Los Angeles

Los Angeles is the formative city in Bernadette Fox’s story: the place where she establishes herself as an architect, meets Elgin Branch, and becomes entangled in a house project she later remembers with shame. Her departure from the city is not a simple career change. It follows a personal crisis and a troubled building project, and the past she leaves behind continues to shape how she understands her artistic failure and her move north.

Architectural Work and Recognition

After a job with Team Disney ended six months later, Michael Graves offered Bernadette a position in New York. She preferred the freedom of the Los Angeles architecture scene, however, and, on Graves’s recommendation, joined Richard Meier and Partners. There she became one of six young architects working on the Getty Center, charged with sourcing, importing, and quality-checking the sixteen thousand tons of travertine brought from Italy to sheath the museum. The assignment placed her within a major architectural project and gave her responsibility for its materials on an immense scale.

That professional standing matters to Bernadette because she does not regard herself as someone whose creative life ended in obscurity. Years later, she recalls receiving an honor from the American Institute of Architects, being associated with a 20 × 20 × 20 project, and having an Artforum reporter seek her out. Yet she interprets such recognition bitterly: to her, these achievements cannot cancel the knowledge that she was an artist who failed to overcome a disastrous project. Los Angeles therefore signifies both the promise of a flourishing architectural life and the unresolved judgment she passes on her own work.

Elgin Branch and the House Project

In 1988, Bernadette met Elgin Branch, a computer animator; they married the following year. She wanted to build a house, and their realtor, Judy Toll, tried to steer the young couple toward conventional homes in Santa Monica or the Palisades. Bernadette instead fixed on finding land where she could design a house herself. When Toll showed them an abandoned factory in Venice Beach offered at land value, Bernadette saw the building itself as the right choice. Elgin was surprised, but trusted her decision.

The project became a lasting source of pain. In a later account, Elgin says that Bernadette ran into trouble with a house she was building and abruptly declared herself finished with the Los Angeles architecture scene. Bernadette’s own recollection is more self-accusing: she describes the last year in Los Angeles as horrible and says that she is still ashamed of her behavior, which she connects to a house. Her memories name concrete acts—having cars towed and making a gate from discarded doorknobs—alongside the anger and self-reproach she has carried ever since. The house is not merely a failed commission in retrospect; it is the object around which she organizes a painful account of what she did and what she lost.

Departure and the Move North

Bernadette’s decision to leave Los Angeles also followed what she calls a huge, hideous event, which she deliberately declines to explain. It occurred around the time Elgin’s animation company was bought by Microsoft. Elgin did not need to relocate, but Microsoft strongly recommended the move, giving Bernadette a practical opening to flee a city she did not want to return to. She went north to look at houses, and the couple eventually made their home in the decaying former Straight Gate School for Girls, a choice Elgin remembers as characteristic of her enthusiasm for an unconventional building.

The move does not mean that Los Angeles’s troubles were resolved. Bernadette later says she had four miscarriages after coming north, a separate and profound loss that belongs to her life after the move rather than to Los Angeles itself. In her recollection, however, the city remains joined to the house, the unspecified crisis, and the shame she carried away. The distinction between leaving a place and escaping its past is central to the way Los Angeles functions in her story.

A City Remembered Through Conflict

The city also becomes a shorthand through which other people classify the Branch family. During a confrontation after a neighborhood dispute, Audrey Griffin invokes the family’s arrival from Los Angeles, their Microsoft money, and their purchase of a twelve-thousand-square-foot building as evidence that they do not belong in the neighborhood. She sets their arrival against generations of her own family’s local history. Los Angeles is thus not just Bernadette’s former home: in Audrey’s accusation, it marks the newcomers’ distance from a community whose sense of belonging rests on inheritance and long residence.

Bernadette’s own association with the city is less about social origin than about the contradiction between professional promise and private defeat. She remembers herself as an artist with significant work and recognition, yet measures that identity against the house that went wrong and the behavior she cannot forgive herself for. Los Angeles holds both sides of that history together: the architectural career she chose to pursue and the rupture that helped propel her away from it. The city’s importance persists not through a return, but through the force of its unresolved place in her memory.