Architect Frederick Fisher: Building a lasting legacy in the L.A. art world
The Los Angeles Times profiles Architecture and Urban Design Alumnus Frederick Fisher
Frederick Fisher, who received his Masters in Architecture from UCLA, tells the Los Angeles Times, "I'm not seen as an architect who produces signature work...Buildings should respond to their setting, so each one is different. That's a problem when people come to our office expecting to find a design they can select—'I'll have one of those'—and we tell them we don't yet know what it should look like."
"Frederick Fisher is something of an invisible man among L.A. architects: He creates buildings that are acclaimed by their users but have often gone unnoticed by the world at large. His houses, academic buildings and spaces for making and showing art are all about substance rather than show. Well-proportioned rooms, natural lighting and finely detailed materials enrich one's experience in a subliminal way. So subtle is the architecture, so elusive in the camera's eye, that the forty-year career of Fisher and his longtime partners, Joe Coriaty and David Ross, is less celebrated than it deserves to be.
That's likely to change in the next few years, for the 30-person office has four major Los Angeles projects in development. A glass wing will open up the Natural History Museum to Exposition Park and its new neighbor, the swoopy silver spaceship of the Lucas Museum. Close by, on the USC campus, the firm is rehousing the interdisciplinary Iovene Young Academy. A new production facility will enlarge the scope of the Center Theater Group downtown, and a state-of-the-art glass block will extend the Santa Monica City Hall.
In person Fisher is as quiet and thoughtful as his architecture, describing himself as 'a pragmatic Midwesterner, the son of a hospital architect with a stack of books on Frank Lloyd Wright.' His mother shared her love of art, taking him to drawing classes and the Cleveland Art Institute. After studying art at Oberlin, he drove to L.A. and secured his Master of Architecture degree at UCLA in 1978. Inspired by a Frank Gehry lecture on the Ron Davis studio in Malibu, he applied for a job and was told they had no work. 'The next day, Gehry called back to say his marketing person had quit and he needed someone right away to fill in,' Fisher recalls. 'It was a great way to learn, and I graduated to model-making and design. He had a habit of giving young people responsibility, having them work from a little sketch.'"— Michael Webb, March 27, 2018
This post is an excerpt, read the full article on the Los Angeles Times website.
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