The Cinematic Dreamer: Revisiting the Forgotten Architect Frank Israel and his Vision in Los Angeles

The architect Frank Israel is not well-known outside of Southern California. As a new book, "Franklin D. Israel: A Life in Architecture" (Getty Publications, 2025) by Todd Gannon makes clear, however, he was a designer of singular talent who played a crucial role not only in articulating a particular approach to architecture in and around Los Angeles in the last decennia of the 20^th century, but also through his influence as a teacher at UCLA, an employer of young architects who went on to important roles themselves, and a pivot in the social and cultural scene who brought together all those interested in understanding and making Los Angeles better.

This I know from personal experience. It was Israel who introduced me to many people who are still friends and colleagues when I arrived in Los Angeles in 1985. It was in his office that Christian Hubert and I co-founded the Los Angeles Forum for Architecture and Urban Design as a way to connect the enormous design innovation that was going on that city, and which has gone on to be an active part of the urban scene there to this day. Israel introduced our small coterie to architects and designers we might not have known, like Tony Duquette, as well as to some of his clients, like the nightclub owner and fashion maven Michelle Lamy. When I went to Chicago for several months for research, Israel somehow did the same for me there. On a personal note, he set up a blind date with my now-husband, Peter Haberkorn. We have been together for almost thirty-seven years.

But how good an architect was Frank Israel, and is he worth this meaty monograph, published by no less an authoritative institution (and holder of his archives), The Getty Institute? As Frank Gehry noted at his funeral (and is quoted as saying in this book), we will never really know: he died of AIDS-related illnesses in 1996, just as he was hitting his stride. His first institutional commission, the Arts Building at California State Riverside, was finished by his firm after his passing.

The rap against Israel’s work at the time is exactly what Gannon points out was his strongest suit: he was most of all a set designer. In the author’s language: “He conjured his “worlds apart” by infusing everyday spaces for work and play with unlikely cinematic artifice.” At the end of the survey, Gannon notes that “From the start, Israel sought –and delivered—not the “eternal present” of the conventional masterpiece, but an affective immersivity more associated with the comforts of interior decoration and the propulsive, fleeting intensity of the cinema.” Israel was, he concludes, “a cinematic dreamer.”

That achievement was, in my mind, most evident in the interiors Israel designed inside several of the sea of warehouses that make up much of the unseen bulk of Los Angeles’ built fabric. His Propaganda films of 1988 and Bright and Associates interior of 1990 (a renovation of what had been the Eames Office), for instance, erected fragments of buildings that acted as focusing pavilions and landmarks in spaces in which Israel left the brick walls, concrete floors, and wood bowstring trusses largely alone. The walls of the insertions bulged and canted out in fragments of a geometry that echoed from one construction to the other. Made from flimsy material and colored in deep ochres, reds, and blues, they paired with exposed wood structures that elaborated the functional aspects of the design. Both spaces, and almost all of Israel’s other office, restaurant, and loft renovations, are now gone. They were beautiful apparitions built with tight budgets for very particular occasions.

What remains are some of the houses Israel designed, mainly in the hills overlooking the plains where those warehouses were located –although two of his strongest designs, the Friedland House of 1997 and the Drager House of 1994, can still be found in Jupiter, Florida and the Oakland, California hills. In all cases, these dwellings were externalized versions of the stage sets. The bulges and cants became roofs that draped down over a motley accumulation of fragmentary forms that partially enclosed a ramble of living spaces. In the last of the houses to be finished, the Dan Residence in Malibu of 1995, the internal fabric of wood started to liberate itself from these partial objects and the whole composition became freer and more angular. Israel’s architecture was becoming open and expansive.

As Gannon points, this architect did not work in a vacuum. Not only was he trained at Yale when that school brought together some of the best faculty and students in the country, but he lived and worked in Southern California at a time of experimentation that I, together with John Chase and Leon Whiteson and with Israel’s advice, collected in 1991 in the Forum publication Experimental Architecture in Los Angeles. Certainly, Gehry’s work of the time was an immensive influence not only on Israel, as Gannon notes, but also on the work of contemporaries such as Eric Owen Moss, Koning/Eizenberg, and Josh Schweitzer, to all whose work Israel’s shows an affinity. Moreover, employees moved between all these offices, cross-pollinating them not only with the designs on which they collaborated, but also with what they learned from teachers such as Israel at UCLA, USC, and SCI-Arc.

The larger lesson you can learn from surveying the short, but productive career of this architect is, as Gannon also notes, that it represents what both the author and I think are among the best aspects of Postmodernism. Informing contemporary work with a sense of historic precedent, being eclectic and open in one’s designs, and thinking of what comes out at the end as what Venturi had called “the difficult whole” are among the lessons to be learned by taking such now often reviled work seriously. In Israel’s case and, to a certain aspect, in that of his contemporaries, it is also the very stage set aspect of the designs, its reveling in décor over monumentality, and its frank learning from the work of interior designers and decorators, as well as films, that shows us the way for the making of architecture in a world in which wasting natural resources in the pursuit of a permanence is made largely irrelevant by both the flood of images and information that wash over us every day and the resulting instability of our lives.

This also means that thinking of Frank Israel as a lost genius is not the point. He was, as Gannon mentions several times, a deeply insecure man who was always trying new ideas and personas. He was also, because of both his personal and professional choices, often an outsider who sometimes reveled in that position, and sometimes was filled with depression about his marginal place. Frank Israel’s work was not great, but beautiful; not meaningful, but affective; not a finished oeuvre, but a series of feints, partial constructions, and experiments. It is those qualities, as well as Israel’s effective generosity as a teacher, friend, and collaborator, that make it worth this beautifully written and lovingly assembled book.

The views and conclusions from this author are not necessarily those of ARCHITECT magazine.

Read more: The latest from columnist Aaron Betsky includes reviews of: Legacy of Ric Scofidio| Fredrik Jonsson and Liam Young | DSR's New Book | the Stupinigi Palace | Living in a Diagram | Bruce Goff | Biopartners 5 |Handshake Urbanism | the MONA | Elon Musk's Space X | AMAA | DIGSAU | Art Biennales | B+ | William Morris's Red House | Dhaka | Marlon Blackwell's new mixed-use development | Eric Höweler’s social media posts,| Peter Braithwaite's architecture in Nova Scotia,| Powerhouse Arts, | the Mercer Museum, | and MoMA's Ed Ruscha exhibition.

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