Where'd You Go, Bernadette(30)
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 was 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.