in 1991.
But Mr. Israel is most widely celebrated for a series of
private houses that pushed the modern vernacular of
Southern California architecture to a peak of innovation.
Several of these projects, including the Lamy-Newton
Pavilion, designed in 1988, were additions to existing
buildings. A staunch supporter of incremental design, Mr.
Israel believed that the juxtaposition of newer and older
structures symbolized the heterogeneity of the contemporary
city.
He delighted in the aura of Hollywood, and several of his
most distinguished residential projects were for people in
the entertainment business, including the director Robert
Altman, the actor Joel Grey and the agent Howard Goldberg,
who, with Jim Bean, commissioned a Hollywood Hills house in
1991.
In recent years, Mr. Israel's firm, Israel Callas Chu
Shortridge, had begun to obtain commissions for large
public projects, most notably the Fine Arts Building at the
Riverside campus of the University of California.
Mr. Israel was a passionate city lover. In a book about his
work, published by Rizzoli in 1992, he wrote about the
impact of three cities on his architecture: New York, Rome
and Los Angeles. Seeking to bridge the gap in scale between
individual buildings and the urban context, he spoke of
designing "cities within," interior spaces with the
variety, color and surprise of a major metropolis. In his
film production offices, Mr. Israel conceived of corridors
as urban streets, leading to unexpected visual experiences.
His use of fragmented forms echoed the fractured texture of
the Los Angeles cityscape. Increasingly, as with the
recently completed Dan House in Malibu, Mr. Israel looked
for inspiration to the shifting, unstable landscape of
Southern California.
He was a revered figure at U.C.L.A.'s architecture school.
An architect trained in the formative years of the
post-modern movement, he was open to many approaches to
design. He was also a teacher, informally, to many of his
friends and associates. A generation of visiting architects
and journalists owe their appreciation of Los Angeles to
Mr. Israel's tours of his adopted city. Aware that many New
Yorkers were prone to look askance at the cultural scene in
Los Angeles, Mr. Israel was especially eager to share the
city's architectural wealth with them.
In recent years, as he struggled with AIDS, he also took on
the task of educating people about living with the disease.
In magazine interviews, and in the catalogue for his show
at the Museum of Contemporary Art, he suggested that the
illness had influenced his architecture by encouraging him
to take greater risks. His determination to continue
working during his illness was a source of inspiration to
a remarkable range of friends, clients and colleagues, who
had come to recognize that Mr. Israel's work embodied a
major chapter of his generation's cultural history.
In addition to Mr. Haase, he is survived by his mother,
Zelda Israel, of Tamarack, Fla., and a sister, Roslyn
Steinberg, of Short Hills, N.J.
[Two photos] The Goldberg-Bean House in Hollywood Hills,
Calif., designed by the architect Franklin D. Israel,
right.
[End]
To see photos:
http://pwp.usa.pipeline.com/~jya/israel.jpg
