Where'd You Go, Bernadette(28)

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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.