Embrace Modern

New Canaan’s Modern House Survey

Can someone please define for me the term “Modern House”?

The New Canaan Modern House Survey went public over the weekend due to some prodding by The New York Times. Their, the survey’s, site is http://www.preservationnation.org/travel-and-sites/sites/northeast-region/new-canaan-ct/ and the survey was a group effort by the National Trust, The Glass House Museum, The Connecticut Trust for Historic Preservation, The New Canaan Historical Society and BCA (Building Conservation of America). Don’t get me wrong, the survey is amazing and what a resource! I think that there are other towns that should do the same thing, Lincoln Massacussetts for instance.

Here is my issue, and you know I usually have one. Where is the line between Modern and Contemporary? When I went through the survey, did I mention how amazing it is, I was clicking thumbnails like nobody’s business. On many pages however I saw houses that I would not consider “Modern”. Were they there because, as in the case of  John Black Lee, he designed houses that were earth shatteringly modern and so others that don’t appear as modern are to be preserved as other examples of a master’s work? Look at Noyes. Noyes 2 unarguably modern. Weeks…I am not so sure. Although I helped move the Weeks out of that house in the 1970’s and in to a condo in the center of town and the house seemed pretty modern on the inside.

Here is my, and only my, opinion.

If I were to close my eyes and think  “modern house” I would see a house like Noyes 2, Campbell/Goldberg, Lee 1 or 2 and houses of the ilk.  Houses like the Ackerman House, Talbert, Lindstrom and McDonnell houses? Cool Contemporary houses. For me Moderns of the time were about standing aside from what existed before, sort of a “that was then this is now” kind of thing. Contemporaries seem to be less groundbreaking without being any less cool as far as houses go. They are about getting away with something, almost flying under the radar. Moderns are the kids who stand on the table, a cup of institutional Tapioca Pudding clutched in one hand like a grenade yelling “into the breach boys” as the food fight begins in the cafeteria (a practice that no one attached to this website condones in any manner). The Contemporary is the kid who sneaks by your house after midnight and moons you. If a Contemporary gets caught, it’s sightly less than colonial look is written off as “childish exuberance”. If a Modern is “caught” it is raised to the ground and replaced by something more conventional, like a replica of Versailles.

I guess my point is that however awesome an undertaking the Modern House Survey is/was/continues to be we, who love modern need to be carefull not to delute what is modern, that is after someone clears it up for me.

Gropius Put to the Torch?

According to the Campaign to Save the Michael Reese Hospital folks in Chicago all of Bauhauser Walter Gropius’ public buildings in Illinois are is danger of being erased from the cityscape should Chicago win it’s bid to host the 2016 Summer Olympics. Indeed should Chicago not win its bid, the buildings could still fall to developer whims.

Located on Chicago’s South Side Gropius was contracted in 1945 and the building went on through much of the 1950’s. The campus is the only example of his architecture and city planning in the state of Illinois.

We join with the folks at The Gropius in Chicago Coalition in urging the city’s olympic committee find a way to save these buildings through adaptive re-use.

For more information see the coalition’s website…http://www.savemrh.com

An Apology

I need to apologize to Prutting Construction (of which I am a fan) for some issues I may have unintentionally caused.

What we do here sometimes borders on Architectural Paparazzi I know but it is never our intention to infringe on anyone’s privacy or cause angst in any way. We do not set foot on peoples property unless invited to do so. That is why, for instance, you’ll not see pictures of the Day or Boisonnas or Frank Lloyd Wright houses on these pages until those owners allow us to take pictures. We know were the houses are but will not set one foot on the property unless granted permission.

There have been two instances that some may consider exceptions, but we honestly don’t.

One was the Joeb Moore designed and Prutting Built (or nearly so) modern near Meade Park in New Canaan. We took pictures all around that house while under construction because the workmen said we could. They were clear that there would be no pictures inside and there weren’t. The other occurred while we driving by Lee II when  saw the owner of the house and, on a whim, got out of our car and introduced ourselves. The owner said she was busy and we left.

The issue:

The issue I am apologizing for comes from the completion of the Toshiko Mori addition to Breuer House III. Mori’s vision was executed by Prutting Construction. Evidently our linking to pictures from the Prutting site showing two nice views of the completed project shot from inside the property’s boundaries  may have caused unintentional stress and for that I am sorry.

It has always been the mission of this blog to celebrate modern architecture and those who labor, either by purchasing an older modern and renovating mindful of the past or those who design and build/renovate these houses and buildings, to preserve  it’s history and shape it’s future. The blog is to let others who care about these icons know that they still exist and are in, for the most part, good hands.

I always welcome invitations and communications  from homeowners, I can be reached at skip[at]embracemodern.com

DeSilver

I had the chance, thanks to it’s current owners, to visit John Black Lee’s 1961 DeSilver House in New Canaan today.

This is John Black Lee's DeSilver House/

I had been looking for the opportunity and in fact had found the house on my way to a friend’s house last summer. I fought the urge to snap pictures (they share a driveway). Then a few months ago the current owners posted a note on this blog saying that they were the current…well you get the picture. We tried unsuccessfully to arrange a time in our schedules for a visit and finally, thanks to email, the weather and Facebook, today ended up being the day.

The new garage, can you tell? Be honest, you can't.

When you pull in to the driveway you are faced with the classic shot from the Bill Earle’s book attributed to a modern house day probably in the late 1950’s. There is a new garage, first sketched by the new owners, to the left and the guest house to the right.

The main house appears smaller in person and it is indeed smaller than most built in New Canaan now-a-days. It is, like the Gropius and Noyes houses I have visited, filled with a sense of awe, of peace and calm. These folks knew their business. There is a reverence one feels when walking in this house.

To enter the home you walk across the bridge lined with planters. Previous owners had replaced the planters with railings as there is a good five foot drop off the side to the main level below. The bridge now steps off from a somehow both modern and classic New England stacked stone retaining wall instead of the steep grade that was there before. After seeing it the way it is I can not imagine it any other way.

When you do cross the bridge to the front door and enter the house your find yourself halfway between the entertaining space (bottom floor) and the private space (top floor). The stairwell is an open affair spanning three floors including the basement which the current owners have remade as a wine cellar. The stairs themselves are thick wood treads with period green carpet pads. There are steel box rods that run all the way up.

The staircase seen from the lower level.

Once on the lower level the kitchen, a beautifully redone and entirely usable space, is to the left and the dining room is to the left. Straight ahead is the living room with it’s central fireplace resurfaced in stone. The floors are light and, at first look, appear to be bamboo laminate but they are in fact light bamboo.

The living room runs the entire width of the rear of the house. It is paneled in large light wood squares and is breathtaking in it’s view of the rear of the property, open layout, impeccable period and new furniture. The ceiling is raised with hidden sconces that run around the entire room.

A big alteration to the downstairs plan is the removal of the half bath and built in cabinets that used to separate the living room from the dining room. The bathroom was moved to a center structure behind a wall covered in panels from the storage units by Charles Eames. The story goes that when the homeowners were looking to cover the wall with something out of the ordinary and yet still somehow true to the period and the home itself they found a resource in the company that presses the panels for the Eames reproductions currently available. The factory pressed an extra run and the panels were installed in the home with dramatic effect.

Also in the living room are wood stools by Eames, a Noguchi coffee table , Cloud Couches by Modernica and chairs that could be Jens Risom. There are area rugs by Flor all through the house.

The dining room has a clear table and chairs which, along with the big windows on two walls, gives the relatively small room a feeling of space and openness.

The kitchen has been transformed and yet does not feel out of place in the house.  The previous owners had the kitchen laid out as an eat-in affair with very little counterspace. Realizing that wouldn’t do the homeowners added a medium island in the middle of the room which makes the kitchen a wonderful place to prepare food for two or twenty two.

Upstairs there are three bedrooms. The master mirrors the living room downstairs with a central fireplace and central entry point. In addition it has access to the two second floor decks that are on each side of the house.

The master has it’s own, as yet to be remodled, bathroom and there is a second bath on the floor.The owner maintains that a major reason for homes like this being prime candidates for tear-down is the size of the bathrooms which at the time the house was constructed were thought of as places to go number one and number two and then wash up afterwards. This was before everyone felt the need to have a day spa next to their bedroom.

There are two other bedrooms on either side of the house. One is used today as a TV room and the other as a guest bedroom. Both are furnished in a way that compliments the surroundings.

Colors are earthy and warm in the house with browns and greens, yes there is white accaisionally, but the feeling is warm and welcoming. The floor to ceiling glass doors and windows around the house afford great views of the outdoor space. There is never a question of where the outside stops and inside begins as there is in Eliot Noyes second house and certainly, I am told, at Philip Johnson’s Glass House but there is light and you do feel connected with the outdoors.

The landscaping too has been redone. After previous owners had cut down many of the trees that surrounded the house it was left surrounded by lawn. There are new flagstone patios all around, the new retaining walls at the front and a very impressive set of stone stairs that run from the kitchen patio to the new garage.

All in all a perfect example of updating while staying true to the architect’s vision. It is said that John Black Lee has been in the house since the renovation and told the owners that they had extended it’s usefullness another 30 years. I agree and in a town where moderns are either threatened or remodled with somewhat murky results DeSilver stands as testiment to what can be done when care and a keen sense of what fits are applied in equal measure.

More Pictures.

The sad little guest house. It doesn't fit, was not designed by the original architect.

This is the new opening between living room and dining room. The half bath is hidden behind the Eames reproduction panels on the right.

One end of the living room. A Cloud Sofa by Modernica faces stools by Charles Eames.

The other end. Another Cloud Sofa and Noguchi coffee table.

The living room fireplace faced by chairs reminiscent of those by Jens Risom

The updated kitchen

The new retaining wall

Stone stairs to the garage.

The dining room side of the house

Three quarter view of the rear of the house and the kitchen side

All images and content © 2009 EmbraceModern and Richard Ploss

Neutra Offers Reproductions

Richard and Dion Neutra Architecture (www.neutra.org) has made available a selection of quality reproductions of six Richard Neutra sketches. These are renderings in various media reproduced on quality papers.

This release is in celebration of the current exhibit in the Getty Gallery in the Los Angeles Library.

Available for purchase are two sketch reproductions of Richard Neutra’s Van Der Leeuw House aka VDL house.  Built in 1932 on a small lot the house had a garden house added in 1940. When a fire ravaged the original house in 1963 it was rebuilt in 1963 by richard and Dion Neutra. It exists to this day aspart of the Cal Poly collection.

Also available are two sketches of the Garden Grove Community Church which was later made famous by Dr. Robert Schuller as his home church and renamed ‘The Crystal Cathedral” after an arguably irreverent addition by Phillip Johnson. The renderings being offered, or reproductions of, are of the church and a cut-away of the sanctuary itself.

A rendering of Neutra’s Howard Hawks House 3 and Monterrey Gardens Civic Center round out the current offering of six reproductions.

These are, according to the Neutra organization, reproduced in 16 x 24 inch format and are suitable for framing. They are offered at $275 each plus shipping and handling.

The others are shown below. For ordering information see www.neutra.org.

Monterrey Park Civic Center

Garden Grove Community Church Sanctuary Cut Away

Howard Hawks House 3

Garden Grove Community Church

VDL House

Richard Neutra

Today marks the 30th anniversary of the passing of one of the great icons in international architecture, Richard Neutra.

The following is from Wikipedia…

Neutra was born in Vienna. He studied under Adolf Loos at the Technical University of Vienna, was influenced by Otto Wagner, and worked for a time in Germany in the studio of Erich Mendelsohn. He moved to the United States by 1923 and became a naturalized citizen in 1929. Neutra worked briefly for Frank Lloyd Wright before accepting an invitation from his close friend and university companion Rudolf Schindler to work and live communally in Schindler’s Kings Road House in California.

In California, he became celebrated for rigorously geometric but airy structures that represented a West Coast variation on the mid-century modern residence. In the early 1930s, Neutra’s Los Angeles practice trained several young architects who went on to independent success, including Gregory Ain, Harwell Hamilton Harris, and Raphael Soriano.

He was famous for the attention he gave to defining the real needs of his clients, regardless of the size of the project, in contrast to other architects eager to impose their artistic vision on a client. Neutra sometimes used detailed questionnaires to discover his client’s needs, much to their surprise. His domestic architecture was a blend of art, landscape and practical comfort.

Neutra had a sharp sense of irony. In his autobiography, Life and Shape, he included a playful anecdote about an anonymous movie producer-client who electrified the moat around the house that Neutra designed for him and had his Persian butler fish out the bodies in the morning and dispose of them in a specially designed incinerator. This was a much-embellished account of an actual client, Josef von Sternberg, who indeed had a moated house but not an electrified one.

The novelist/philosopher Ayn Rand was the second owner of the von Sternberg house in the San Fernando Valley (now destroyed). A photo of Neutra and Rand at the home was famously captured by Julius Shulman.

Neutra died in Wuppertal, Germany, in 1970.

His son Dion still manages “Richard and Dion Neutra Architecture” in LA where he champions the ideas that he and his father worked on for years together as well as championing the preservation of he and his dad’s works. The current battles include the Treetops in Silverlake California and The Gettysburg Cyclorama Center in Gettyburg PA where the National Parks service seemes hellbent in tearing it down.

Opinion: Preservationists for the Distruction of History

I have to admit, as I have stated before, that I don’t understand  the whole battlefield restoration argument when it comes to Gettysburg.

What has prompted this post was a link in one of my Google Alerts that led me to the following statement on The Gettysburg Daily, a website that seems to be more obsessed with Gettysburg than we are with, lets say, Eliot Noyes. This is a site that complains about which trees are removed and has 34 pictures taken walking around the Virginia Monument;

The white structure above the Comfort Inn [in the photograph] is the old Cyclorama building, which we hope is torn down soon.

From The Gettysburg Daily (http://www.gettysburgdaily.com)

So the argument is that the Gettysburg Battlefield needs to be restored to the way it was July 1-3 1863 which means that the Cyclorama Center, designed by Richard Neutra, has to go. One has to ask why?

Why spend the money?

Why destroy a historical structure?

It seems like selective restoration. One would assume, as I have stated before in a semi-joking manner, that if the goal is to restore the battlefield to it’s 1863 glory so that people can get a sense of what it was like, then we need to add other items to the “to do” list.

1. The removal of all above the ground monuments. This would include the Virginia, Tennessee and other monuments that dot the battlefield either where charges happened or certain people fell.
2. The removal of the Comfort Inn (there was no comfort then and I think that it is a slap in the face to those who fell).
3. The removal of all motorized transport from the battlefield, this includes maintenance vehicles, security etc.
4. The removal of all modern conveniences from the park. No Flush Toilets, running water other than streams.
5. The removal of all paved roads and walking paths.

I know it seems that I am being sarcastic and condescending but I assure you that I am not. I am just trying to point out that it is no longer 1863 and things are different. When the Center was built it was built in a spot near to where President Lincoln gave his Gettysburg Address.

From Richard Neutra’s own words (as sent to me by his son Dion).

We should invite every year one of the great statesmen of
the Nations. It may be even a “Cold War” enemy nation to
speak before thirty thousand people about: ‘What Shall
Not Perish From the Earth.’ This will be a series of
speeches throughout the centuries. It may be Nehru, it may
be Chou en Lai or Doctor Heuss of West Germany.

We have not money enough to seat so many people in
American Seating Company’s plush chairs, but they can
stand in a lovely landscaped natural gathering ground like
the forecourts of the Temple Ise in Japan. They can stand
for one minute, forty seconds. They can hear a message
in thirteen sentences about the ideals of mankind which
must endure. Mankind is the greater union which must be
preserved over the sovereignty of any political area in
India, Maine or Virginia. None of them must be allowed
to become cause for mankind to perish from the earth.

Mankind rules. The Greater Union becomes significant on
a shrunken globe. The same issue is still with us and will
probably be with us for generations to come, but Lincoln
was not a victor-speech maker. He was a prophet and his
grand text still resounds.

The point is this, in a place so marked by historical conflict, can we not find room to save another piece of history?

Alice Ball and The Trouble (or one of them anyway) with the Internet

I have Google Alerts set for all sorts of things. This can be problematic on many levels. One of my alerts is for Neutra. I have been talking, via email, and working with Dion Neutra about and one things related to the works  of his late father. Because of my alert, I get all sorts of news from around the internet about all things Neutra. This is good except that I also get every sale announcement about Lysol Neutra Air.

Another alert I have is “Alice Ball”. This is, of course, The Alice Ball House built by Philip Johnson in New Canaan but that’s not the “trouble” mentioned above.

The trouble is that once information is printed on the interent it is there, for the most part, for ever. That means that information printed here or in other blogs and websites can be picked up by Google or any other search engine, and treated as new.

For example… this morning I got a Google Alert that Philip Johnson’s Alice Ball House was again facing demolition. That owner Christina Ross was again filing for a demo permit. The article was posted on the Connecticut Trust For Historic Preservation website and the date, probably autogenerated through Javascript, was March 2 which is today.

I called Prudy Parris, the listing agent, for confirmation. She assured me that this was just one of those self perpetuating news items. She also said that Ms. Ross has all of the permits needed to build the second home she wants to build on the site while still preserving the Ball House.

The house remains for sale at $3.5m and more information can be found at Prudy’s website .

It was nice to find out that the agent is herself a member of DocoMomo, the modern preservation group.

Gettysburg Update

This came in today from the National Parks Service. Please note the tagline:

Skip:

There is no resolution in the lawsuit regarding the Cyclorama Building at Gettysburg National Military Park.

Demolition work is beginning on the old Visitor Center building.
Demolition of the Cyclorama building will not move forward however until the lawsuit is resolved.

Katie Lawhon
Public Affairs Specialist
Gettysburg National Military Park

Experience your America

The National Park Service cares for special places saved by the American people so that they all may experience our heritage.

I think the tagline is sad really. I am trying to get more information.

Breuer’s Second New Canaan House is Reborn

[PICTURE REMOVED]

One of the renovation projects in New Canaan that we have been following for the last couple years is the expansion of Marcel Breuer’s second New Canaan house. Called “Breuer 2″ by some people in the area and other areas as well, it is in actually “Breuer 3″ with “One” being the house he built for his family in Lincoln Massachusetts a stone’s throw from the Walter Gropius House and “Two” being the modified home on Sunset Hill.

Anyway, while testing a link from the townhouse post to Prutting Construction’s website (UPDATE: the photos of the completed renovation have been removed to honor the wished of Prutting Construction and Their client) I found new pictures of the completed project which was designed by the former head of the Harvard Architecture School, how appropriate since that is where Breuer and the rest of “the Harvard Five” (Breuer, Johnson, Noyes, Johansen and Gores) came from, Toshiko Mori.

Mori’s approach seems to have been one of separation and preservation with the addition obviously the addition and the original home preserved, from the outside anyway, in near it’s original form. It is a stunning bit of work. The addition, while new, does pay homage to the forms and themes used by Breuer and his contemporaries. It’s almost as if the main living area from Johnson’s Wiley House was lifted off it’s foundations and placed next to the Breuer House.

The project shows that with a team effort, owners with foresight balanced with historical importance, a really good architect steeped in the traditions of modernism and its history and an accomplished and professional builder, that these moderns need not disappear.

[PICTURE REMOVED]

Known as Breuer 1 in New Canaan this is actually Breuer 2

This is the real Breuer 1 in Lincoln Massachusetts.

Toshiko Mori

Prutting Construction