I love LA (as in the song by superbly named Randy Newman). Southern California was a world centre of domestic design before and after WW2. Exhibit 1: the high end of Neutra and Schindler. Exhibit 2: the experimental Case Study Houses. Exhibit 3: the mass housing of Krisel and Wexler. Exhibit 4: the courtyard houses of the Zwebells.

50 years ago, when fellow architecture graduates headed overland to London (following the footsteps of the other Tony Wheeler), I made my way to LA. I had a deep curiosity in alternative design that would evolve into sustainability. I was convinced LA was the centre of the modern design universe, having imbibed Reyner Banham's Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies.

I went again in 1982 for a second round of postgraduate study. LA’s creativity was even hotter, with work by Mike Rotondi and Thom Mayne of Morphosis, Eric Owen Moss, Rebecca Binder, Fred Fisher, Robert Mangurian, and at the centre, Frank Gehry.

We knew them in Australia through the photographs of Englishman Tim Street-Porter. Every image I’d researched had the TSP moniker.

Sitting in the refectory at the Canberra CAE one week before departure, I was chatting with a mature-age student. She had a friend who lived in LA. Really? You can imagine my eye roll. Then she said her friend was Australian, an author, and an interior designer who was married to a photographer. My ears pricked up. OMG. It’s Annie Kelly, married to Tim Street-Porter. Dumb luck – I had a direct conduit to LA’s postmodern architecture.

I was staying at the Y. I rang Annie and Tim and was invited for dinner. I drove up Camrose to their stucco Spanish mission in West Hollywood, with two 60s Cadillacs out front. Nervously trying to sell my bona fides, I mentioned the nearby High Tower, with an idiosyncratic separated lift that led to aerial walkways to apartments. Elliot Gould lived in one as Philip Marlowe in the film of Raymond Chandler's The Long Goodbye.

Tim responded to my ramble: “You can stay.” I was astonished; he later told me that since I knew that ‘guff’, we had much in common. I moved in, I went to UCLA by day, cooked (badly) by night, and we talked. And talked.

On Friday morning Annie suggested I buy some Australian wine, as we were going out to dinner. I went to Ralph's on Sunset and purchased 2 bottles of Jacob's Creek.

In the evening, we piled into the 66 Caddy and headed down the hill to Santa Monica, Tim and Annie pointing out Frank Gehry's house. “I’ll come back in the day,” but was told to get out of the car. With 2 bottles of modest claret in my hands, someone knocked, and the door opened. It was Frank Gehry, with a striped apron, saying, “You must be the Aussie; come on in.” I almost fainted.

Whilst Frank cooked spaghetti bolognese, I looked around the house, which had only been finished a few years earlier but was already the ne plus ultra of LA invention. He’d discombobulated a pink stucco cottage with chainlink, corrugated iron and plywood. Anywhere back home this was heritage sacrilege. LA was the one and best place in which you could monster mash a house to be funny, delightful, serious, and artistic.

I stood under the kitchen’s tilted glass box talking with Frank. I ate sitting next to him, so nervous I accidentally spilt some spag bol on the corrugated cardboard table. He leant over and whispered, “Don't worry, they’ll make a new one next week.” He suggested I come to the studio in Santa Monica on the following Monday, which of course I did.

I was welcomed and shown to the model-making room. I spent the day watching the heart of the design office as current projects were assembled, including early work on the soon-to-be-famous Norton ‘lifeguard house’. The models were rough, made from mixed media, and bonded with hot glue.

In the afternoon Frank decided that some designs needed a different shape. Bashing them by hand, with gusto and glee. Polaroids were taken and pinned on the wall, and a new model was made.

This continued for a couple of days where I was more observer than helper. I went on a site visit to the recently completed Arnoldi Triplex on Indiana Avenue in Venice. Frank called them the ‘three little pigs’, one clad in stucco, one in plywood, and one in green asphalt shingles. Famous when owned by actor and photographer Dennis Hopper, who built a studio and exhibition space next door. But back then we had a security guard because that end of Indiana was in drug wars.

I went to see earlier works by F.O.G., as he was being known. Modest modernist boxes at UCLA. Two things stood out. He could really plan. And he knew how to build. Have a look at the floor plans of any of his buildings; start with the Vitra and Guggenheim Museums. And most of his buildings wear really well (the former American Centre in Paris and our Chau Chak Wing at UTS are exceptions). As diligent as he was brilliant. Testament to Malcolm Gladwell’s thesis in Outliers.

Everything could be reimagined in LA. No history as a hindrance. Ideas could be tested out in cheap and cheerful materials. Architects outdoing each other in creativity, some in mutual support, others (whom I won’t mention) jealous of the press attention for what they called ‘cinema sets’.

LA was a big part of Frank’s creativity. Both setting and milieu. Home to Hollywood, LA was a hub of creatives engaged in a cross-fertilisation. That year the stunning Blade Runner was released, with designs done by ‘visual futurist’ Syd Mead and English director Ridley Scott. The Bradbury Building, one of the few historic buildings in downtown LA, was reimagined in ways I could barely see on my visit 9 years earlier.

Frank developed a close association with LA artists, Ed Ruscha, Claes Oldenburg and others, who intimated that anything was possible. Particularly with ‘poor materials’. Not least of which was possible because there were ample clients who were interested in artistic explorations, not just house building.

Frank designed a dozen houses in quick succession in LA that essentially made his wider reputation and were a springboard into the work in the late 80s, including Walt Disney Hall, his gift to downtown, and four decades of great architecture.

I only spent a week, probably less than 0.02% of Frank's working life. Too short a period of time witnessing genius at work. But it was a window into a place and time. LA in the 80s. Marvellous, that.

Cross-Sections are Friday musings from Tone Wheeler, formerly of Tone on Tuesday. Amateurs draw plans; professionals draw sections – never at cross purposes.

Tone Wheeler

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