Ave Pildas was in the midst of his commercial photography and design career when Beverly Russell, the editor-in-chief of Interiors magazine, put him on assignment for an article about Frank Gehry and six of his disciples.
It was 1980, and the Venice Beach art scene was wide awake in an era of electric bohemia. The creative types who had migrated there in the sixties for its unconstrained spirit and cheap and spacious, albeit unmaintained, industrial rentals had grown alongside their surroundings into more commercially recognized artists and spaces. Artist collaboration was alive and well in marriages that transcended mediums and movements. The neighborhood boasted a complete assemblage of punks, hippies, street performers, modernists, bikers, bodybuilders, and skaters alike. Youth, pleasure, and anti-establishment rhetoric was abundant, but the sky was just beginning to turn.
Collectors and private galleries began to spring up along the coast, and, in the way things go, stylishness was catching and starting to metastasize through the canals of Venice. Soon, the cost of living would rise above the pay grade of the common nonconformist artist or designer gone rogue. Gagosian would set Venice as the backdrop against which to peddle his (mutual?) limerence with the work of Jean-Michel, and indulgent chicness would creep in and angle beatnik spirits toward commercialization.
But before Venice was ravaged by costliness, a subsequent uptick in houselessness, and opioid abuse by land and E. coli outbreaks by sea, journalist Gordon Hazlitt memorialized it as “a workplace of odd-men-out who dream up new worlds and report on them through images on paper and canvas, in clay or bronze.” Hazlitt’s article, “Venice, California,” published in the January 1980 volume of ARTNews magazine, surveyed a number of fine artists working in Venice to gauge the atmosphere of the up-and-coming neighborhood. In a statement that summarizes the anima of the place then, the sculptor and painter Tony Berlant called it “…a zone, a modern monastic zone where the artist is secular priest. Artists are the last of the introspective, free-enterprise monks, each working in his own little cell.”
Among these monks were the likes of contemporaries Ed Ruscha, Chuck Arnoldi, Garry Winogrand and his Leica, Helmut Newton, Chris Burden, Dennis Hopper, Eric Orr with his metal reliefs, John Baldessari, and more. And here they could be found running around Venice, bobbing back and forth between bikes and rollerskaters in high-cut bikinis. In Hazlitt’s catchy quip: “Venice was Beat before the Beatniks, psyched before the psychedelics, and always, always out of it.”
This is the company Ave found himself among on that day at forty years old, standing in the sand before seven architects of the Southern California persuasion: from left to right, Frederick Fischer, Robert Mangurian, Eric Owen Moss, Coy Howard, Craig Hodgetts, Thom Mayne, and, la crème de la crème, Frank Gehry. An architecture student turned Swiss-trained designer turned master photographer, Ave may well have been the perfect candidate to take this photo.
Ave has this one story I enjoy: at the end of his second year at the University of Cincinnati School of Architecture, he was edged out by administration for designing a hyperbolic paraboloid bachelor pad that was deemed too experimental for the program. So I asked him whether he experienced any awe when facing Frank Gehry, who was being nationally recognized at the time for his revolutionary design work, and six of his up-and-comers. He denied it.
“I was just thinking, ‘Do a good job. Take a good picture,’” he said.
It was far from Ave’s first commercial shoot for Interiors. He’d done a myriad of assignments there, primarily profiles of historical and unique homes, portraits of their designers and owners, and structural shots. In fact, the cover of the edition including the Frank Gehry-and-students image was another one of Ave’s photographs: an interior of the Crystal Cathedral designed by Phillip Johnson and John Burgee in Garden Grove, California.
Frank Gehry was at one of several peak points in his career. He would be featured by American Architecture Now that same year in an hour-long interview where he was referred to as “the most provocative [and] the best known California-based architect in the country.” He had just experienced his twenty-year anniversary of his own firm, was commissioned to participate in the 1980 Venice Biennale, and was causing a controversial splash in Santa Monica where, much to the neighbors’ protest, he was renovating a façade on his bungalow home with corrugated steel sheets and chain link.
Gehry’s vision to disturb the monotony he saw in modern housing developments and large-scale projects led him to a method of sculptural design which made use of basic industrial material in a style cited as “cheapskate architecture.” In a 1980 edition of Contemporary Architects, he states, “I approach each building as a sculptural object, a spatial container, a space with light and air, a response to context and appropriateness of feeling and spirit. To this container, this sculpture, the user brings his baggage, his program, and interacts with it to accommodate his needs. If he can’t do that, I’ve failed.”
Ave had met Frank a handful of times before the shoot and knew several of his mentees. In fact, Craig Hodgetts was a high school friend of Ave’s back in Cincinnati. He had taken photographs for a few of the architects, whether for other publications or for their personal portfolios. He knew going onto set that day that it wasn’t going to be a particularly easy or comfortable time for his subjects. There was no shortage of rivalry between the protégés.
He recalls a bit of stiffness on the beach that day as he lined the seven architects up, arms-length apart, along the shoreline with their backs facing the water. Gehry was placed in the center, and the three on each of his respective sides exchanged skeptical glances or gazed off into nothing with their arms limp at their sides.
Ave then rallied them into the semi-circle we see in the final published image. The men, six young and one middle-aged, spent some minutes milling around and arranging themselves with consideration as to whom each wanted or didn’t want to stand beside.
Then Ave removed a joint from his pocket. It was circulated and toked at some. Suddenly everyone was feeling much more warm and fuzzy.
He took a number of photos, which begin with the one seen above and quickly spiral into shots that more closely resemble a reunion between estranged family members. First Coy Howard, then Craig Hodgetts and Fred Fischer dive into the sand, laughing all the way, to wrap their bodies around Gehry’s ankles, who stands with his arms shrugged to his sides in a gesture that exhibits as much intellectual prowess as it does paternal pride. Those are his boys.
Eric Owen Moss, Robert Mangurian, and Robert’s golden retriever coalesce on the left edge of the photograph to watch the pig pile happening before them. I asked Ave why Robert Mangurian had a dog.
“Robert always had a dog.”
Thom Mayne chuckles and looks off into the sand. Thank God for pot.
The transparencies were developed and sent back to the Interiors office, where the iconic title image was chosen and printed. Ave always referred to the image as “Frankenboyz,” a phonetic twist that still labels the storage archives of the transparencies today. The image was published as “California Design: A New West Side Story” and subsequently went to sleep for some time.
Then, in fall of 2024, Ave received a note from Frances Anderton, a writer and KCRW broadcaster specializing in design and architecture. Frances expressed that she, alongside filmmaker and Friends of Residential Treasures, LA (FORTLA) founder Russell Brown, were in the throes of extensive research into Frank Gehry and his six subversive apostles. She told Ave that the original “Frankenboyz” image and accompanying article had become a point of genesis for exploration into “the LA School” of architects. She asked if Ave would be open to a reshoot of the architects, at least those physically capable of making it out to the beach, in the same location as the original. The new images would serve as a recreation of that iconic early shot.
On October 11, 2024, Fred Fischer, Craig Hodgetts, Thom Mayne, Eric Owen Moss, Frances, Russell, and Ave gathered back in that sacred spot in the sand in front of Ocean Front Walk. Sadly, Robert Mangurian had passed in 2023, Coy Howard was in the hospital at the time, and Frank Gehry was physically unable to make it to the beach. The men once pictured wrestling in the sand at Gehry’s feet had grown into distinguished designers in their own right, sharing a closeness and warmth where, before, the competition had been too critical to allow.
Thom Mayne brandishes the same kind smile as he did as a young man and looks as though he hasn’t removed his hands from his pockets in forty-five years. In truth, those drafting hands have been hard at work conceptualizing such icons as the eclectic 41 Cooper Square building, the San Francisco Federal Building, and the Bill and Melinda Gates Hall at Cornell University, as well as the breathtaking headquarters for his personal studio and firm, Morphosis, in Culver City. He’s earned his Master of Architecture from Harvard and has taught at a number of highly prestigious universities since. He dons an all-black ensemble with a single stark question mark across his chest, which acts as a testament to his curious approach to the craft.
Craig Hodgetts reaches across the group to affectionately hold the hand of Fred Fischer. Hodgetts, now a Master of Architecture from Yale University, has made quite an impression with his co-owned firm Hodgetts + Fung, where he’s known to employ imaginative storytelling and evolving technology into his designs. Notable projects include the distinctive renovation of the Hollywood Bowl and the Egyptian Theatre, and the geometric Hyde Park Library.
Fred Fischer achieved his Master of Architecture from UCLA, and his firm would go on to design such beauties as the Annenberg Community Beach House, the Los Angeles Natural History Museum, and renovations to the J. Paul Getty Villa and MoMA PS1 in Brooklyn.
Eric Owen Moss removed his Uncle Sam tie, but otherwise remains watching the antics of his cohorts with his hands in his pockets just like in 1980. He received his Master of Architecture from UC Berkeley and has notably committed himself to a well-known, ongoing revitalization project in Culver City called “The New City.” Hired by the owners and developers of the Hayden Tract, Eric’s firm has produced no less than fifteen buildings to reimagine what was once a grouping of stale warehouses. The new buildings, with whimsical names like Beehive, Waffle, Umbrella, Stealth, and Pterodactyl, effectively iconized the area into a design community inhabited by lucrative firms and companies.
The reunion of the four architects and Ave opened a space for reflective conversation, nostalgia, and the kind of artistic observation that can only be accessed in hindsight. These dialogues turned into recorded panel discussions that featured alongside Ave’s photographs in Rebel Architects, a twelve-part documentary series created by Russell, Frances, and the FORTLA team. Each episode dives into the work of one of the designers pictured and the environment that nourished their visual language.
The series brought enormous media attention back to the original photo, which was featured in Forbes and printed in black and white across the Los Angeles Times Entertainment section, effectively waking it up from its hibernation. Until then, the image had only been housed on Ave’s portfolio website and other corners of the internet, from modern architecture subreddits to reviews of A Confederacy of Heretics, a book published in conjunction with The Architecture Gallery, independent Southern California design blogs, and the UCLA School of Architecture news page.
Architecture would continue to find its way into Ave’s photographic work, both in personal and commercial projects. The discipline, one of the great loves of his life, lodged itself into his visual consciousness at a young age and refused to leave. You can see the lifelong fascination in the photos he takes today, even if they’re not of buildings; an attention to geometry and structural soundness is always present.
The original shot, especially when paired with the recent photographs, is reminiscent of a formative time in the design world, when Los Angeles was just planting its feet into what would be remembered as its visual language. Those young men, angled against the iconic beachfront apartments of the Venice boardwalk, clad in whacky fashion statements and slightly stoned, would go on to be the henchmen of Gehry’s design principles and the city’s architectural legacy. It’s amazing the second life that the image stirred up when reintroduced in new global and historical contexts.
“That one photograph contains a whole world,” says Russell.
About Ave Pildas
Ave Pildas continues his photographic practice from his solar-powered, zero-scaped home and studio in Santa Monica, designed in collaboration with W3 Architects. His current projects explore communities across Los Angeles to capture street scenes and the niche cultures forming in places like the Santa Monica Pier, Leimert Park, and downtown LA. He operates his own publishing press, Small Books, and is actively digitizing and preserving his archive of more than sixty-five years of photographs. The Pildas-Green Foundation, incorporated earlier this year in collaboration with his wife, sculptor Phyllis Green, aims to provide support to underrecognized artists working in photography, sculpture, or bookmaking.
