Stepping Into Dramatic Blend of Art, Architecture

Architecture is not a comfortable fit for most art museums, which is why it’s so rarely shown. How do you convey the essential qualities of scale, volume and building materials through models and plans, drawings and photographs? Over the past 10 years, the Museum of Contemporary Art has set a lead by commissioning architects to install shows of their own work and that of others. The results have been mixed. Frank Gehry simulated real buildings to punctuate his display. Arata Isozaki did a better job himself than for Louis Kahn. Hodgetts and Fung re-created a couple of postwar Case Study houses and brought a whole era back to life.

MOCA’s current offering, “Out of Order: Franklin D. Israel,” is its best to date, a compact but visceral experience. Director Richard Koshalek and curator Elizabeth A.T. Smith invited Israel to design an installation that would express the spirit of the architect’s work and frame exhibits. Working with his colleague, Damon Caldwell, Israel has succeeded in creating a total work of art that fuses form and content and reveals the inventiveness and beauty of his architecture.

When MOCA was being planned, Koshalek fought to preserve the integrity of Isozaki’s design, butting heads with those who would have preferred a neutral container. Since then, the director’s faith in fine architecture has been validated by a succession of exhibitions that have made inspired use of soaring, sky-lit galleries. Israel passed up this opportunity for a dialogue with another master. Instead, he chose two modestly scaled, artificially lit rooms that he could remodel as freely as he has transformed generic warehouses for Propaganda Films, Limelight Productions and Virgin Records. And he chose a title for the show that evokes the order of nature from which his forms emerge, as well as the disorder of an era in which old certainties are being challenged.

It begins enigmatically. A smooth plaster plane juts into the lobby from above the entrance, as boldly as the tilted canopy on Tiny Naylor’s drive-in restaurant, which once anchored the junction of Sunset and La Brea in Hollywood. Below it is a sign that reads, “Please be aware of the structural components contained in the following exhibition.” There’s no other text: Visitors are left to discover for themselves what’s in store.

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The first room heightens the suspense. A plain white box has been turned into an angular labyrinth. Plastered boards cut into the space, drawing you into their folds and inducing a sense of disorientation. It’s like walking through a gigantic piece of origami in which you begin to wonder whether the existing floor and ceiling are still flat and solid. It takes a few minutes to get your bearings. Walk the wrong way at a knife-edge divide and you’ll find yourself in another exhibition, featuring MOCA’s latest photographic acquisitions. A second exit disgorges you into a show of work by Sigmar Polke. Finally, you turn the corner and discover a collection of architectural models and photographs that explain what Israel is up to.

For many, it will be a revelation. Over the past decade, Franklin D. Israel Design Associates has won the acclaim of peers and clients, but its work is known to the public only through illustrations in magazines and books. Unless you are invited inside, you can catch only a glimpse of the houses and entertainment industry offices it has designed in Los Angeles and beyond. A new library on the UCLA campus is restricted to staff, and its exterior is concealed by vegetation. A private art gallery in Holmby Hills is masked by a high wall.

Israel didn’t choose to focus on private jobs and interiors. In fact he’s a passionate urbanist who believes that all buildings should respond to their site and enhance the community. The MOCA installation hints at that sense of involvement. The dynamic planes engage the viewer, turning mystery to delight. Wary of finger marks on the chalky surfaces, the museum guards warn you not to touch, but it’s hard to resist the temptation. Despite their sharp edges, these are sensual forms that invite a caress. And they suggest ways of modeling space that go beyond style to the heart of what architecture is about.

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Nothing in the exhibition is more dramatic than the transition from the first space to the second. One wall has been papered with blueprints of the installation. Blue light plays over the other walls, which are glimpsed through fiberboard grids that are tilted inward and cut away to frame spot-lit models of Israel’s buildings. The folded planes of the first room leap into this space and arch over and down to bracket a long fiberboard console, on which are displayed back-lit transparencies of recent work. Grant Mudford shot these images, and they have the surreal brilliance of early Technicolor movies. Emerging from the cool white labyrinth, the shock is as great as Dorothy’s arrival in the Land of Oz.

Color is an integral part of Israel’s vision. The searing yellow of the foyer at the Bright and Associates studio in Venice, the undulating blue wall of the Goldberg-Bean house in the Hollywood Hills, and the ruddy copper cladding of the Drager house in Berkeley give those structures an added dimension, much as painters can use colors to create an illusion of depth on a canvas. And the photos and models show how Israel uses folded planes in his buildings, to blur the division between wall and roof, and to animate the spaces between.

His work--like that of Frank Gehry and Eric Owen Moss--also blurs the division between art and architecture. Now that the Temporary Contemporary has reopened, we can hope that MOCA will present many more such surveys. In a city that’s poorly informed about adventurous architecture and awash in mediocrity, it would be a crucial public service. Who knows, it might build support for the buildings we really need, like Disney Hall.

* “Out of Order: Franklin D. Israel” continues through May 26 at the Museum of Contemporary Art, 250 S. Grand Ave. (213) 626-6222.