Paul Jellinek's friendship and professional support for Bernadette Fox

Paul Jellinek’s friendship and professional support for Bernadette Fox developed around the work that others struggled to classify: houses made with invention and care, beyond the architectural mainstream. He helped her work find professional recognition, but their connection was never simple intimacy. After the Twenty Mile House was demolished, he became one of its public defenders, while Bernadette’s later letter to him made clear that gratitude, anger, affection, and distance could coexist.

Meeting Through Beeber Bifocal

Jellinek entered Bernadette’s professional life soon after she and Elgin Branch bought the former Beeber Bifocal factory. At a dinner party, the factory’s potential animated her: it was still full of boxes of old bifocals and machinery, and she wanted to make something from what was already there. Jellinek, an architect and professor at SCI-Arc, was struck by her enthusiasm. He later recalled that he did not yet know she was a trained architect, much less a favorite of Michael Graves. Her manner seemed wild and fuzzy, but the energy of her ideas was unmistakable.

That first impression became a working relationship as the building took shape. Bernadette began with wire bifocal frames, knitting them together into a strong screen embedded with glasses. She then had the workers turn thousands of frames into interior partitions. Jellinek brought students to the site and offered extra credit for helping. Rather than imposing a finished concept on the factory, Bernadette let the project evolve: lenses became tabletops, machinery parts became table bases, and glued catalogues were cut with a chain saw into living-room seats. Jellinek’s participation connected the improvised labor of the house to architectural education, even as the work resisted the profession’s prevailing emphasis on technology, computer drafting, and prefab construction.

He described Beeber Bifocal as outside the mainstream and rooted in craft. Its force, in his account, came not from a single grand design but from the accumulation of patient acts and available materials. The house’s care could be felt as an encompassing welcome; the materials were not merely waste to be hidden, but the substance from which its rooms and furnishings emerged. Jellinek’s enthusiasm was therefore both personal and critical: he valued the experience of the house while recognizing how sharply it differed from the polished, conventional architecture around it.

From Creative Advocate to Professional Witness

Jellinek also helped Bernadette connect her response to waste with a larger public project. At the Getty, she was angered by the waste involved in shipping travertine from Italy only to have pieces rejected over minor inconsistencies. Jellinek told her that the city’s Department of Cultural Affairs had bought a lot beside the Watts Towers and was interviewing architects for a visitors center. Bernadette secretly spent a month designing a fountain, museum, and viewing platforms using rejected travertine. The proposal linked the material’s discarded pieces to the Watts Towers, themselves made from other people’s garbage; her nautilus-shaped platforms echoed both fossils in the stone and the towers’ whorls.

The clearest public endorsement came through Jellinek’s account to an acquaintance affiliated with the MacArthur Foundation. Asked what was most exciting in architecture, he named Bernadette’s house. He could not easily place her within a professional category: architect, outsider artist, hands-on maker, or what he jokingly characterized as a glorified dumpster-diver. What mattered to him was the quality of being inside her houses. His testimony helped bring attention to work that had not yet been absorbed into the language or institutions of green architecture.

When people connected with the foundation visited the Twenty Mile House, its appearance unsettled their expectations. Instead of an improvised structure made to look like a pile of discarded objects, they encountered a sparkling glass box with clean lines, concrete floors, wood walls and ceilings, and exposed-aggregate counters flecked with broken glass. There was no drywall or paint. Jellinek remembered that the visitors began laughing when they saw how beautiful it was. Bernadette was working on the garage, pouring concrete into forms and making tilt-up walls; the visitors rolled up their sleeves and joined her. The recognition that followed—the MacArthur grant, awarded to her in 1992—gave her the means to let go of the house and put it on the market.

The House’s Destruction and Jellinek’s Response

The grant and sale did not protect the house from destruction. While Bernadette was in Europe, Jellinek went to the property with students, intending to show them the building. He knew she was away and had a key, but did not know that the house had been sold. He arrived to find three bulldozers demolishing it, breaking glass and crushing beams, furniture, lights, windows, and cabinets. He tried to stop a bulldozer operator and, when that failed, had his students form a chain in front of the machines. With no cell phones available, he drove to a pay phone on Hollywood Boulevard and left Bernadette an angry message, accusing her of leaving for Europe and destroying the house without telling him.

The misunderstanding was exposed only after the demolition. Jellinek had not known that the buyer was Bernadette’s neighbor, Nigel Mills-Murray; when Bernadette returned and called him back, he was away from his office. Her realtor eventually explained who had bought the property. The Twenty Mile House, three years in the making, had been demolished in a day. Jellinek’s shock and anger registered not only the loss of a building he admired but also the sudden collapse of his assumption that he knew what Bernadette had chosen to do.

After news of the demolition spread, Jellinek mobilized professional opposition. He gathered architects’ signatures on a letter that appeared in the newspaper, while an editorial by Nicolai Ouroussoff and the broader public response brought attention to the loss. He later credited the controversy with helping the Landmark Commission take modern architecture preservation more seriously. His defense did not restore the house: the only photographs were the realtor Judy Toll’s point-and-shoot pictures, and the available plans were the comically incomplete drawings Bernadette had submitted to the building department. The gap between the vanished structure and its thin surviving record became part of what his campaign was trying to confront.

Distance, Affection, and a Later Reply

Jellinek’s public advocacy did not mean that he and Bernadette had been constant confidants. He stressed that, despite the impression of closeness, they had not spoken all that much. After the demolition, he tried to call her, but she and Elgin sold Beeber Bifocal and left town. Bernadette never built another house, and when the American Institute of Architects made her a fellow, she did not attend the ceremony. Jellinek continued to drive past the empty site. His remembrance combines professional respect with helplessness: he could organize a response and keep the loss in view, but could not restore the house or bring Bernadette back into the architectural community.

Two decades later, Bernadette wrote to him from Seattle after discovering an architecture competition inspired by the Twenty Mile House. The competition invited architects, students, and builders to reimagine the house for its twentieth anniversary, with the central restriction that every material used must come from within twenty miles of the site. Bernadette recognized Jellinek’s influence in the project and teased him for leaving his fingerprints all over the revival. Her mock complaint was also a direct acknowledgment that he had kept the house’s ideas alive. She wondered whether he was angry with her, missed her, or felt nonplussed, and admitted that she owed him a return phone call.

Her letter does not settle the old rupture or claim that their friendship had been close in the ordinary sense. Instead, it reveals a durable attachment expressed through work, memory, and an overdue reply. Jellinek had championed the house before its recognition, witnessed its destruction, and helped turn its loss into a public argument for preservation. Bernadette answered that support with teasing affection and an acknowledgment of debt. Their relationship remains marked by the distance between them, but the surviving exchange shows that the work continued to serve as a language through which they could address one another.