Culver City, California, had an unexplained anomaly for 54 years. On a banal high school campus sits a 1964 building that looks, from above, like an enormous origami crane with a broad fanned tail, perched amid the surrounding suburban sprawl. This is the Robert Frost Auditorium, named for the California-born poet. From the ground, it resembles a giant scalloped seashell, with a dramatic flying buttress at one end, recalling Eero Saarinen’s sculpturally expressive buildings. Like them, the Frost is a work of engineering bravura, with its overarching roof of pleated thin-shell concrete, only 4 inches thick, and clear span of 240 feet. Hard to imagine what such a daring work was doing on a public school campus in a middle-class, movie-industry town on Los Angeles’s Westside—or how the school district could even have afforded it. Compounding that mystery, no one could explain how the architects credited with its design had produced a scheme so unlike their other, far more conventional, work. Who really designed it?
Finally, last fall, weeks before architects Hodgetts + Fung (H+F) unveiled the Frost’s $16.3 million renovation, its backstory emerged. Andrew Nasser was identified as the original designer. This dapper, 83-year-old, Ethiopian-born Englishman-turned-American—still an engineer in nearby Pasadena—had tackled the auditorium commission as a 26-year-old employee of Johnson & Nielsen, consulting structural engineers to the project’s architect of record, Flewelling & Moody (F&M). Nasser had trained as an architect, interning with Eero Saarinen before earning his engineering degree at Caltech. He later provided the structural expertise for many of John Lautner’s famously acrobatic buildings, but never received any credit for the Frost. Instead, says Nasser, F&M partner Ralph Flewelling claimed, in a 1962 newspaper article, that the scheme had come to him in a dream and he’d sketched it up on a bedside pad; when the young engineer confronted him, Flewelling tried to banish him from the project. (The junior engineer stayed on because—as his boss, Carl Johnson, pointed out—only he could carry out the scheme.)
You have 0 complimentary articles remaining.
Unlimited access + premium benefits for as low as $1.99/month.