TAPPING PSYCHE OF L.A.'S URBAN FABRIC\Architect Israel's mix of fascination, discontent, on view in\MOCA exhibit.

Byline: Herbert Muschamp The New York Times

Franklin D. Israel, a native New Yorker, went west and became Frank Israel, Star Architect, Hollywood Architect.

Now, at age 50, Israel is the subject of a vibrant retrospective at the Museum of Contemporary Art, a show that is also a haunting portrait of Los Angeles at a critical moment in its history.

Through the lens of architecture, we are shown an urban drama of extremes: a city precariously balanced between cultural eminence and imminent collapse, between the triviality of the pop culture it pumps out and the civic greatness to which it aspires.

Using one architect's work as an example, the Israel retrospective holds out a message of hope that art can help reconcile these extremes, or at least negotiate them with poise.

Architecture is the art that went west because it needed more room to breathe. In the last two decades, Los Angeles has eclipsed New York as the country's leading city for contemporary architecture.

The shift west is partly due to technology, perhaps more to mentality. New York is a vertical city, made possible by the steel frame and the elevator. Los Angeles is sprawling, horizontal, as much an extended suburb as a city, with an urban fabric that is simultaneously knitted together and ripped apart by dependence on the car.

Since the mid-1970s, a group of Los Angeles architects has been making architecture out of these challenging urban conditions. Frank Gehry, Thom Mayne, Eric Owen Moss, Frederick Fisher, Craig Hodgetts and Ming Fung are only some names on this talented roster. Along with the growth of institutions like the Museum of Contemporary Art and the Getty Center, the creativity of these architects is an awesome sign of the city's increasing cultural depth.

These have also been years of painful crisis for Los Angeles, when racial tensions and natural disasters have clouded the city's image as a sun-kissed promised land.

But there's a level on which these extremes are not opposed. Insecurity, sophistication: these are symbiotic forces, joined in the evolution of a great city. They are a cause of discontent as well as a source of fascination for a creative mind.

This is the symbiosis that has shaped the work on view in "Out of Order," the Israel show at the MOCA. His buildings epitomize both the deepening of the city's cultural maturity and the agony that has lapped through Los Angeles in recent years. They do not polarize these extremes; nor do they resolve them. They make art out of the tension between them. In doing so, the buildings transcend their purely regional importance as the work of an "L.A. architect" and become more broadly emblematic of the contemporary city in flux.

Israel moved to Los Angeles in 1977. His earliest works are placid. The houses he designed in the 1980s, for clients like Robert Altman, Joel Grey and Michele Lamy, exude Eastern calm. Trim, spare pavilions, their simple geometric interiors suffused with natural light, the buildings evoke a palmier time in Los Angeles as well as the modern masters who preceded Israel beneath the palms, architects like Rudolf Schindler, Frank Lloyd Wright, Richard Neutra, and Charles and Ray Eames.

In more recent works, the placidity has evaporated. Walls tilt. Rooms twist. Private houses are sheathed with metal panels, as if armoring themselves against assault. Windows have mutated from ordinary rectangles into elongated trapezoids, silent screams of glass. A boat-shaped form appears in many buildings, as if the architect thought it prudent to provide his clients with arks to escape an approaching deluge.

No other architect's work embodies more fully the city's current tension between ephemerality and perpetuity. Then, as the MOCA show's catalog makes painfully clear, earthquakes and fires are not the only natural disasters that have destabilized the city. In an interview with the show's curator, Elizabeth Smith, Israel talks candidly about his struggle with AIDS and the impact of that struggle on his work.

The disease has also struck Israel's clients. One of his most accomplished buildings, the Goldberg-Bean House, set on a spectacular site in the Hollywood Hills, was sold not long after its completion because one of the two young men who had commissioned the house died. More than most cities, Los Angeles belongs to the living: to youth, promise, radiance. It has fallen to Israel's generation to negotiate a contract between stellar promise and early death.

Visitors enter the show through a piece of architectural sculpture, a giant origami-like pavilion of plaster, whose planes tip to and fro to form canted walls, doorways, a ceiling that dips and thrusts and a dimly illuminated hideaway enclosure, perfect for a rendezvous with Dr. Caligari. From there, they pass into what Israel calls the Blue Room, a somberly lighted, roughly rectangular grotto, where wooden models of his buildings are displayed.

The room is enclosed on three sides by stud walls, affixed with horizontal slats; the models are viewed through openings between the slats. The fourth wall is papered with blueprints for the plaster pavilion.

Deep blue light from concealed fluorescent tubes washes the gallery walls behind the slats and spills into the space, an electric version of Chinese ink brushed over watered paper. The stud walls, together with the blueprints, read as metaphors for the process of building. In combining these with the stylized upheaval of the plaster folds, Israel symbolizes this moment in the city's history, or at least his place in it: The "unbuilding" of Los Angeles is integral to the building of a richer, more complex city.

A 40-foot-long light table slices diagonally through the Blue Room's artificial dusk, its surface laminated with Grant Mudford's sparkling color photographs of Israel's built work: private houses, offices for movie production and record companies, a private art museum and his most recent building, a library for UCLA. The show's perfect moment comes into focus when you stand at the end of the table and let your eyes glide along its length.

A fold of the plaster origami thrusts over the table, like a highway overpass, and suddenly the table is transformed into Frank Israel Boulevard, the architect's grand synthesis of Wilshire, Melrose, Hollywood and Sunset, compressed into one giant, lit-up toy.

The image of the city street has figured frequently in Israel's work. In a 1992 essay called "Cities Within," he describes how his designs for office interiors, like those for Propaganda Films, bring the scale and variety of the urban streetscape into an enclosed, semi-public realm.

Born in 1945, Israel studied architecture at the University of Pennsylvania and Yale in the early days of the postmodern movement.

Robert Venturi and Robert A.M. Stern, who helped shatter the modernist taboo against the use of period styles, were early influences. From Venturi, but also from the appetites of his own generation, Israel absorbed a taste for popular culture. On first moving to Los Angeles, in fact, Israel pursued a career as a movie production designer and worked on sets for "Star Trek."

"Star Trek: The Building." That's the title I would have given the MOCA show, for Israel's view of the world bears a startling resemblance to the twinkling skyscape that the crew of the Enterprise gazes out upon while hurtling through deep space. Israel's starry panorama is a filmic montage of history, glamour and visual delight. It takes in the film-industry luminaries who have hired him, the glittering nighttime vista from the Hollywood Hills, and, not least, the pantheon of great architects like Schindler and Neutra who have influenced his work.

In his introduction to a book on Israel's work, Frank Gehry notes that he has sometimes referred Hollywood clients to Israel because "Frank deals better with 'stars' than anyone else in town." Yet it was thanks to Gehry that at the critical moment, Israel was able to distinguish between Tinseltown hype and the responsibilities of art, and to heed the call of the latter.

The relationship between "the two Franks," as they're often referred to, helps explain why Los Angeles has eclipsed New York as the center of American architecture.

New York architects like to gesture in the direction of tradition, but they know next to nothing about continuity or the mutual support between generations on which tradition depends. In Los Angeles, architects talk less about tradition; many of them are too busy living it. Despite the city's reputation for freewheeling individualism, it has developed an almost classical order of continuity, due in large part to Gehry's generosity to younger architects.

THE FACTS

What: "Out of Order: Franklin D. Israel."

Where: Museum of Contemporary Art at California Plaza, 250 S. Grand Ave., downtown Los Angeles.

When: Through May 26.

Hours: 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesday through Sunday; extended hours 11 a.m. to 8 p.m. Thursday.

Admission: $6 for adults; $4 for senior citizens and students with ID; free for MOCA members and children under 12. Admission is free to all from 5 to 8 p.m. every Thursday.

Information: [phone].

CAPTION(S):

PHOTO

Photo (1) Frank Israel draws on his fondness for the varied architectural styles found side by side on Tinseltown's palm-lined streets and his own ideas about the modern urban landscape for his designs, including 1993-94's Arango-Berry House, above, in Beverly Hills. Grant Mudford (2) Frank Israel's architecture is the focus of "Out of Order," at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles.