On a large, empty stretch of Venice Seashore in 1980, seven Los Angeles architects — Frank Gehry, Thom Mayne, Eric Owen Moss, Coy Howard, Craig Hodgetts, Robert Mangurian and Frederick Fisher — gathered for a gaggle portrait by photographer Ave Pildas. Clad in mismatched outfits and standing casually within the sand, they regarded extra like a rumpled rock band than the way forward for American structure.
The ensuing picture, revealed in Interiors journal, distilled a seismic second in L.A.’s inventive historical past. These seven, gazing in their very own instructions but joined in a way of mischievous revolt and cocky exuberance, represented a brand new technology that was bringing a brash, free creativity to their work and beginning to distance itself from the buttoned-up codes and expectations of the structure institution.
Every would go on to have a profitable profession, from Pritzker Structure Prize winners to administrators of structure faculties. And so they and their compatriots would, for some time not less than, assist put a quickly altering L.A. on the middle of the constructed tradition.
“That one photograph contains a whole world,” notes filmmaker Russell Brown, who just lately directed a 12-part documentary collection about that Venice structure scene. “There was risk going on, and freedom; it was all about ideas.”
“It’s become a kind of reference point,” provides architectural journalist Frances Anderton, host of the collection. “It just keeps reappearing whenever there’s a conversation about that period.”
The 1980 picture is the jumping-off level for “Rebel Architects: From Venice to the World Stage,” produced by Brown’s nonprofit, Pals of Residential Treasures: Los Angeles. 4 of the architects — now of their 70s and 80s — gathered for a (far much less brash) new picture and an trustworthy dialog about their early careers in L.A., and what’s transpired since for the collection, which started streaming month-to-month on FORT: LA’s web site July 1.
A local Angeleno with a background in function and documentary filmmaking, Brown conceived of the idea after a chat with architect Robert Thibodeau, co-founder of Venice-based DU Architects. After a deeper dive into the picture with Anderton, the concept for a reunion was born.
“We thought, why don’t we restage the photo and then use that as an excuse to get the guys together?” Brown explains.
He most well-liked a spontaneous, lighthearted group dialogue to the everyday documentary, with its one-on-one interviews and heavy manufacturing.
Frances Anderton, from left, Frederick Fisher, Craig Hodgetts, Thom Mayne and Eric Owen Moss catch up for “Rebel Architects,” a 12-part collection.
(FORT: LA)
“It’s about the chemistry between creative peers,” says Brown. “The real legacy of these architects isn’t just in the buildings. It’s in the conversations they started — and are still having.” He added: “There’s a spark that happens when they’re together … They talk about failure, competition, teaching, aging. It’s a very human exchange.”
Episode 1, titled “Capturing a Moment in L.A. Architecture,” opens with 4 of the surviving architects — Fisher, Mayne, Moss and Hodgetts — recreating that seminal {photograph} for Pildas and sitting down for an interview. (Howard was interviewed individually, Gehry declined and Mangurian died in 2023.) The group dissects the picture’s cinematic, casual composition, during which Pildas goals down from a berm, the uncared for buildings behind the eclectic crew shrinking into the horizon, merging with the sand. And so they bear in mind a time during which town’s messy city kinds and perceived cultural inferiority offered countless inventive gas, and liberation.
Pildas remembers how the unique shoot got here collectively on the request of British design editor Beverly Russell, who was trying to seize “Frank Gehry and some of his Turks.” (The worldwide design press was gaga for L.A. on the time. Anderton notes that her transfer from the U.Okay. resulted from the same project, on the “subversive architects of the West Coast,” for the publication Architectural Evaluate in 1987.)
On the time, a lot of the architects had been working in garages and warehouses, forming their studios and collaborating with equally norm-busting and (comparatively) unheralded artists within the scrappy, harmful, forgotten, but exploding Venice scene. In a later episode, the architects begin itemizing the artwork abilities they might run into, or befriend, together with Larry Bell, James Turrell, Ed Ruscha, Fred Eversley, Robert Irwin, Robert Rauschenberg and Jean-Michel Basquiat, to call a couple of.
Basquiat was then dwelling and dealing in Hodgetts’ constructing. “It was a spectacular fusion of all this creative energy,” Hodgetts remembers. “There was no audience, there were no guardrails, and one did not feel constrained.” He provides, later: “We all felt like we were marooned on a desert island.”
Pildas, who had studied structure earlier than switching to design and, finally, images, was uniquely suited to seize the group. He had shot a number of the small, quirky experiments of Mangurian and Mayne, and knew a lot of the others by means of social {and professional} circles. (He even knew Hodgetts from highschool again in Cincinnati.)
The primary try on the picture appeared stiff, says Pildas, so he took out a joint, which all besides Hodgetts accepted, he says. The icebreaker labored. In a later picture, says Pildas, Fisher is hugging Gehry’s leg, the others huddled round. “It got pretty friendly in the end,” he jokes.
Pildas argues that the picture is rather more layered with which means (to not point out nostalgia) now than it was on the time. “Back then, it was just another magazine shoot. Now, it’s history,” he says. Provides Moss: “Its relevancy, or not, is confirmed by the following years. Otherwise it’s gone.”
Frederick Fisher, from left, Thom Mayne, Craig Hodgetts and Eric Owen Moss recreate their well-known 1980 picture.
(Ave Pildas)
Every episode explores the picture’s layers, and the unfolding tales that adopted — the challenges of sustaining originality; essential function of journalists in selling their work; maddening disconnect between L.A.’s expertise and its purchasers, together with the mercurial, ever-evolving identification of Los Angeles. The tone, just like the picture, is unpretentious and playful, heavy on character and story, not principle. This was not at all times a simple activity with a gaggle that may get esoteric fairly rapidly, provides Anderton. “I was trying to keep it light,” she laughs. “I don’t think I even have the ability to talk in the language of the academy.”
“They’re cracking jokes, interrupting each other, reminiscing about teaching gigs and design arguments,” says Brown. “There’s real affection, but also a sense of rivalry that never fully went away.” Hodgetts doesn’t see it that approach, nonetheless. “It was really about the joy of creating things. We wanted to jam a bit, perform together; that’s really life-affirming,” he says.
There are some revealing moments. Mayne, whose agency Morphosis is thought for daring, city-altering buildings reminiscent of Caltrans HQ in downtown L.A., displays on instructing as a approach of “being the father I never had.” (His father left his household when he was a younger boy.) He tenderly discusses the seminal function that his spouse Blythe — a co-owner of Morphosis — has performed in his profession. Fisher reveals that Gehry was the chief motive he dropped all the things to return out to L.A. (On the time, he was working as a show designer at a division retailer in Cincinnati.) “I remember seeing this architect jumping up and down on cardboard furniture. I could see there was something going on here. Something percolating,” he says. Moss opens up about his struggles to barter the calls for of the sensible world, whereas Hodgetts performs sensible critiques of the others’ work, typically to broad smiles, others to cringes.
Notably absent from the reunion is Gehry himself, who’s now 96. “He’s at a point in his life where trudging through sand for a photo wasn’t going to happen,” says Brown. “But his presence is everywhere. He’s still the elephant in the room.”
One episode explores how Gehry, a few decade older than the others, each profoundly influenced and sometimes overshadowed the group — a actuality that was maybe bolstered by his nonchalant dominance within the picture itself. “Frank takes up a lot of oxygen,” Mayne quips. Nonetheless, all admire Gehry’s unwillingness to compromise creatively, regardless of usually heavy criticism.
One other prevailing theme is the bittersweet lack of that early sense of freedom, and the Venice of the Nineteen Seventies, with its breathtakingly low rents and deserted allure. At this time’s architects — wherever they’re — face greater stakes, infinitely greater prices and tighter rules.
“The Venice we grew up with is completely gone,” says Fisher. “But maybe it’s just moved,” famous Moss. Distinguishing L.A. as a spot whose vitality and a focus is consistently shifting, he wonders if inventive ferment would possibly now be taking place in faraway locations like Tehachapi — “wherever land is cheap and ambition is high,” he says.
Whereas Pildas was capturing the seven architects 45 years in the past, he was additionally busy chronicling town’s road tradition — jazz golf equipment, boulevard eccentrics, decaying film palaces and bohemian artists. All had been featured within the 2023 documentary “Ave’s America” (streaming on Prime Video) directed by his former scholar, Patrick Taulère, exploring his six many years of humbly perceptive, deeply human work.
After reviewing the recreation of the picture — the architects are nonetheless smiling this time, however their scrappy overconfidence feels eons away — Pildas wonders who the subsequent technology shall be, and the way they are going to rise.
“Maybe it’ll happen that they’ll have another picture someday with a bunch of new architects, right?” he says. “This is a fertile ground for architecture anyway, and always has been.”
Exposing that “fertile ground” to Angelenos of all types is FORT: LA’s overarching objective. Based in 2020, it affords structure trails, fellowships and a stunning number of programming, from design competitions to architecture-themed wine tastings. All, says Brown, is delivered, like “Rebel Architects,” with a way of accessible pleasure and exploration — an particularly helpful present in a turbulent, insecure time for town.
“Suddenly, you kind of think about the city in a different way and feel it in a different way,” says Brown. “This is a place that allows this kind of vision to come to life.”
