Bernadette Fox and David Walker's architectural building partnership

Bernadette Fox and David Walker's architectural building partnership rests on a practical alliance: Fox brings an evolving vision for making buildings from available materials, while Walker can build without the fixed plans many contractors require. Their collaboration turns that flexibility into two distinct projects, the improvised Beeber Bifocal home and the locally sourced Twenty Mile House.

Meeting and Working Method

Walker, a contractor, met Fox after she and Elgin Branch bought the former Beeber Bifocal Factory. At a dinner party, she asked Walker to be her contractor. When he offered to provide references, she said she simply liked him and asked him to come by that Saturday with a crew. The arrangement began not with a finished design but with a direct choice of collaborator and an invitation to start work.

That first Saturday established the method that would define their work together. Walker arrived with workers to find no plans or permits, but brooms and squeegees; Fox had them sweep the floor and clean the windows and skylights. When Walker asked whether to order a dumpster, she refused. Her decision made the existing contents part of the architectural problem rather than waste to be hauled away. Walker's willingness to proceed without a conventional plan gave her room to discover the building's form through its materials.

Beeber Bifocal: Building from the Contents

The factory was a 3,000-square-foot cinder-block structure with eleven-foot ceilings, a clerestory, and a roof made up of skylights. Converting it into a home occupied the next two years of Fox's life, with Walker there every day. During the first week, she spread the factory's contents across the floor: thousands of bifocal frames, boxes of lenses, flattened cardboard, and machinery for cutting and polishing lenses. Walker's role was to keep the work moving while Fox studied what the materials might become.

The first major transformation began with a box of wire frames Fox took home on Friday. By Monday, she had knitted them together into a strong, chain-mail-like mesh. She set Walker's crew to cutting and joining thousands of frames into screens that became interior walls. This was not simply the use of an unusual finish: the factory's discarded stock supplied a building element, and the contractor and his workers carried the experiment into the house itself.

Other pieces of Beeber developed through the same open-ended collaboration. Tabletops were made from lenses, and machinery parts became table bases. Catalogues stacked ceiling-high in a back room were glued into solid four-foot cubes; after a night of drinking, the group used a chainsaw to cut seats into them, making living-room furniture. Walker later described the organizing principle as avoiding trips to the hardware store and using only what was already on the premises. His account makes the partnership's process clear: Fox initiated the material experiments, while Walker and the crew helped turn them into usable parts of a home.

The building also depended on a kind of work culture that unsettled conventional divisions between contractor and designer. Walker recalled his Mexican workers knitting the frames together in chairs outside, accompanied by ranchera music on the radio. The unusual task did not displace the crew's construction work; it became part of it. In Fox and Walker's process, the contractor's role extended beyond executing a settled specification to helping an unconventional material idea become a durable interior screen.

The Twenty Mile House

The partnership continued with the Twenty Mile House, where Fox committed to using materials sourced within a twenty-mile radius rather than treating nearby retail availability as sufficient. Walker accepted the challenge. Paul Jellinek later emphasized that Walker could work without plans, a rare capacity that made him especially suited to Fox's approach. He also credited Fox's handling of permits: her submissions contained little practical information, yet she managed to secure approval in a period when she could speak directly with senior staff at the building department.

Once Fox received a permit for a three-bedroom, 4,000-square-foot glass-and-steel house, construction put the local-material principle into practice. A cement factory in Gardena supplied sand, which Fox mixed on site. A recycling yard in Glendale contacted her when steel beams became available. Materials from a dump counted even if their original source lay outside the radius, and a demolition dumpster at a house down the street provided another supply. Tree trimmers furnished wood for cabinets, flooring, and furniture. The project's constraints therefore shaped procurement and construction together, while Walker's readiness to take on the challenge connected Fox's rules to work that could actually be built.

The shared practice of reuse surfaced in the conflict over discarded hardware at the neighboring White Castle. Fox followed the truck removing its dumpster and paid the driver to salvage hardware. Walker recalled that she considered the pieces too tacky to use as they were, and instead soldered them together with wire for a front gate, returning to the wire-joining method associated with Beeber. The episode shows the material principle recurring in a new form: objects rejected as refuse could become part of a building through Fox's transformation of them.

Significance of the Partnership

The two houses reveal a consistent but not identical collaboration. At Beeber, Fox and Walker worked from the contents of an old factory, allowing frames, lenses, machinery, and catalogues to suggest architectural uses. At the Twenty Mile House, Fox made locality an explicit condition of the project, and Walker's capacity to build without conventional plans enabled her to pursue it. Across both, the partnership joins improvisation to practical construction rather than leaving experimentation at the level of an idea.

Walker is consequently more than the contractor who appears after Fox has designed a building. His flexibility is one of the conditions that lets her work take shape: he brings a crew when she asks, adapts to materials already at hand, and accepts the challenge of another house governed by unusual constraints. Their collaboration gives architectural form to Fox's resistance to waste, while the recurring transformation of discarded matter—from bifocal frames into walls to salvaged hardware into a gate—makes the partnership's working method visible.