Embrace Modern

The front of Noyes House II

On Saturday June 28^th 2008 we had the opportunity to sit down with Frederick Noyes at Noyes House II in New Canaan Connecticut.

The conversation ranged from Eliot to why we like modern architecture and included a tour of the house and grounds. As we walked through the front door to the courtyard he introduced me to Calder’s “Black Beast” which still rests there. We chatted about modern architecture and I told him of some of the block structures I had done with kids at The New Canaan Daycare Center and at Miller/Driscoll in Wilton. We entered through the door next to the kitchen and ended up on the couch facing the fireplace. A preview is below. To see rhe full interview, click the link at the bottom.

FN: …..As far as what he was about, we were so immersed in it when I grew up and all of these people who turned out to be icons, Charles Eames and Calder and whoever just constantly coming through the house that you’re not aware of what it is. In fact when I read the recent book that Gordon [Bruce] did, you know, I know all that stuff but I read it and I go “holy mackerel!”

EM!: So it’s like, “what an amazing guy, wish I’d known him!”

FN: He was kind of low-key, it wasn’t like he was off doing stuff, he was but a lot of the stuff he’d be doing back there [the study behind the fireplace in the public space of the house] and my mother would be on the other side of the table and he’d be drawing away and she’d be saying, “oh you can do better than that”.

Read the interview here>>

Last night marked the “teachers get-together” before the end of day-camp this summer. It is traditional, in the camp where I spend my summers, that each teacher/councilor pull another’s name from a hat and then get/make a gag gift for them which is presented at this event over dinner.

The summer I discovered colored thread “friendship bracelets” I was presented with a book and colored thread.

This summer it has been about building. Actually most times I am around young kids and blocks it’s about building. This summer, as I have shown before,  it was all about kids under the age of 11 getting modern architecture.

They were all in to it but three stood out; Patrick, Will and Sam. Sure there were others but every morning when I walked in I was immediately ushered in to “the block area” to see my morning “gift”. Sometimes it was a tower, sometimes a smaller home but every morning I got an architectural gift.

So, imagine my surprise when, at dinner last night, the teacher who had drawn my name, Kelly, presented me with a huge box. It was light-weight and didn’t have air holes cut into it so I felt I could open it.

Inside was a model, made by Will, Sam and Pat, of Stone’s Celanese House made with tape, Popsicle sticks and construction paper along with notes about how much fun they’d had this summer building things.

I’ll post a picture of the model this evening.

I had the opportunity to go back to the Gropius-Breuer-Ford-Bogner cluster this past weekend (August 1st 2008) to take the tour of The Gropius House. My wife, reluctantly at first, tagged along.

The house is owned now by The Society for the Preservation of New England Antiquities (aka Historic New England) and seems to be in terrific shape. The house is open for tours (inside) at $10 a head and it’s well worth it. You can walk around the outside all you want for free. See their website for details.

Gropius, founder of The Bauhaus and the Harvard Professor who trained the likes of Philip Johnson, Landis Gores, John Johansen (who married his daughter Ati), I.M Pei, Paul Rudolph and Eliot Noyes, built the house in 1937-38 at a cost of $18,000, just shy of the $20,000 budget given him by  property owner Mrs. James Storrow. The plan was that she would provide a plot of land in Lincoln Massachusetts and money for the construction of the house which she would then lease to the Gropius family.

The approach to the house is up a short gravel driveway. The house itself is perched on a small hill with woods in the back and a replanted orchard in the front. We were the only people on our tour which gave us the opportunity to experience the house in a group the size of which it was designed for.

Impressions:

On first approach the house seems to be slightly contrived with it’s spiral staircase on the front of the building, glass block and long entry porch which juts out from the house and an angle. Upon further reflection, and explanation from our guide, you realize that Gropius did everything for a reason. The spiral staircase, for instance, is a private entrance for daughter Ati and to allow access to the roof deck without having to go through her upstairs bedroom. The glass block is to allow privacy with light.After cautions about not touching anything and placing surgical booties on our feet to protect the floor we went in.

The first impression is one of quiet, not unlike the inside of Noyes II in New Canaan but while Noyes is an open floor-plan in the extreme (not a bad thing) Gropius is comprised of smaller connected spaces. The mudroom at the front entrance is an example. While most would have a door separating the entry foyer from the rest of the house, here is only a curtain which when pulled back, allows light to spill into the main hall through the glass block windows. Gropius was very conscious of light. In-fact the house has very little “general” room lighting relying instead on natural light which is allowed in and through the house by the architect’s  attention to every detail.

The “quiet” in the  house is disconcerting at first. You are standing on what appears to be a solid floor, looking at a solid plaster ceiling and wood walls and yet there is no echo. This is due to the fact that the floors are actually cork, the ceiling is industrial acoustical plaster and the walls are covered in clapboard set vertically. All absorbing sound.

We toured the study with it’s Breuer designed desk, private entrance for business and large glass windows with a full view of Ati’s private staircase and more glass block, this time covered in philodendron, separating it from the dining room.

An interesting side note about the plants. When asked if they were the original plants, our guide responded that SPNEA takes all the plants to their greenhouses and then, using cuttings, repopulates the buildings with the genetic progeny of the originals. I was told that you can buy Jade Plants taken from cuttings of Walter and Ise’s original.

From the study we went into the living room which is a Marcel Breuer museum. His furniture is everywhere. There are Breuer’s nesting tables, his Long Chair and a pair of Butterfly Stools that were gifts from Sori Yanagi. The view out the windows is wonderful and you can see this house as an early example of the outside is inside approach taken to wonderful new heights by people like Noyes and Johnson.

Details are everywhere and the details I feel are what separate moderns from cheap knockoffs. For example, the dining room features a smallish round table and no chandelier. It does have a small, round metal plate in the ceiling centered over the table which is a spotlight with an adjustable aperture. The focus is set so that the light covered only the table so that when a guest is sitting at dinner, facing the great outdoors through more large windows, just the table is illuminated not the room.

More detail. In the master bedroom upstairs there is a glass wall that separates the sleeping area from the dressing area. That is because, according to our guide, Walter and Ise liked to sleep with the windows open and did not want that to influence the climate in the rest of the house. Ok, but there is a mirror mounted on the glass wall. On the bedroom side is a piture. On the dressing room side the mirror is set so that the windows and curtains on the far wall are reflected but in such a way that at first you don’t even know there is a morror there.

The curtains that divide the rooms are hanging from tacks placed in the ceiling not slapped on the outside as an afterthought.

I could sit here for hours and write a book about my visit but that would do you a disservice. The whole house is filled with little details that together show what an amazing man this was. You can see the echoes of his thoughts in the work of all who came after, even those he did not touch directly. You must experience it yourself.

Go to Lincoln, see the house.

Pictures of the exterior are below.

You can see in this picture where the inside starts and the outside stops in the glass block. The sculpture is called Winter Trees and is by a local artist.

The stair is actually an industrial fire escape and was used “off the shelf” as nay of the home’s fixtures were. The window on the right is Walter and Ise’s study. The stoop is another entrance to the house that leads directly to the study to help separate business and family is small 2300 square foot house.

Gropius was a believer in local vernacular, he just interpreted it his own way. So when after looking at traditional New England houses he found that they where primarily wood, he used wood. When he found that tradition dictated that the second floor have five windows on the front of the house, he did the same.

OK, it’s 1937 and  Gropius is  doing passive solar! The piece of the roof that seems separated from the house is there so that the sun, when at it’s highest in the summer, is blocked from the living room windows below. Why the separation? To allow the light to warm the roof deck above.

The deck above the living room with it’s Bauhaus Pink wall clearly visible. Why pink? Because it’s just “off white”  enough to kill the glare a pure white wall would have generated. It is also used on the kitchen ceiling to offset the white of the cabinets and black floor.

I love screen porches and this is a great screen porch. The view is virtually unbroken from the floor to the ceiling.

more photos on Flickr.

I was at a house near the Lee II, Parsons, Smallen, Becker cluster yesterday talking to the owners about their home. We are working on backstory for that house and will have a story soon.

Interestingly the husband was telling me that his brother and he were friends of the Parson boys during summers on Long Island. His brother had been to Parsons as a kid and one night, after a visit to the house we were discussing, he took a wrong turn out of the driveway and went by Parsons for the first time since childhood.

Seems that Mr. and Mrs. Parsons were tragically killed in an accident on the Long Island Expressway in the 1970’s or 80’s.

I went over to Wiley again during my break this afternoon and it is a busy place. From the street it look like the garage is being expanded and the ground around the house has all be disturbed.

I don’t like to walk in to peoples property. I did so a week or so ago at a house in NEw Canaan when I saw people there and caught the current owner at a bad time which regretted afterwards.

After leaving Wiley I went by the Historical Society which I found was closed. Then on to The Glass House Museum where a couple overheard my questions to the nice folks there and walked out with me.

The gentleman, whose name I did not get, said the he’d heard that the construction at Wiley had to do with waterproofing the foundation/lower floor.

More info when I get it.

It was a nice afternoon and so I thought I’d drive around and check up on previous finds.

Imagine my angst when I entered the cul-de-sac where Johnson’s Wiley House is located only to have my view from the street almost entirely blocked by orange construction fence, piles of dirt and heavy machinery.

Closer inspection, again from the car, showed that the house itself seems to be intact. The ground in front of the lower level seems to be torn up and the garage/barn has been gutted. If anyone has any info, please pass it along. Here are some pix.

Through the trees just in front of the tractor you can see Wiley’s glass box.

 The garage has been worked on and there seems to be something going on between that and the house.

Also, upon passing John M Johansen’s Campbell/Goldberg house I noticed an addition there too that is not in any pix from 2006. It looks very nice and in keeping with the original (as already modified by the owner Alan Goldberg) home’s look and feel.

I watch to much TV. In particular, Planet Green, HGTV and others of their ilk. The issue is that because of that I forget that it takes forever to build a house and not the 30-69 minutes it does on TV.

Case in point Breuer III. The pix below show a house near completion (I hope) and the overall package looks ok although I am beginning to think the new pavilion seems too different.

Either way, the main house is still there at least in spirit.

Here are some shots from today.

The new Mori pavilion at Breuer 3 (remember 1 is in Lincoln Ma. 2 is in New Canaan and so is this, number 3)

The main section (old section) of Breuer 3 is seen through the trees. The Mori pavilion is to the left and something new, a pool house maybe, is one the right.

The front entry.

I have been trying to locate houses by the H5+ in New Canaan as regular readers know.

One that has been stumping me has been Lee’s Teaze/Tease House. In doing research on something else (a friend’s house that shares a driveway with DeSilver) I found a note about the current owners of a John Black Lee house doing a restoration on the property. I took their name and, using my usual online process found that I had already found the house but not realized it. I have seen the house from the air (maps.live.com)and am fairly certain this is it.

Young kids are open to the principals set forth in mid-century modern architecture. I have shown you previous building projects at The Day Care Center of New Canaan. Today was another banner day in the block area of the center.

Three young architects seem to really get it. I’ll call them Bob, Bill and Stan. Bob and Bill are brothers who currently live in a mid-century modern in New Canaan. They understand open floor plans and minimal resources (we are working on building just big enough). Stan also understands the concepts and has a desire, at age 10, to be an architect. We have, with other students, built bridges, towers, Eliot Noyes House II and multiple open plan moderns. Today we threw something new into the mix. Terrain.

We have two kinds of blocks at the center, the usual wooden ones and dense foam blocks. We’ve used the foam blocks previously in tower building. The wooden blocks we’re used to provide a stable platform/structure up to about five feet and the foam was used to build prefab tower modules on the ground which were then installed until we hit the ceiling (right).

So today we built houses on and under terrain. We started by stacking the foam blocks to form a sort of hill. Then we took a few minutes to discuss how the house could use the hill without changing it (or with minimal changes). We decided that we’d build starting on top and then extend pavilions on decks out over the edges of the hill in the front and on both sides. Another wing would extend off the rear at the base of the hill.

The “Hill House” aka “Bird House”.

Below are more pix.

Then we discussed green roofs and using the ground as an insulator. We built an underground house where, again, the foam blocks as terrain.

The Underground House at DCoNC. The foam block represent the terrain. The four square plastic panels are skylights. The two in the foreground are over the kitchen and the others are over the hallway to the bedrooms. The rectangular clear panel is over the bathroom. You can see the atrium in the center.

This is the light coming into the kitchen  through the skylights.

This is the atrium.

This is the view from the master bedroom windows.

The atrium from the front hall.

More “Hill House” Pix

The view through the long section of the Hill House”. The rear of the house is dwon hill from the rest of the structure.

The front entry.

The skylights.

I had the opportunity to take a drive through what has to be one of the most delightful small towns in New England today, Lincoln Massachusetts. I was returning from a trip to visit relatives just south of Nashua New Hampshire.

I had gone to Lincoln because of what is there. You see, besides it’s proximity to Walden Pond and it’s having The DeCordova Museum and Sculpture Park in town it is also the former home of Walter Gropius the guy that made The Harvard Five the…well…you know. His house is on Baker Bridge Road which is to Lincoln what Chichester is to New Canaan. Marcel Breuer’s first family house, the Ford House which was designed by Gropius and Breuer for Harvard Professor and author James Ford and the Bogner House designed by and for Walter F. Bogner. There are other houses there too, over 100 in fact, enough to give New Canaan a run for it’s money.

The Gropius House with new plantings from in front of Breuer 1

This is the Walter F Bogner house.

The front of the James Ford House by Gropius/Breuer

The rear of the Gropius/Breuer James Ford house.

Front view of Breuer 1 Lincoln Ma.

The rear of Breuer 1

Being there got me thinking. The Gropius House is known on the Internet (which means it’s true) alternately as “Gropius 1″, “Gropius 2″ and “Gropius 3″. Then I thought about Breuer’s house numbers in New Canaan. It seems fairly clear that Breuer’s first family home was built in Lincoln across the orchard from his mentor’s house, the second and third in New Canaan. So, Breuer 1 in New Canaan is actually Breuer 2 and Breuer 2 in New Canaan is actually Breuer 3. My head hurts.

Numbers not withstanding, I see Lincoln as a place I’ll be visiting again.