Franklin D. Israel

Acclaimed Los Angeles architect Franklin D. Israel (1945-1996) created innovative residential projects and office interiors that made him one of the most talked-about designers of his generation.

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Acclaimed Los Angeles architect Franklin D. Israel's (1945-1996) innovative residential projects and office interiors made him one of the most talked-about designers of his generation. In this vivid narrative, architectural historian Todd Gannon draws on archival resources, analyses of Israel's buildings, and recent interviews with the architect's colleagues, clients, and contemporaries, including Frank Gehry, Thom Mayne, and Robert A. M. Stern. Gannon traces Israel's development from his early years and career on the East Coast to his formative world travels and residence at the American Academy in Rome. The author guides readers through the Los Angeles architectural context, Israel's influential teaching at UCLA, his dalliance with Hollywood, and the personal motivations behind his architecture and design work-all aspects of an influential career that was cut short by his death from AIDS-related complications at the age of fifty.

Franklin D. Israel is a compelling work of architectural history and biography that chronicles one gay man's engagement with the largely heteronormative world of American architectural culture while exploring the achievement of this central figure in the still largely unstudied history of late twentieth-century avant-garde Los Angeles architecture.
“This study is a necessity for students and scholars to understand the idiosyncrasies of Los Angeles architecture. Gannon sensitively articulates the mark that Frank Israel left on the identity of this complex, every-changing city.”—Thom Mayne

“Weaving together the creative and personal histories of one of all too many architects felled by HIV/AIDS, Gannon’s engaging study reveals that the deliberate heterogeneity of Frank Israel’s architectural palette and the broad reach of his ideas made his work a centripetal force that turned Los Angeles into a global architectural capital.”—Sylvia Lavin, Professor of History and Theory of Architecture, Princeton University