Fox was the most junior member of a group assigned to the Team Disney Building in Burbank. Her first job was typical grunt work, laying out bathrooms in the executive wing.
MICHAEL GRAVES: Bernadette was driving everyone insane. She wanted to know how much time the executives spent in their offices, how often they’d be in meetings, at what time of day, how many people would be in attendance, the ratio of men to women. I picked up the phone and asked her what the hell she was doing.
She explained, “I need to know what problems I’m solving with my design.”
I told her, “Michael Eisner needs to take a piss, and he doesn’t want everyone watching.”
I’d like to say I kept her around because I recognized the talent that would emerge. But really, I liked the sweaters. She knitted me four, and I still have them. My kids keep trying to steal them. My wife wants to give them to Goodwill. But I won’t part with them.
The Team Disney Building was repeatedly delayed because of the permitting process. During an all-firm meeting, Fox presented a flowchart on how to game the building department. Graves sent her to Los Angeles to work on-site.
MICHAEL GRAVES: I was the only one sad to see her go.
In six months, the Team Disney job ended. Graves offered Fox a job back in New York, but she liked the freedom of the Los Angeles architecture scene. On a recommendation from Graves, Fox was hired by the firm of Richard Meier, already at work on the Getty Center. She was one of a half-dozen young architects charged with sourcing, importing, and quality-checking the sixteen thousand tons of travertine from Italy which would sheathe the museum.
In 1988, Fox met Elgin Branch, a computer animator. They married the next year. Fox wanted to build a house. Judy Toll was their realtor.
JUDY TOLL: They were a darling young couple. Both very smart and attractive. I kept trying to put them in a house in Santa Monica, or the Palisades. But Bernadette was fixated on getting a piece of land where she could design something herself. I showed them an abandoned factory in Venice Beach that was being sold for land value.
She looked around and said it was perfect. To my shock, she was talking about the building itself. The only one more surprised than I was the husband. But he trusted her. The wives always make these decisions anyway.
Fox and Branch bought the former Beeber Bifocal Factory. Soon thereafter, they went to a dinner party and met the two most influential people in Fox’s professional life: Paul Jellinek and David Walker. Jellinek was an architect and professor at SCI-Arc.
PAUL JELLINEK: It was the day she and Elgie closed on Beeber Bifocal. Her enthusiasm for it lit up the whole party. She said the factory was still filled with boxes of old bifocals and machinery that she wanted to “do something with.” The way she was talking, all wild and fuzzy, I had no idea she was a trained architect, let alone a darling of Graves.
David Walker was a contractor.
DAVID WALKER: Over dessert, Bernadette asked me to be her contractor. I said I’d give her some references. She said, “No, I just like you,” and she told me to come by that Saturday and bring some guys.
PAUL JELLINEK: When Bernadette said she was working on the Getty travertine, I totally got it. A friend of mine was on travertine duty, too. They had these talented architects reduced to being Inspector 44 on an assembly line. It was soul-destroying work. Beeber was Bernadette’s way of reconnecting to what she loved about architecture, which was building stuff.
The Beeber Bifocal Factory was a three-thousand-square-foot cinder-block box with eleven-foot ceilings topped by a clerestory. The roof was a series of skylights. Transforming this industrial space into a home consumed the next two years of Fox’s life. Contractor David Walker was there every day.
DAVID WALKER: From the outside, it looked like some junky thing. But you walk in and it’s full of light. That first Saturday I show up with some guys like Bernadette asks. She has no plans, no permits. Instead, she’s got brooms and squeegees and we all go to work sweeping the floor and cleaning the windows and skylights. I ask her if I should order a dumpster. She practically shouts, “No!”
She spends the next week taking everything in the building and laying it out on the floor. There’s thousands of bifocal frames, boxes of lenses, bundles of flattened cardboard boxes, plus all the machinery for cutting and polishing lenses.
Every morning I show up, she’s already there. She’s wearing this backpack with yarn coming out of it, so she can knit while she’s standing. And she’s just knitting and looking at everything. It reminded me of being a kid and dumping out a bunch of Legos on the carpet. And you just sit there and stare before you have any idea what you’re going to make.
That Friday, she takes home a box of wire bifocal frames. Monday, she returns and she’s knitted them all together with wire. So you have this awesome chain mail with glasses embedded in it. And it’s strong, too! So Bernadette puts the guys to work, with clippers and pliers, turning thousands of old bifocal frames into screens, which she uses as interior walls.
It was hilarious to see these macho guys from Mexico sitting in chairs and knitting out in the sun. They loved it, though. They’d play their ranchera music on the radio and gossip like a bunch of ladies.
PAUL JELLINEK: Beeber Bifocal just kind of evolved. It’s not like Bernadette had a big idea going in. It started with knitting the glasses together. And then came the tabletops made out of lenses. Then the table bases made out of machinery parts. It was fucking great. I’d come by with my students and give them extra credit if they’d help.
There was a back room piled ceiling-to-floor with catalogues. Bernadette glued them together until they were solid four-foot-by-four-foot cubes. One night we all got drunk and took a chain saw to them and cut out seats. They became the living room furniture.
DAVID WALKER: Pretty soon it became obvious that the point was to avoid any runs to the hardware store and use only what was on the premises. It became kind of a game. I don’t know if you could call it architecture, but it sure was fun.
PAUL JELLINEK: Back then, architecture was all about the technology. Everyone was switching from drafting boards to AutoCAD; all anyone wanted to talk about was prefab. People were building McMansions to within six inches of the lot line. What Bernadette was doing was completely outside the mainstream. In some ways, Beeber Bifocal’s roots lie in hobo art. It’s a very crafty house. The feminists are going to kill me on this, but Bernadette Fox is a very feminine architect. When you walk into Beeber Bifocal, you’re overwhelmed by the care and the patience that was put into it. It’s like walking into a big hug.
At her day job at the Getty, Fox was growing indignant at the waste of shipping ton after ton of travertine from Italy only to have it refused by her superiors for minor inconsistencies.
PAUL JELLINEK: One day, I mentioned to her that the city’s Department of Cultural Affairs had just bought an empty lot next to the Watts Towers, and they were interviewing architects for a visitors center.
Fox spent a month secretly designing a fountain, museum, and a series of viewing platforms made from the Getty’s rejected travertine.
PAUL JELLINEK: She made the connection because the Watts Towers were constructed out of other people’s garbage. Bernadette designed these nautilus-shaped viewing platforms, which echoed the fossils in the travertine and the whorls of the Watts Towers.