Where'd You Go, Bernadette: A Novel by Maria Semple Page B
Authors: Maria Semple
Tags: Fiction, Humorous, Family Life, Contemporary Women, Fiction / Family Life, Fiction / Contemporary Women, Fiction / Humorous
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Builders of America
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:
Green Builders of America and the Turner Foundation announce:
20 × 20 × 20: The Twenty Mile House
Twenty Years Later
Twenty Years in the Future
Deadline for submission: February 1
Bernadette Fox’s Twenty Mile House no longer stands. There are few photos of it, and Ms. Fox is purported to have destroyed all plans. Still, its relevance grows with each passing year. To celebrate the twentieth anniversary of the Twenty Mile House, the Green Builders of America, in conjunction with the Turner Foundation, invite architects, students, and builders to submit designs to reenvision and rebuild the Twenty Mile House and, in doing so, open a dialogue for what it means to “build green” in the next twenty years.
The challenge: Submit plans for a 3-bedroom, 4,200-sf single-family residence at 6528 Mulholland Drive in Los Angeles.The only restriction is the one Ms. Fox placed on herself:
Every material used must come from within twenty miles of the building site
.
The winner: Will be announced at the GBA/AIA gala at the Getty Center and be awarded a $40,000 prize.
S ATURDAY , D ECEMBER 11
From Paul Jellinek, professor of architecture at USC,
to the guy Mom ran into on the street outside the library
Jacob,
Because you’ve taken an interest in Bernadette Fox, here’s a bit of a hagiography from the not-yet-published February issue of
Artforum
. They asked me to vet it for glaring mistakes. In case you have an impulse to contact the writer with news of your Bernadette Fox sighting, please don’t. Bernadette has obviously made a choice to get lost, and it seems to me we should respect it.
Paul
*
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 oneexception. 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
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:
Green Builders of America and the Turner Foundation announce:
20 × 20 × 20: The Twenty Mile House
Twenty Years Later
Twenty Years in the Future
Deadline for submission: February 1
Bernadette Fox’s Twenty Mile House no longer stands. There are few photos of it, and Ms. Fox is purported to have destroyed all plans. Still, its relevance grows with each passing year. To celebrate the twentieth anniversary of the Twenty Mile House, the Green Builders of America, in conjunction with the Turner Foundation, invite architects, students, and builders to submit designs to reenvision and rebuild the Twenty Mile House and, in doing so, open a dialogue for what it means to “build green” in the next twenty years.
The challenge: Submit plans for a 3-bedroom, 4,200-sf single-family residence at 6528 Mulholland Drive in Los Angeles.The only restriction is the one Ms. Fox placed on herself:
Every material used must come from within twenty miles of the building site
.
The winner: Will be announced at the GBA/AIA gala at the Getty Center and be awarded a $40,000 prize.
S ATURDAY , D ECEMBER 11
From Paul Jellinek, professor of architecture at USC,
to the guy Mom ran into on the street outside the library
Jacob,
Because you’ve taken an interest in Bernadette Fox, here’s a bit of a hagiography from the not-yet-published February issue of
Artforum
. They asked me to vet it for glaring mistakes. In case you have an impulse to contact the writer with news of your Bernadette Fox sighting, please don’t. Bernadette has obviously made a choice to get lost, and it seems to me we should respect it.
Paul
*
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 oneexception. 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
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