MacArthur Foundation

The MacArthur Foundation is the institution behind the grant that first gave Bernadette Fox’s architecture national recognition and altered her relationship to the Twenty Mile House. In the book, the Foundation is seen through a particular act of patronage rather than a broad account of its operations: an award for work that had captivated Paul Jellinek, followed by a consequential shift in Fox’s life and the house’s fate.

The Grant and Its Significance

In April 1992, Fox received a phone call asking whether she was Bernadette Fox and whether she was alone. The caller told her that she had been awarded a MacArthur grant worth $500,000. The account describes the award as intended for talented people whose creative pursuits show extraordinary originality and dedication, along with a marked capacity for self-direction. At the time, it had never before been given to an architect, making Fox’s recognition an exceptional one for her profession.

The award did more than attach a prestigious name to Fox’s work. Receiving it enabled her to let go of the Twenty Mile House and put the property on the market. In that sense, recognition became a hinge: it confirmed the importance of a building made outside conventional architectural expectations, while helping bring its creator to a point where she could relinquish it.

How Fox’s Work Reached the Foundation

The account traces the recommendation to Paul Jellinek, who was asked by a Chicago friend affiliated with the MacArthur Foundation what he considered the most exciting development in architecture. Jellinek named Fox’s house. He did not settle on a single professional label for her, describing her instead as possibly an architect, an outsider artist, a hands-on maker, or a glorified dumpster-diver. What mattered to him was the experience of her buildings: they felt good to walk into.

The description places the recommendation in an architectural moment when green design was being discussed, but before LEED, the Green Building Council, or Dwell had arrived. Environmental architecture existed, yet beauty was not always treated as a priority. Jellinek’s endorsement therefore joined environmental ingenuity to an insistence on aesthetic achievement rather than presenting Fox’s work as a novelty of recycled materials.

The Twenty Mile House as Evidence

A group associated with the MacArthur Foundation visited the Twenty Mile House expecting, Jellinek recalled, something like an ugly yurt assembled from license plates and tires. Instead, they entered a sparkling glass box of clean lines, without drywall or paint. Concrete floors, wood walls and ceiling, and exposed-aggregate counters flecked with broken glass gave the interior warmth and color; despite those materials, Jellinek remembered it as lighter inside than outside.

During the visit, Fox was building the garage, pouring concrete into forms and making tilt-up walls. The visitors took off their jackets, rolled up their sleeves, and helped with the work. Jellinek recalled that this was when he knew she had won the grant. The scene brings the Foundation’s recognition into contact with the labor and materials of the house itself: the award’s subject was not an abstract proposal but a building still being made by its architect.

Afterlife of the Recognition

The Twenty Mile House took three years to complete and was demolished in a single day. The surviving visual record is limited to photographs taken by realtor Judy Toll; the plans Fox submitted to the building department were comically incomplete. News of the demolition prompted grief in architectural circles, intensifying the contrast between the recognition the house had received and the ease with which its physical evidence disappeared.

Two decades after the house’s anniversary, the Green Builders of America and the Turner Foundation invited architects, students, and builders to propose a new version for the same Los Angeles site. The competition asked for a three-bedroom, 4,200-square-foot home, with every material sourced from within twenty miles of the building site, and offered a $40,000 prize. This later initiative belonged to those organizations, not to the MacArthur Foundation; its relevance here is as evidence of the house’s continuing architectural afterlife. The Foundation’s award had helped establish the Twenty Mile House as work worth recognizing, even as its surviving photographs and incomplete plans became an unusually fragile archive of that achievement.