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Culture Monster Blog

Architect Frederick Fisher: The anti-Thom Mayne?

By Christopher Hawthorne
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The recent work of Frederick Fisher and Partners is deceptively simple. At the Annenberg Community Beach House in Santa Monica and a new academic building at Caltech, among other projects, Fisher has used a spare, restrained, formal approach to deal with a wide range of constraints and design pressures -- and carve out space for the consideration of history and memory.

In other words, Fisher has lately produced buildings that look precise and modern but suggest a respect for and understanding of the past more closely associated with postmodernist architects like Aldo Rossi and Robert Venturi. That combination is rare indeed.

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Find out more about Fisher’s recent architecture -- and why he might just qualify as the anti-Thom Mayne -- in a Sunday Arts & Music piece here.

-- Christopher Hawthorne

Photos, from top: Annenberg Community Beach House; Frederick Fisher. Credits, from top: Grant Mudford; Spencer Weiner / Los Angeles Times

Culture Monster Blog
Christopher Hawthorne

Christopher Hawthorne was the architecture critic for the Los Angeles Times from 2004 to March 2018. Before coming to The Times, he was architecture critic for Slate and a frequent contributor to the New York Times. He is the author, with Alanna Stang, of “The Green House: New Directions in Sustainable Architecture.” Hawthorne grew up in Berkeley and has a bachelor’s degree from Yale, where he readied himself for a career in criticism by obsessing over the design flaws in his dormitory, designed by Eero Saarinen.

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