Where'd You Go, Bernadette

by Maria Semple

  Sincerely,

  Elgin Branch

  PART TWO

  Bernadette Past and Present

  Architecture competition sponsored by the Green Builders of America

  FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:

  Green Builders of America and the Turner Foundation announce:

  20 × 20 × 20: The Twenty Mile House

  Twenty Years Later

  Twenty Years in the Future

  Deadline for submission: February 1

  Bernadette Fox’s Twenty Mile House no longer stands. There are few photos of it, and Ms. Fox is purported to have destroyed all plans. Still, its relevance grows with each passing year. To celebrate the twentieth anniversary of the Twenty Mile House, the Green Builders of America, in conjunction with the Turner Foundation, invite architects, students, and builders to submit designs to reenvision and rebuild the Twenty Mile House and, in doing so, open a dialogue for what it means to “build green” in the next twenty years.

  The challenge: Submit plans for a 3-bedroom, 4,200-sf single-family residence at 6528 Mulholland Drive in Los Angeles. The only restriction is the one Ms. Fox placed on herself: Every material used must come from within twenty miles of the building site.

  The winner: Will be announced at the GBA/AIA gala at the Getty Center and be awarded a $40,000 prize.

  SATURDAY, DECEMBER 11

  From Paul Jellinek, professor of architecture at USC,

  to the guy Mom ran into on the street outside the library

  Jacob,

  Because you’ve taken an interest in Bernadette Fox, here’s a bit of a hagiography from the not-yet-published February issue of Artforum. They asked me to vet it for glaring mistakes. In case you have an impulse to contact the writer with news of your Bernadette Fox sighting, please don’t. Bernadette has obviously made a choice to get lost, and it seems to me we should respect it.

  Paul

  *

  PDF of Artforum article

  “Saint Bernadette: The Most Influential Architect You’ve Never Heard Of”

  The Architects and Builders Association of America recently polled three hundred architectural graduate students and asked them which architects they admire most. The list is what you’d expect—Frank Lloyd Wright, Le Corbusier, Mies van der Rohe, Louis Kahn, Richard Neutra, Rudolf Schindler—with one exception. Tucked among the great men is a woman who is virtually unknown.

  Bernadette Fox is extraordinary for many reasons. She was a young woman practicing solo in a male-dominated profession; she received a MacArthur grant at thirty-two; her handmade furniture stands in the permanent collection of the American Folk Art Museum; she is considered a pioneer of the green building movement; the only house she ever built no longer stands; she dropped out of architecture twenty years ago and has designed nothing since.

  Alone, any of these attributes would make an architect noteworthy. Taken together, an icon was born. But who was Bernadette Fox? Was she forging the way for young women architects to come? Was she a genius? Was she green before there was green? Where is she now?

  Artforum spoke with the handful of people who worked closely with Bernadette Fox. What follows is our attempt to unlock one of architecture’s true enigmas.

  Princeton in the mideighties was the front line in the battle for the future of architecture. The modernist school was firmly established, its acolytes lauded and influential. The postmodernists, led by Princeton faculty member Michael Graves, were mounting a serious challenge. Graves had just built his Portland Public Service Building, its wit, ornamentation, and eclecticism a bold rejection of the austere, minimalist formality of the modernists. Meanwhile, deconstructivists, a more confrontational faction, were banding together. Led by former Princeton professor Peter Eisenman, deconstructivism rejected both modernism and postmodernism in favor of fragmentation and geometric unpredictability. Students at Princeton were firmly expected to pick sides, take up arms, and shed blood.

  Ellie Saito was in Bernadette Fox’s class at Princeton.

  ELLIE SAITO: For my thesis I designed a teahouse for the visitors center at Mount Fuji. It was essentially a pulled-apart cherry blossom made of exploding pink sails. I was defending my design during review. I was taking it from all sides. And Bernadette looked up from her knitting and asked, “Where are they going to put their shoes?” We all just looked at her. “Aren’t people supposed to take off their shoes in teahouses?” Bernadette said. “Where will they put them?”

  Fox’s preoccupation with the prosaic caught the attention of Professor Michael Graves, who hired her to work in his New York office.

  ELLIE SAITO: Bernadette was the only one in the whole class he hired. It was a big blow.

  MICHAEL GRAVES: I’m not looking to hire an architect with a huge ego and huge ideas. I’m the one with a huge ego and huge ideas. I want someone who has the ability to carry out my ideas and solve the problems I throw at them. What struck me about Bernadette was the joy she took in tasks that most students would find beneath them. Architecture isn’t a profession usually chosen by egoless worker bees. So when you’re looking to hire, and you see a talented one, you grab her.

  Fox was the most junior member of a group assigned to the Team Disney Building in Burbank. Her first job was typical grunt work, laying out bathrooms in the executive wing.

  MICHAEL GRAVES: Bernadette was driving everyone insane. She wanted to know how much time the executives spent in their offices, how often they’d be in meetings, at what time of day, how many people would be in attendance, the ratio of men to women. I picked up the phone and asked her what the hell she was doing.

  She explained, “I need to know what problems I’m solving with my design.”

  I told her, “Michael Eisner needs to take a piss, and he doesn’t want everyone watching.”

  I’d like to say I kept her around because I recognized the talent that would emerge. But really, I liked the sweaters. She knitted me four, and I still have them. My kids keep trying to steal them. My wife wants to give them to Goodwill. But I won’t part with them.

  The Team Disney Building was repeatedly delayed because of the permitting process. During an all-firm meeting, Fox presented a flowchart on how to game the building department. Graves sent her to Los Angeles to work on-site.

  MICHAEL GRAVES: I was the only one sad to see her go.

  In six months, the Team Disney job ended. Graves offered Fox a job back in New York, but she liked the freedom of the Los Angeles architecture scene. On a recommendation from Graves, Fox was hired by the firm of Richard Meier, already at work on the Getty Center. She was one of a half-dozen young architects charged with sourcing, importing, and quality-checking the sixteen thousand tons of travertine from Italy which would sheathe the museum.

  In 1988, Fox met Elgin Branch, a computer animator. They married the next year. Fox wanted to build a house. Judy Toll was their realtor.

  JUDY TOLL: They were a darling young couple. Both very smart and attractive. I kept trying to put them in a house in Santa Monica, or the Palisades. But Bernadette was fixated on getting a piece of land where she could design something herself. I showed them an abandoned factory in Venice Beach that was being sold for land value.

  She looked around and said it was perfect. To my shock, she was talking about the building itself. The only one more surprised than I was the husband. But he trusted her. The wives always make these decisions anyway.

  Fox and Branch bought the former Beeber Bifocal Factory. Soon thereafter, they went to a dinner party and met the two most influential people in Fox’s professional life: Paul Jellinek and David Walker. Jellinek was an architect and professor at SCI-Arc.

  PAUL JELLINEK: It was the day she and Elgie closed on Beeber Bifocal. Her enthusiasm for it lit up the whole party. She said the factory was still filled with boxes of old bifocals and machinery that she wanted to “do something with.” The way she was talking, all wild and fuzzy, I had no idea she was a trained architect, let alone a darling of Graves.


  David Walker was a contractor.

  DAVID WALKER: Over dessert, Bernadette asked me to be her contractor. I said I’d give her some references. She said, “No, I just like you,” and she told me to come by that Saturday and bring some guys.

  PAUL JELLINEK: When Bernadette said she was working on the Getty travertine, I totally got it. A friend of mine was on travertine duty, too. They had these talented architects reduced to being Inspector 44 on an assembly line. It was soul-destroying work. Beeber was Bernadette’s way of reconnecting to what she loved about architecture, which was building stuff.

  The Beeber Bifocal Factory was a three-thousand-square-foot cinder-block box with eleven-foot ceilings topped by a clerestory. The roof was a series of skylights. Transforming this industrial space into a home consumed the next two years of Fox’s life. Contractor David Walker was there every day.

  DAVID WALKER: From the outside, it looked like some junky thing. But you walk in and it’s full of light. That first Saturday I show up with some guys like Bernadette asks. She has no plans, no permits. Instead, she’s got brooms and squeegees and we all go to work sweeping the floor and cleaning the windows and skylights. I ask her if I should order a dumpster. She practically shouts, “No!”

  She spends the next week taking everything in the building and laying it out on the floor. There’s thousands of bifocal frames, boxes of lenses, bundles of flattened cardboard boxes, plus all the machinery for cutting and polishing lenses.

  Every morning I show up, she’s already there. She’s wearing this backpack with yarn coming out of it, so she can knit while she’s standing. And she’s just knitting and looking at everything. It reminded me of being a kid and dumping out a bunch of Legos on the carpet. And you just sit there and stare before you have any idea what you’re going to make.

  That Friday, she takes home a box of wire bifocal frames. Monday, she returns and she’s knitted them all together with wire. So you have this awesome chain mail with glasses embedded in it. And it’s strong, too! So Bernadette puts the guys to work, with clippers and pliers, turning thousands of old bifocal frames into screens, which she uses as interior walls.

  It was hilarious to see these macho guys from Mexico sitting in chairs and knitting out in the sun. They loved it, though. They’d play their ranchera music on the radio and gossip like a bunch of ladies.

  PAUL JELLINEK: Beeber Bifocal just kind of evolved. It’s not like Bernadette had a big idea going in. It started with knitting the glasses together. And then came the tabletops made out of lenses. Then the table bases made out of machinery parts. It was fucking great. I’d come by with my students and give them extra credit if they’d help.

  There was a back room piled ceiling-to-floor with catalogues. Bernadette glued them together until they were solid four-foot-by-four-foot cubes. One night we all got drunk and took a chain saw to them and cut out seats. They became the living room furniture.

  DAVID WALKER: Pretty soon it became obvious that the point was to avoid any runs to the hardware store and use only what was on the premises. It became kind of a game. I don’t know if you could call it architecture, but it sure was fun.

  PAUL JELLINEK: Back then, architecture was all about the technology. Everyone was switching from drafting boards to AutoCAD; all anyone wanted to talk about was prefab. People were building McMansions to within six inches of the lot line. What Bernadette was doing was completely outside the mainstream. In some ways, Beeber Bifocal’s roots lie in hobo art. It’s a very crafty house. The feminists are going to kill me on this, but Bernadette Fox is a very feminine architect. When you walk into Beeber Bifocal, you’re overwhelmed by the care and the patience that was put into it. It’s like walking into a big hug.

  At her day job at the Getty, Fox was growing indignant at the waste of shipping ton after ton of travertine from Italy only to have it refused by her superiors for minor inconsistencies.

  PAUL JELLINEK: One day, I mentioned to her that the city’s Department of Cultural Affairs had just bought an empty lot next to the Watts Towers, and they were interviewing architects for a visitors center.

  Fox spent a month secretly designing a fountain, museum, and a series of viewing platforms made from the Getty’s rejected travertine.

  PAUL JELLINEK: She made the connection because the Watts Towers were constructed out of other people’s garbage. Bernadette designed these nautilus-shaped viewing platforms, which echoed the fossils in the travertine and the whorls of the Watts Towers.

  When Fox presented her plan to the Getty management, they quickly and unequivocally shot her down.

  PAUL JELLINEK: The Getty was interested in one thing: getting the Getty built. They didn’t need some low-level employee telling them what to do with their extra material. Plus, can you imagine the PR? It’s not good enough for the Getty, but it’s good enough for South Central? Who needs that headache?

  Richard Meier and Partners were unable to find Fox’s drawings in their Getty Center archives.

  PAUL JELLINEK: I’m sure Bernadette just threw them away. The important thing to come out of it—and she knew it—was that she had forged a distinct point of view, which was, simply, to waste nothing.

  Fox and Branch moved into the Beeber Bifocal House in 1991. Fox was restless for another project.

  JUDY TOLL: Bernadette and her husband had poured everything into that glasses factory they were living in, and she didn’t have much money to spend. So I found her a scrubby piece of land on Mulholland in Hollywood, near Runyon Canyon. It had a flat pad and a great view of the city. The piece of land next to it was also for sale. I suggested they buy that, too, but they couldn’t afford it.

  Fox committed to building a house using only materials from within a twenty-mile radius. That didn’t mean going to a Home Depot a mile away and buying steel from China. The materials all had to be sourced locally.

  DAVID WALKER: She asks me if I’m up for the challenge. I tell her, Sure.

  PAUL JELLINEK: One of the smartest things Bernadette did was hook up with Dave. Most contractors can’t work without plans, but he could. If the Twenty Mile House demonstrates anything, it’s what a genius she was with permits.

  When it comes to Bernadette, everyone teaches Beeber and Twenty Mile. I teach her permits. It’s impossible to look at the plans she submitted to plan-check without cracking up. It’s pages and pages full of official-looking documentation that contain virtually no information. It was different back them. It was before the building boom, before the earthquake. You could just go down to the building department and talk to the top guy.

  Ali Fahad was the top guy at the Los Angeles Department of Building and Safety.

  ALI FAHAD: Of course I remember Bernadette Fox. She was a charmer. She wouldn’t deal with anybody but me. My wife and I had just had twins, and Bernadette came with hand-knit blankets and hats for them both. She’d sit, we’d have tea, she’d explain what she wanted to do with her house, and I’d tell her how to do it.

  PAUL JELLINEK: See! Only a woman could do something like that.

  Architecture has always been a male-dominated profession. Until the emergence of Zaha Hadid in 2005, one was hard-pressed to name a famous female architect. Eileen Gray and Julia Morgan are sometimes mentioned. Mainly, female architects stood in the shadows of their famous male partners: Ann Tyng to Louis Kahn, Marion Griffin to Frank Lloyd Wright, Denise Scott Brown to Robert Venturi.

  ELLIE SAITO: That’s what drove me so crazy about Bernadette at Princeton. To be one of two women in the whole architecture department, and you spend your time knitting? It was as bad as crying during review. I felt it was important, as a woman, to go toe-to-toe with the men. Any time I tried to talk to Bernadette about this, she had no interest.

  DAVID WALKER: If we needed something welded, I’d bring a guy in and Bernadette would explain to him what she’d want, then the guy gave me the answer. But it never bothered Bernadette. She wanted to get her house built, and if that meant some sub disrespecting, it w
as fine with her.

  PAUL JELLINEK: That’s why Dave was so important. If Bernadette was just a woman standing on-site trying to get metal welded, she’d have gotten eaten alive. And don’t forget, she was thirty. Architecture is one of the few professions where age and experience are actually considered assets. To be a young woman on her own, building a house essentially without plans, well, that just wasn’t done. I mean, even Ayn Rand’s architect was a guy.

  After receiving a building permit for a three-bedroom, four-thousand-square-foot, glass-and-steel box with a detached garage and guesthouse, Fox began construction on the Twenty Mile House. A cement factory in Gardena supplied the sand, which Fox mixed on-site. For steel, a recycling yard in Glendale contacted Fox if beams came in. (Materials from a dump were deemed OK, even if the materials themselves originated from outside the twenty-mile radius.) A house down the street was being torn down; its dumpster was a great source for materials. Tree trimmers provided wood, which would be used for cabinets, flooring, and furniture.

  ELLIE SAITO: I was in L.A. on my way to Palm Springs to meet with some prefab developers. I stopped by the Twenty Mile House. Bernadette was all laughter, in overalls and a tool belt, speaking broken Spanish to a bunch of workers. It was infectious. I rolled up my Issey Miyake and helped dig a trench.

  One day, a convoy of trucks pulled into the adjacent lot. The property had been purchased by Nigel Mills-Murray, the TV magnate from England, best known for his smash game show You Catch It, You Keep It. He had hired a British architect to design a fourteen-thousand-square-foot Tudor-style white marble mansion Fox dubbed the White Castle. Initially, the relationship between the two crews was cordial. Fox would go to the White Castle and borrow an electrician for an hour. An inspector was about to revoke the White Castle’s grading permit, and Fox talked him out of it.