Biographical/Historical Note
Franklin D. Israel was born in Brooklyn, New York, on December 2, 1945. He received his
architectural training at Yale University and at Columbia University, where he earned his
master's degree in 1971. Two years later, Israel was awarded the Rome Prize. His two year
stay in Rome proved extremely important not only because of his studies of the Italian and
Northern European Baroque, but also because of his introduction to the work of the Italian
architect Carlo Scarpa (1906-1978) and his encounters with American practitioners, such as
Richard Meier, and architectural historians such as James Ackerman. Israel moved to Los
Angeles in 1977 to teach architecture at UCLA and start his own architectural design office.
He was soon employed in the film industry, working as a set designer for several movies
including Star Trek: The Motion Picture. This time spent in the film studios
enabled him to secure a number of early projects from clients in the entertainment industry,
including actor Joel Grey and film director Robert Altman, for whom he designed houses. He
also designed office buildings for film and record production companies in Hollywood.
Israel's earliest work is decidedly postmodern. Having studied with Robert A.M. Stern and
Romaldo Giurgola, two leaders of the postmodern era in New York, Israel was well trained to
look at historical precedent and adopt details from buildings created in the past into his
own designs. His Clark House (Hollywood, 1980, unexecuted) is probably the best example.
Based on Vignola's Villa Farnese in Caprarola (1559-1573), the house is – as is the
historical example – pentagonal in shape with a circular court in its center. The
proportions of all rooms around the court were determined by those of the Villa Farnese. The
facades, however, were loose adaptations of the 16th-century example and were designed to
frame the view from each side of the building.
Israel began to study the work of Frank Lloyd Wright, Rudolph Schindler, Richard Neutra,
and other modernists in the region soon after his arrival in Los Angeles, where Southern
California modernist architecture as a whole became a rich source of inspiration for
Israel's design work. Historical references to the classical architecture of Italy and
France soon disappeared from his studio and a new formal language took root in which one can
recognize details borrowed from architects he admired but integrated into solutions entirely
his own. Engaging with the conflict between organic and tectonic architecture, he sought to
combine the two, to give his buildings a solid structure and then add a skin that, rather
than being no more than a wrap around the space (as was typical in the work of early
20th-century modernists), instead draws attention to the form and makes the abstract
structure more intimate. His buildings always combine a smoothly surfaced concrete, steel,
or hardwood structure with wood and stucco shapes painted in intense, Luis Barragán-like
colors. Colorful and playful, his buildings are rendered warmer and more palatable than the
sterile white, modernist architecture of the periods immediately before and after the Second
World War, and it was these characteristics that increased this profile and brought him
numerous clients.
Though he had moved away from the use of specific historical precedents, Israel remained
interested in history, making distinctions between perpetuating traditions and creating
memorable spatial patterns based on universal scenarios he saw as being used repeatedly
throughout history. Placed in former industrial buildings or warehouses, offices such as
those for Propaganda Films or Virgin Records are organized as small villages or, as Israel
himself liked to call them, "cities within." Israel connected the various elements of an
office (meeting rooms, workstations, and editing rooms) through streets and plazas. In the
Propaganda Films office, there is even one meeting room that looks like a baptistery placed
on a piazza next to a ship- or church-like group of executive offices. Such references to
memory and historic precedents presented within a modern context are perfect examples of the
architectural debate of the period, when alternatives were sought for a modernism that had
lost all its glamour for a younger generation.
Frank Israel died June 10, 1996 due to complication from AIDS. At the age when most
architects are still trying to find the ideal client and job, Israel had already created a
substantial body of work, had had two monographic exhibitions at major art museums (the
Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, 1988, and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles,
1995), and counted the most renowned architects in the United States (including Richard
Meier, Robert A.M. Stern, Richard Weinstein, and especially Frank Gehry and Philip Johnson)
amongst his greatest supporters.
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