When Palisades Charter Elementary School Principal Tami Weiser was told that her school was slated for both interior and exterior painting, she panicked at picking the colors–but only for a minute. She called a parent, Eva Sobesky, who had a first grader at the school, and asked for help. Sobesky, a Palisades resident, happens to be an award-winning architect and has her own firm, EIS Architects in Venice. She in turn enlisted another first grade parent, Helena Berge, who just happens to work at her firm, to help her with the project. Palisades Elementary was told by LAUSD officials that the palate for both exterior and interior buildings was limited to 15 colors, but the school could pick the colors, which isn’t always the case with LAUSD schools. Having Sobesky as a volunteer consultant had to help. Sobesky and Berge began by taking photos of each building on campus and then used PhotoShop to “paint” each of them in potential colors. Originally, Sobesky thought that white might help the children focus better, but found to her surprise that research showed just the opposite: vibrant colors affect children in very positive ways. It helps them think and focus, especially elementary-aged children. Yellow has a positive effect on children’s psyche. Another issue facing Sobesky and Berge was having beautiful 1931 original buildings juxtaposed with classroom bungalows that aren’t so beautiful. How do you unite them and make the campus look like it’s one entitiy? Sobesky approached the interior courtyard as if it were a Mexican or European piazza. She told Weiser, “The courtyard is the soul of the school and the colors should reflect that.” So the two architects chose bold colors, like zippy gold, orange spice and bittersweet. They joked that if it didn’t turn out, they would have to move to another elementary school. After Sobesky and Weiser had colored in each of the buildings on paper, they made a booklet with the color choices and presented them to LAUSD officials. In subsequent meetings, they explained why they had made the choices they did. For example, they chose a strong color for the auditorium–“deluxe,” a bright orange yellow, almost pumpkin. They felt that since special events such as graduations, assemblies and student performances occur at that site, the auditorium should stand out. In addition, they wanted people passing by to have a hint of the magnificent colors that grace the courtyard. After school began and the buildings were all freshly painted, Weiser told the Palisadian-Post: “The energy level has been so positive on the yard. The bright colors are putting out a good feeling.”

Garden enthusiasts have much to cheer about with the ongoing renovation of The Outdoor Room by new owner Jami Burrows. Vintage mid-century metal chairs situated at the entry of the nursery immediately announce an entirely new vibe. The structure, stripped to its elegantly spare post-and-beam essence and gleaming with a fresh coat of white paint, is now a light-filled haven for perusing inspired vignettes of modern outdoor furnishings and eclectic accessories for the garden. By far the biggest stars are the plants themselves: striking arrangements of robust succulents, grasses, dahlias, rosebushes and trees–even hard-to-find burgundy iceberg roses–abound, with new plants arriving almost daily. Burrows’ grand vision is to offer a variety of plant materials equal to Sperling, the multi-acre nursery in Calabasas, amid a contemporary, boutique-style setting. Burrows officially took possession of the property on July 26, and has been working six-day weeks ever since. Demand–what she estimates as 20 to 30 people stopping by daily hoping to garden shop–prompted what Burrows calls a ‘soft opening.’ ‘People are so excited about the new nursery,’ she says, ‘I couldn’t turn them away.’ She’s already sold sets of her new line of garden furniture, a sleek combination of teak and stainless steel. A major shipment of furniture and accessories from Bali should arrive in time for the grand opening on Saturday, November 18. In addition to restoring the local nursery as a full-service garden maintenance and design business, Burrows’ plan also includes an on-site florist, weekly garden seminars and a kids’ summer camp. Located at the corner of Sunset and Los Liones Drive, the nursery became The Outdoor Room in 1997 when award-winning designer Sandy Kennedy purchased what had been Sawyer Nurseries and transformed it into a high-end haven for horticulturists. After Kennedy’s untimely death in 2004, the nursery began losing much of its luster, limping along without the benefit of its founder’s vision. Observing this, an ambitious Burrows tracked down the owner, Dr. Linda Lack, to pursue purchase of the business. Lack and Kennedy had been partners in life and business, though Lack’s background is in education, not horticulture. Impressed by Burrows’ enthusiasm and vision, Lack agreed to sell. The Outdoor Room’s two-acre site is owned by the J. Paul Getty Trust (purchased in June 2005), and Burrows is negotiating a long-term lease. The new venture is a family affair, with Burrows partnering with her father, Mike Minder, who owns an investment company in Calabasas. Her mother, an interior designer, and sister, Melissa, a teacher in Santa Monica, will also be unofficial players. Burrows, a Malibu native, lives in Pacific Palisades with her 9-year-old son, Chet, and 10-year-old daughter, Violet, both students at Marquez Charter Elementary. For 15 years, she worked in the film business as a costume designer and wardrobe consultant before switching creative gears two years ago and enrolling in UCLA’s landscape architecture program. Although her design skills incorporate every garden style, Burrows says she leans more toward minimalist, modern schemes. ‘We want to become a destination for gardeners, where you can find things that nobody else has,’ Burrows says. ‘This is a long-term venture and we hope to be a big part of the Palisades community.’ The Outdoor Room is located at 17311 Sunset Blvd. Hours are 7:30 a.m. to 5:30 p.m., Monday through Saturday, and 9 a.m. to 4 p.m., Sunday. Contact: 454-5252 or visit www.theoutdooroom.com. —— This article was printed in the September Home and Garden Issue.

A new book exposes Frank Lloyd Wright’s cloistered Taliesin Fellowship as a less than ideal world for young architects.

No individual in American architecture has a more towering legacy than Frank Lloyd Wright. Perhaps equal in fame to Wright’s long career as an architect is his turbulent private life, a subject almost as well-documented as his buildings. Scandal and controversy were a constant throughout his life, beginning in 1909 when he abandoned his wife and family and sailed to Europe with the wife of one of his clients, Mrs. Edwin Cheney. Wright’s life with his third and final wife, Olgivanna, and their establishment of an architectural colony where he trained hundreds of devoted apprentices is now the focus of a new book ‘The Fellowship: The Untold Story of Frank Lloyd Wright & The Taliesin Fellowship’ (Harper Collins), co-authored by Roger Friedland and Harold Zellman. The Fellowship began at Taliesin, Wright’s estate in Spring Green, Wisconsin in 1932 and a second outpost, Taliesin West in Arizona, was established in 1937. As conceived by Wright and Olgivanna, the Fellowship was to be a self-contained, self-sustaining community of apprentices who would learn and practice the philosophy of organic architecture. Unconventional from the start, the Fellowship had cultish overtones, with residents forbidden from forming outside relationships and not allowed to leave without permission. The drawing card was the magnetic power and genius of Wright. All of Wright’s late masterpieces–Fallingwater, the Johnson Wax Administration Building and the Guggenheim Museum–were realized as part of the Taliesin Fellowship, yet the idealistic village Wright and Olgivanna hatched and reigned over was not exactly utopia. Their minions were overwhelmingly male, many homosexual, and they often paid a high personal price for their loyalty, a quality often cruelly manipulated by the famously outsized ego of their ‘master,’ and his controlling wife. The influence of the Greek-Armenian mystic Georgi Gurdjieff, who Olgivanna considered her spiritual master, is a thread throughout the book, with Gurdjieff’s teachings about transcendence and self-awareness coming to bear on the Fellowship at Taliesin. Marketed by Harper Collins as ‘an unforgettable story of genius and ego, sex and violence, mysticism and utopianism,’ the book is an unusual hybrid of page-turning storytelling–often unflinching in its sordid details–rooted in solid, groundbreaking scholarship. Ten years in the making, the epic-sized publication was co-authored by Roger Friedland, a professor of religious studies and sociology at UC Santa Barbara, and Harold Zellman, an architect and historian whose firm, Harold Zellman and Associates, is based in Venice. The two first collaborated in 1997 as Getty fellows working on a chapter for another book about Crestwood Hills. Their research on two former members of the Fellowship led to rare access to Wright’s archives in Scottsdale. ‘It became clear pretty quickly that this Fellowship was something beyond just a labor pool for Frank Lloyd Wright,’ Zellman says. ‘It was a very grand idea indeed, much more so than had ever been represented in previous histories.’ During a recent interview in his Pacific Palisades home, Zellman spoke at length about the book, a project he’s been consumed by for more than a decade. How did the Taliesin Fellowship first come about? Zellman: When Wright formed the Fellowship in 1932, he was out of work and it was three years into the Depression. In fact, he hadn’t had any serious amount of work since the 1920s. It wasn’t the Depression that caused all the problems. He was in deep trouble long before that in part because of his scandalous personal behavior. He was completely written off by architectural critics and historians at that point. There’s the famous line by Philip Johnson who, when asked about Wright, referred to him as the greatest architect of the 19th century. Behind that quip was a very serious and widespread belief that his career was over. The Fellowship certainly, in part, was inspired by a need to survive and to support Taliesin, which was an enormous and emotionally important part of Wright’s life. The bank was forever trying to repossess it. He desperately needed a financial base outside of his architectural practice, and that’s what the Fellowship was designed to be. It’s not that he didn’t have an interest in passing on his ideas about organic architecture, but there was a strong financial motivation, too. What kind of instruction did apprentices receive from Wright? Zellman: Wright was very hostile to formal education. His idea was that the way to learn architecture was by apprenticing and working on projects. The problem was he had no projects; that’s where the moxie comes in. He promoted this idea of the Fellowship, and many young people came without having any idea he had no work. What the apprentices did for a long time, for close to two years, was work on his estate, farming, cooking and serving meals. This worked into Wright’s theory of education: you can’t design a kitchen unless you’ve worked in one. Early on they got one really small house project and, with 30 apprentices, only a couple of them could be doing any kind of architecture work. There was a lot of frustration among apprentices, and many left. Some of them took to going at night into Wright’s vaults of drawings and independently studying them in order to learn something. Wright wasn’t about to start giving lectures and forming classes because that was the approach to education he very publicly reviled. In the book, you conclude that ‘the Fellowship did a better job of making architecture than of making architects.’ How so? Zellman: Many detected early on there was no opportunity for upward mobility. The highest rank you could expect to achieve was something called senior apprentice. Our conclusion after interviewing a lot of these people is that if you had any kind of strong sense of yourself and were looking for your own voice as an architect, there was no room for you there. There were several people, Fay Jones is a good example, who figured it out right away. He left within three months, and went on to an important career. However, many stayed long periods of time. Not everyone had huge ambitions. Many felt honored to be in Wright’s presence and to be serving this larger purpose. From their point of view, as they told us, they could be out in the world and doing mediocre, unimportant things or they could be devoting their life to what they considered to be this extraordinary architect. How did the Fellowship fit into Wright’s grander vision of restructuring American society? Zellman: Wright had an idea that pretty much developed around the same time as the Fellowship, a scheme for decentralizing America. He was very hostile toward the modern industrial city and, of course, it’s well-known how he was partial to the relationship of architecture and nature. He saw the city as alienating citizens from nature, among other things. He, like many others, was critical of the impact of industrialization—traffic, pollution–all those things we still really haven’t figured out how to deal with. Out of this critique of the industrial city, Wright came up with this alternative pattern of settlement called Broadacre City, essentially a network of relatively small villages connected by rail and highways. Ultimately, his dream was that cities would disappear. At the same time he was forming the Fellowship he wrote a book called ‘The Disappearing City,’ and he meant that quite literally. It was his hope that New York and Chicago and all these American cities would completely disappear and be replaced by a network of small, close to nature, village-like communities which, not coincidentally, were to be governed by architects. He saw the Fellowship as a seed people could replicate. This would be the method by which these Broadacre Cities would emerge. Did you set out to knock the mythical Wright slightly off his pedestal by unearthing more of his dark side? Zellman: We didn’t set out to do anything like that. The logic is almost the reverse. It isn’t so much what we did, but how other people treated him who have done research. The Wright bibliography is enormous. Architectural historians have tended to focus on, as they should, the architecture. There’s also been a number of pure biographies over the years, many fine ones, such as Brendan Gill’s ‘Many Masks,’ that started to move in the direction of demystifying Wright. Essentially, we just went where the information took us. One of the biggest advantages was that we weren’t writing a full-life biography, so it allowed us to dig a little deeper into this part of his life. We made a commitment to write the book and portray Wright as we understood him from our sources. If there were any marching orders we gave ourselves, it was not to use genius as a sort of rationalization for his behavior, as many of his followers tended to do. If he did horrible things to somebody, he did horrible things to somebody. In the end, people are pretty shocked by what they’ve read. It’s what we learned. Do you mind that some reviews have focused on the more sensational aspects of the book, in particular the chapter entitled ‘The Sex Clubs?’ Zellman: Aspects of sexuality that appear in the book are essential aspects of the Fellowship. It’s in no way gratuitous. This was an insular place, a world unto itself in which all satisfactions were to be found within. It’s evident in the structure and organization of the place, one that was predominately male, that there was a problem of sexuality. Olgivanna set about to solve or at least control it. Early on–and this is one of the most shocking aspects of the book to most people–she tried to encourage a certain amount of homosexuality at the Fellowship. She understood that if people didn’t find sexual release, they wouldn’t stay. It wasn’t that gay men joined disproportionately, but they stayed disproportionately, often rising to the ranks of the inner circle. Olgivanna also encouraged married women to spread themselves around in order to deal with the gender imbalance. You might say it was an experiment within an experiment. She had a problem and sought to solve it. But there was huge price paid. How did you manage to take years of scholarly research and cast it in the form of a compelling narrative? Zellman: That was the charge and that’s what we wanted to do. We didn’t want to write a book that was only of interest to scholars. It’s really an exercise in storytelling. We wanted to give a visceral sense of what it was like to be with Frank Lloyd Wright and in his world, to create an intimacy between people and the day-to-day life of the Fellowship. We also wanted to bring out of the shadows of history books these people who had devoted their lives to Wright, to give them a voice.

By DIVYA SUBRAHMANYAM Palisadian-Post Intern When Alexandra Keller visited China and Cambodia with her family last year, she had no idea that she would end up sponsoring a child from the Cambodian Children’s Fund (CCF), raising the required $100 per month by making and selling jewelry. Alexandra, 11, and her mother, Anne Kresl, recently visited the sponsored girl, DaraReaksmey (called Reaksmey), and spent a week with her and her friends. Alexandra, a sixth grader at Seven Arrows Elementary School in Pacific Palisades, learned jewelry-making from her grandmother. After purchasing beads on the trip to China, she decided she wanted to craft and sell her own jewelry and donate the money to charity. But she was still unsure which charity should receive the proceeds. However, soon after they returned to the Palisades from China and Cambodia, Anne read a magazine article about Scott Neeson, a Hollywood marketing executive who relinquished his job in show business to move to Phnom Penh, the capital of Cambodia, and set up the CCF, which is a residential school for impoverished children. Anne contacted him and arranged for Alexandra to sponsor Reaksmey, 12. Alexandra’s first fundraising opportunity was at her school’s book fair last year, where she arranged her professional-quality necklaces, bracelets and earrings on a cloth-covered desk. During this first sale, she made $700, enough to support Reaksmey for seven months, from January to July of this year. (Each monthly installment contributes to food, schooling, healthcare, transportation and uniforms.) The two girls began corresponding via e-mail, with Reaksmey communicating through a translator. They discussed topics ranging from their progress in school to their favorite colors, although their vastly different homes and cultures made mutual understanding slightly difficult. ‘When I said my favorite animal was a dolphin,’ recalled Alexandra affectionately, ‘Reaksmey asked me, ‘What is dolphin?” The girls finally had a chance to meet when Alexandra traveled to Phnom Penh during her spring break this year. Expecting to be met by a single driver at the hotel to take them to the CCF, Alexandra and Anne were instead greeted by six smiling Cambodian girls, seated on a couch in the lobby. When they introduced themselves, the girls clamored for Alexandra to guess which one was Reaksmey. However, having seen pictures, Alexandra knew exactly who she was. ‘You just fall in love with the Cambodian people,’ Anne said about the children. ‘They’re gracious, charming, loving’they’re just an honor to support.’ At first, Reaksmey was very shy, even though most of the other children were outgoing and friendly. Anne suspects that this was because there was so much emotion for Reaksmey in meeting Alexandra. By the second day, though, the two had settled into a comfortable friendship. During the visit, Alexandra took a tour of the building where the children live, seeing the facilities to which her jewelry sales were contributing. The center contains a medical room, (which provides blood tests, vaccinations, and general healthcare), a kitchen, a dining area, and a bedroom, with boys and girls on separate floors. Because most were accustomed to sleeping with multiple people in their beds at home, the children sleep about 15 to a room, with four beds in each room. Alexandra also learned about their daily schedule: In the morning, the CCF children are taught reading and writing in Khmer (the Cambodian language), computer studies, math and English, and at night, they receive education in the arts, including local music, dance and drama. At the school, called Doun Penh, the students sang a song in English as a demonstration for Alexandra. After they finished, one boy got up from his seat and said ‘That’s nothing!’ ‘He said ‘yo, yo, yo!’ and then started rapping!’ recalled Alexandra, who was surprised at the extent of western influence in this rural area. But this made her realize that despite their cultural differences, she and the other Cambodian children were essentially the same. This was further evidenced when Anne and Alexandra took Reaksmey and some friends to the hotel for a day. The Cambodian girls knew very little English, and Alexandra knew no Khmer, but they managed to overcome this seemingly insurmountable barrier and interact simply as children. ‘I wanted to play hide-and-seek, but I didn’t know how to explain it,’ Alexandra said. But using broken English, gestures, and smiles–the “language” they would use to communicate throughout Alexandra’s trip–they realized that they all knew this standard game, though by different names, and played on the hotel grounds. Later that day, they all went to the hotel’s swimming pool, and the Kresls bought pool toys, floating doughnuts, and beach balls. ‘All the girls loved swimming,’ Alexandra said. ‘They had so much fun!’ One of the girls, a petite 10-year-old named Srey Nuch, was so admiring of these purchases that she wore a deflated doughnut as a vest and refused to take it off. (Eventually, the Kresl family decided to also adopt Nuch through the CCF.) Many of the Cambodian girls were curious as to how a girl as young as Alexandra could make $100 per month, as about 85 percent of them came from Steong Meanchey, a rubbish dump where they searched for items worth re-selling for 50 cents per day. To explain, Alexandra showed samples of her jewelry, and gave Reaksmey a special pink bracelet. ‘They’re so grateful and happy to have you,’ Anne said about Reaksmey’s and her friends’ reactions when they received such gifts. ‘Small gestures mean so much.’ Many of the Cambodian children demonstrated this gratitude by randomly hugging Alexandra throughout her visit to the CCF and the school. Even those who weren’t especially close to Reaksmey knew about Alexandra because Reaksmey shares her correspondence with her classmates, just as Alexandra does with hers. Two classrooms, nestled in two entirely different communities, and thousands of miles apart, are thus connected by the two girls. ‘They’re going to be friends for life,’ Anne said. ‘The sponsorship may end, but not the relationship.’ Alexandra intends to continue her service to Cambodia and the CCF, both in the short-term and the long-term. She is currently working on a jewelry collection made primarily from turquoise, coral, semiprecious and carved stones, wood, bone, amber, pearls and gold chain. Many of her materials were acquired on her trips to China and Cambodia, and her pieces are priced between $20 and $120. For more information or to receive notice of Alexandra’s upcoming sales, e-mail alexsjewelryforcambodia@yahoo.com. When she’s older, she plans to return to Cambodia to help in a more hands-on way. ‘I want to work at the CCF one summer when I’m older,’ Alexandra said. ‘I just want to help.”