Building the Ojai Dream with Frederick Fisher

Fred Fisher, the internationally renowned architect and his wife, Jennie Prebor, could have chosen anywhere in the world to live. In fact, he recently spent two years in Rome as a Fellow with the American University, where he wrote a book, "Robert Venturi's Rome," with colleague Stephen Harby. They studied the Eternal City through the eyes of Venturi, the groundbreaking (literally) architect whose "Complexity & Contradiction in Architecture" has deeply influenced generations of architects. As featured in the Spring 2021 issue of Ojai Quarterly by Jerry Dunn, Fisher and Prebor moved to Ojai for its excellent views, tight-knit community, world-class arts organizations like the Ojai Music Festival, and its congenial downtown, where Prebor's shop, Blanche Silvia, has brought a new and deeper layer of chic and sophistication to town. They also built their dream home "The Box on the Hill" on 9 acres of land an easy walk from downtown amid old olive groves, with sweeping sunset views of the Topa Topa Bluffs and Chief's Peak. We cover a lot of ground in the talk. Growing up in the Rust Belt on Lake Erie, John D. Rockefeller and Frederick Law Olmstead, Michelangelo and Christopher Wren, having an architect father and instead studying art history before coming back to architecture and how those two disciplines inform each other, early clients for the prestigious firm, working with Frank Gehry, discovering Ojai and the meanings, both literal and metaphorical, of "palimpsest" and how ancient Romans left a blueprint for civilization upon which the Renaissance was built. We did not talk about the Laurentian Shield, the Orinoco River or the Tunguska blast of 1908.