Architect Brenda Levin Accepts 2008 Award From Barnsdall Art Park Foundation

Brenda Levin's remarks upon accepting her honor: Who among us would dare deny that art and architecture-taught at an early age-doesn't nourish and inspire our children's imaginations for a lifetime?

Who could, or would, deny that "It takes a village to raise a child"?

Or, for those decompressing from last week's political conventions, that we in Los Angeles, and in our Barnsdall Park neighborhoods, don't have "Small Town American Values"?

Barnsdall Art Park was a very significant village resource for the raising of our son, Eliot. It was in this architecturally and culturally rich park, while attending art classes, that he experienced and began appreciating, to David's and my eternal delight, both art and architecture and their interplay.

I am, therefore, very grateful this evening to receive the Barnsdall Art Park Foundation's honor, and also very honored-with contributions from friends, neighbors, and professional colleagues-to help support the park's fantastic programs and improvements.

I want to especially thank Cheryl Johnson, Nyla Arslanian, Jacqueline Kerr, and Shelah Lehrer Graiwer for making this evening so glorious and successful, and to the Honorary Committee who lent their names, and by virtue of their star power, importantly raised my cache in my family.

Aline Barnsdall's unique vision for Barnsdall Art Park-and its ongoing stewardship by the city and the Barnsdall Art Park Foundation-is what we celebrate here tonight.

A fiercely independent feminist, her vision was informed and shaped by both her passion for the arts, and her admiration for the architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright, most especially of Wright's desire to create a distinctive style of architecture, a combination of house and garden, for Los Angeles.

I too-as you might imagine-have been influenced, and my career in Los Angeles informed, by the interplay of the arts and Frank Lloyd Wright's architecture. While most of you know me "only" as an architect, for many decades I identified myself as an artist. From the time I was a child, I was drawing, painting, and eagerly awaiting John Nagy's weekly TV drawing lessons.

In 7th grade, an art teacher encouraged my talent, and, empowered by that recognition, I began taking art classes with a well-known portrait painter whose studio overlooked the Hudson River. At seventeen, I took classes at the Arts Students League in New York-surreptitiously changing my clothes to the requisite black in the art school's bathroom before class to disguise my suburban New Jersey roots.

In 1964, I arrived at college-the School of Fine Arts at Carnegie Tech-and in quick undergraduate succession, I majored in painting, textile design, printmaking, before finally settling on graphic design.

On one particularly creative date-one sunny fall day just outside of Pittsburgh-I saw for the first time a Frank Lloyd Wright house-the Kauffman House, best known as Fallingwater. It was, indeed, falling into the water. While we couldn't get inside, its physical setting and visual impact piqued my curiosity and later inspired me to peer into Carnegie Tech's School of Architecture.

Unfortunately, what I noticed was that there were just two women students who had managed to break through the architecture profession's famous and historic glass ceiling-its male gender bias. With the women's movement not yet fully in bloom, and Hillary Clinton still at Wellesley, I withdrew from architecture's doorway.

Much changed by the time, at the age of 27, I began a Masters program in architecture at Harvard. Forty percent of my first-year class was women, an exponential increase from past years.

Graduating three years later, in 1976, I skeptically, but bravely and lovingly, accompanied my soon-to-be husband, David Abel, across the country to Los Angeles. I was, needless to say, a bit apprehensive about becoming a resident of sun-drenched, sprawling Southern California. And, I received no support for this move from any of my northeast corridor classmates. Few, if any, of them thought the land of architectural opportunity extended beyond Saul Steinberg's world map as seen from New York's 9th Avenue.

My first job in Los Angeles- at the lofty sum of $5 an hour-was with John Lautner, a Frank Lloyd Wright protégé who studied at Taliesin. Lautner had come to Los Angeles to supervise the construction of one of Frank Lloyd Wright's projects.

While John's considerable imagination and talent is now well documented in a retrospective at the Hammer Museum, what is less well known is that he kept a packet of Wright's letters, tied with a red ribbon, in the bottom drawer of his desk. Occasionally, and I remember this vividly, he would gather the studio's architects together and read one of Mr. Wright's tomes.

In 1978, David and I moved to Los Feliz, and in 1980, we built our home and started a family. Fast forward 5-6 years and our son Eliot began taking art classes at Barnsdall along with his neighborhood friends, Ben, Becca, and Jonah Lehrer and Kier Lehman.

More than a decade later, collaborating with my friends and colleagues Mia and Michael Lehrer, who were the well-deserved previous recipients of this same honor, we master-planned Barnsdall Park, building on its history and planning for its future. Several years later, I was tasked with the first phase restoration of the Hollyhock House.

I've been fortunate to have now practiced architecture for more than twenty-eight years in Southern California, and clearly, art, architecture, Frank Lloyd Wright, and Los Angeles have all to varying degrees shaped my life and my career.

So, in accepting this honor, I would like to thank my adopted home, Los Angeles; John Lautner for giving me a chance; my good fortune in having parents who supported my dreams; and my husband, David Abel, who fully imagined "my successful career" and our meaningful life together in the "City of Angels."

Tonight your support of Barnsdall Park ensures that in the not-to-distant future the next recipient of this honor will share and recount their story of the influence on their life and lasting value of the art classes offered here in Aline Barnsdall's Park.

Allow me to conclude by thanking the Barnsdall Art Park Foundation, John Kirk Mukri and Olga Garay from the city of Los Angeles Department of Recreation and Parks and Cultural Affairs Departments, respectively, and all of you who are here tonight for making this "Big City" recognition memorable.