Frank Israel: Designs With a Sense of Irony

To fashion designer Michelle Lamy, the studio addition to her Hancock Park home looked “boring.” Finished in raw gray stucco, the abstract design did not create the dramatic contrast she desired between her conventional white clapboard Colonial home and the modernist geometry of the two-story addition that overlooks the pool.

Frank Israel, who designed the addition, agreed.

Standing before the studio, client and architect searched for a clue to the right color when Israel noticed the striking mustard yellow of the knit jump suit Lamy wore--”a model from her fall collection,” he said. “Soon as I suggested the mustard, she agreed it was exactly what we wanted to bring out the old-new contrast in the architecture.”

So Lamy gave the jump suit to the contractor, who mixed up a matching pigment. Now, said Israel, “the color collision between the white clapboard and the yellow stucco is wonderfully ironic.”

The collision, the irony, the openness to crossovers between fashion and architecture, and the willingness to collaborate with clients are all characteristic of Israel’s work, an exhibit of which opened Monday at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis.

Titled “Architecture Tomorrow,” the Walker show is the first in a series that “focuses on the accomplishments of young American architects whose work is original and experimental in nature,” said curator Mildred Friedman.

When the show closes in January, the Israel exhibit will travel to several U.S. cities, including San Francisco. A Los Angeles venue still is being sought.

Israel’s openness to other viewpoints is partly explained by his background as a set designer for Paramount Studios and for French film director Roger Vadim.

After graduating from Yale and Columbia, he spent a year at the American Academy in Rome and some months in Tehran and London before returning to his native New York in the late 1970s. Impatient with the self-enclosed world of Manhattan architecture and the style wars that raged there at the end of the decade, Israel headed for Hollywood and a change of scene.

“Film and architecture share the same wonderful mix of the mythical and the commonplace,” the 42-year-old architect said in an interview in his office. “They differ in the physical density of their medium and in the varied ways they try to control their audience.”

Beyond Limitations

But set design had its limitations, he discovered. “It was exciting to be able to conjure up any effect with the simplest possible means. But in the end, it’s just celluloid. I missed the palpable textures of architecture, the three-dimensional tactile reality and the freedom of point-of-view.”

Unlike film, which “fixes you with one framed shot after another,” architecture allows the viewer to “move through and around the structure at will, selecting his own ‘shots,’ ” Israel explained. “That’s what makes architecture so much more challenging, to me.”

Today, Franklin D. Israel Design Associates occupies a suite of shabby second-floor rooms beside the Beverly Hills Playhouse on Robertson Boulevard. A bust of Tennessee Williams, who once owned the small theater, guards the narrow alley that leads to the stairway.

On the upper floor, the architect and his five assistants bend over drafting tables, grappling with projects for clients who are mostly connected with the film, TV and fashion industries.

Ironic Style

The office-studio of Propaganda Films, a Hollywood production company, is Israel’s most recently completed project and the epitome of his ironic yet wholly pragmatic style.

Within the shell of an old prop rental warehouse, Israel erected a series of stage sets that include a boat-shaped office core and free-standing conference room in the form of a drum topped by a mini-minaret. Containing the abstract and playful new constructions are graffiti-scarred block walls that have been lightly sandblasted but otherwise left as found.

‘Bittersweet’ Qualities

As an essay accompanying the Walker Art Center exhibition notes, Israel “uses settings to make rituals out of ordinary events” and projects “bittersweet, even melancholic qualities” in his work--a sense that the tension between the shelter we seek within our architecture can seldom be happily reconciled with the threat of the outside world.

“We’re extremely pleased with our new space, and with the collaborative way in which Frank worked,” said the company’s president, Joni Sighvatsson. “He understood what we wanted and came up with highly creative ways of realizing our needs.”

“There’s a lot of (Frank) Gehry in this design,” Israel acknowledged, tipping his hat to the Santa Monica-based guru of the L.A. avant-garde. “The feel of a tiny village, of a small fleet of new ships slipped into an old bottle is very Gehry. The fact is, a lot of my commissions have been handed down to me by Frank.”

‘Totally Professional’

Says Gehry of Israel: “He is highly talented, very smart and totally professional. If he got a chance to do major work, he’d be pretty high up the reputation ladder, I think.”

Israel is “that rare animal, a truly serious architect,” agreed Richard Meier, designer of the Getty Fine Arts Center. “His mind has a rigor and integrity you seldom find today in the design field.”

When he’s not concentrating on architecture, “I read about politics and swim,” said Israel. “Politics drives me crazy and swimming keeps me sane. You need a bit of both--craziness and sanity--to keep afloat in this amazing reality.”