Design Icon Frank Israel is featured in this month's OUT magazine. I have posted the entire spot in its entirety for those who do not subscribe nor have access to the publication. Enjoy and be inspired!
Though he was born in New York City and earned degrees from the University of Pennsylvania and Columbia, Frank Israel's work was a driving force behind the ascendant Los Angeles architecture scene of the 1980s and 1990s, alongside pioneers like Frank Gehry and Thom Mayne, before his career was cut short at the age of 50.
After working on an urban development plan for the shah of Iran and serving two years as a resident fellow at the American Academy in Rome, Israel moved West in the late '70s, just as Los Angeles was dethroning New York as the capital of contemporary architecture. Beginning what would nearly be two decades teaching at the University of California, Los Angeles, he also created sets for Star Trek: The Motion Picture and Roger Vadim's Night Games. Bitten by the Hollywood bug, he designed L.A. homes for Robert Altman and Joel Grey, and later became best known for creating offices there for Propaganda Films, Limelight Productions, and Virgin Records' original headquarters. His residential and corporate projects often paired existing structures with bold formal experimentations.
In his review of Israel's 1996 retrospective at the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, New York Times architecture critic Herbert Muschamp said, " No other architect's work embodies more fully [Los Angeles's] current tension between ephemerality and perpetuity...Earthquakes and fires are not the only natural disasters that have destabilized the city,' referring to the AIDS pandemic that took the architect's and several of his client's lives. A vocal AIDS activist who lived with HIV for 12 years, Israel completed the design of his final project, a library at UCLA, in 1996.
Article courtesy of OUT Magazine.
Images courtesy of the World Wide Web.
No comments:
Post a Comment