Mid-century Modern Hudson Valley Blog

‘Hood Century’: How One Man Is Redefining Midcentury Modern Architecture

Jerald Cooper, who lives in Cincinnati, wants to recognize and help preserve modern architecture and interior design that have added to the aesthetic and culture of many Black communities. In 1928, a Black congregation in Cincinnati bought a German Gothic brick structure originally built in 1865 as a synagogue. Revelation Missionary Baptist Church, as they called it, was later led by the civil rights leader Fred L. Shuttlesworth and welcomed the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. when he visited. The congregation updated the building with a modern addition in the 1970s, giving the church an aesthetic that came to symbolize Black progress in urban centers in the wake of the Civil Rights Movement. But in 2019, that alteration was cited as a reason the church could not receive a designation as a historic site, paving the way for the building to be torn down in 2019 to help make way for a soccer stadium. The destruction deeply hurt Jerald Cooper, 39, who grew up in Cincinnati and still lives near the site of the church. “The modern addition was everything to me,” he said.” It was the best indoor-outdoor to me in the little courtyard. It was a safe place. It was our event center. It was where all my memories live.” Mr. Cooper showed off a photo of a celebration held inside Revelation Missionary Baptist Church in the 1970s. He has a vast collection of over 30,000 archives containing documents, photographs and other memorabilia from his deceased father and other people with roots in Cincinnati. “That’s my identity,” he said. “This is all we have.” Mr. Cooper, Carlton Robert Collins and John Harris chat in the empty lot where the church once stood.Credit…Madeleine Hordinski for The New York Times He decided to try to do something to preserve what he calls “hood century,” a play on midcentury architecture and interior design, giving room for new ways to explore and examine the style. He began with an Instagram page now called @hoodmidcenturymodern and is planning a crowdsourcing map to catalog the history of modernism in Black culture to better understand it, and ultimately preserve it. He said many people do not know the history of their neighborhoods. “This lack of knowing is why we started this,” he said. Mr. Cooper has developed three definitions of “Black modernism” through the hood century project: modernism designed for Black people, modernism that has been “handed down” to Black people, or modernism that has taken on cultural significance in Black popular culture. A creative consultant who rose through the hip-hop industry, Mr. Cooper studied communications and marketing in college but has no formal training or education in architecture or design. Yet, he has a love and appreciation for the buildings that came to define his childhood growing up in the College Hill neighborhood in Cincinnati. His posts through an Instagram page have captured the attention of heavyweights like GloRilla, a Grammy-nominated rapper photographed recently in Memphis by Mr. Cooper. His aim is to make architecture and design more accessible by using layman’s language to break down barriers typically set up by white academics with advanced degrees, and educate more people who are now empowered through social media to comment on the structural beauty of a modernist tower: “Joint look like carport siding 🔥🔥🔥.” So it’s simply modernism filtered through a different cultural lens, opening new ways of seeing the past, present, and future, or as Mr. Cooper would put it, “same documentary, different language.” Mr. Cooper called the Radisson Hotel in Covington, Ky., “a futuristic and clean aesthetic that still places an importance on function.” In Lincoln Heights, Ohio, sits a round pink house, known affectionately as “the round house.” The city is known as being a welcoming suburb to Black homeowners who faced discrimination in other communities. According to the website of St. Aloysius Gonzaga Church and Catholic School in Cincinnati, this church was “was dedicated in 1963” and was built in “a unique amphitheater form with the altar in the center.”Credit…Madeleine Hordinski for The New York Times He lives and works in a sparsely furnished 8,000-square-foot studio in Cincinnati’s West End, wood columns stoically divide the space like a street grid — almost resembling a neighborhood itself. During a recent interview, he shared a family archive full of photos and memorabilia from Revelation Missionary. He also showed off his father’s collection of 45’s, mostly from the 1950s and 60s, which he is learning to spin. Nearby College Hill where he grew up was a center of the Underground Railroad and a center of activity for Levi Coffin, a white abolitionist. By the time Mr. Cooper was growing up there, it was heavily redlined. After attending Mount Saint Joseph’s College, Mr. Cooper made his way to Los Angeles and London before returning to Cincinnati in 2019 when the debate over the church was in full swing. Mr. Cooper started the Instagram page that December. And now he is working on the “Hood Century” website that will feature a crowdsourced map database where users can upload text, images, audio, and video from geographically tagged locations overlaid on Google Maps. Mr. Cooper was inspired by Queering the Map, a popular map website where people upload their stories and memories to places around the world. It all connects back to Revelation Missionary. For over 60 years, his mother, Joyce Cooper, was an active parishioner. She still lives in a house nearby that she has owned for over 40 years. “My mom can’t walk down certain blocks in her neighborhood because she is reminded of that church,” Mr. Cooper said. “It was a small space, but it is big in her mind. It’s infrastructural trauma.” Original source: NY Times

This Unbuilt Frank Lloyd Wright Building Could Soon Be Finished—130 Years After He Designed It

Talks of building a Wright-designed structure are underway in the architect’s hometown When Frank Lloyd Wright passed away in 1959, he didn’t only leave behind one of the greatest architectural legacies of any American designer, but also numerous unfinished projects. In the years after his death, other architects stepped in to oversee the completion of a dozen or so in-progress projects, like the Marin County Civic Center or the Socrates Zaferiou House. A handful of projects have even been constructed completely posthumously, like a mausoleum in Buffalo built in 2004. Now, a boathouse in Wisconsin may soon join the list. Designed in 1893, Wright conceived the Monona Boathouse at just 26 years old. The young architect had just opened his practice in Chicago and was hired to design a structure along the shores of Lake Monona in his home state, Wisconsin. A group of progressive leaders headed by John Olin, the “father of Madison’s park system,” wanted to replace a collection of illegal and unattractive boat houses that had popped up over the years along the lakefront. Wright turned in a design for a circular structure with a conical roof, which would have been built if not for an economic depression in 1894. Now, nearly 130 years later, this early Wright design may soon become a reality. Last month, an ad hoc committee assembled by the Friends of Nolen Waterfront, an organization shepherding the effort to reshape Madison’s waterfront, gathered to hear design propositions from three firms tasked with reimagining the area. Representatives from Sasaki, James Corner Field, and Agency Landscape & Planning presented ideas for redeveloping 1.7 miles of shoreline, and, according to The Cap Times, a local Madison publication, many proposals included Wright’s original boathouse. Through the redevelopment, the city is hoping to provide greater waterfront access to the public in addition to implementing green infrastructure and pedestrian friendly areas near the lake. According to The Cap Times, currently there are few safe ways to access the lakefront area, and when there, it’s hard to do much more than walk or bike. While official plans have yet to be decided, this wouldn’t be the first time Madison has built a Wright design after the architect’s death. In 1997, the city constructed the Monona Terrace Community and Convention Center along the shores of the lake, which Frank Lloyd Wright had first designed between 1938 and 1959. Original Source: Architectural Digest

A Historic Frank Lloyd Wright Usonian Home in California Just Hit the Market for Nearly Four Times the Average Asking Price

It was restored by the late architect’s former apprentice, Arthur Dyson, with consultation from his grandson, Eric Lloyd Wright. The Fawcett Farm, a restored Frank Lloyd Wright home in California’s Central Valley just hit the market with L.A.-based Crosby Doe Associates for $4,250,000. It’s a whopping ask compared with other Usonian homes by the famed architect on sale this fall, including one in upstate New York asking $1.5 million and another in Wisconsin going for $725,000. Ronald Reagan, however, gave a stump speech during his gubernatorial run at this storied site. In full, the Fawcett Farm’s open living plan spans seven bedrooms, six baths, a kitchen, service room with laundry, living room with fireplaces, family room, and master bedroom. A “semi-attached small museum,” separate workshop, swimming pool, koi pond, and Japanese garden adorn its gated exterior. Inside Fawcett Farm. Wright’s signature Usonian style references roughly 60 homes he designed for middle-class families starting in 1936, with the Herbert Jacobs House in Madison, Wis. Compact, L-shaped, single-story construction unite them all, often cradling a central garden and built from sustainable methods like solar heating, passive cooling, and natural light through clerestory windows. In 1944, Stanford football star Buck Fawcett turned down a draft with the Chicago Bears to care for his family’s farm. His father, a founder at Producers Cotton Oil Company, had fallen ill. Fawcett commissioned Wright to design this home, situated on 76 acres at 21200 Center Ave. in Los Banos, California, after the two met while Fawcett was taking an architecture class at Stanford. Upon seeing photos of the site, Wright famously said, “Not much beauty there.” Fawcett retorted, “Actually, Mr. Wright, the Central Valley of California contains the most fertile agricultural land in the world, and you should consider it an honor to build a house there!” Wright finished designing the Fawcett Farm in 1955, making it among the last structures the architect envisioned before his death in 1959. It was erected posthumously in 1961, a utilitarian emblem of his distinct, organic architecture. “We have no longer an outside and an inside as two separate things,” Wright once said. “They are of each other.” More of the sprawling estate. To that end, the Fawcett Farm’s listing says “the residence and surrounding gardens afford an island of peace rising from the crops and merging with the distant mountains on the far horizon.” Meanwhile, Wright oriented the house’s direction to shield it from the valley’s heat and wind while offering sweeping views of coastal mountains to the west. According to the NY Post, Fawcett remained the property’s sole owner until his death in 2009. New owners, a couple, scooped it up in 2012 and employed Wright apprentice Arthur Dyson to restore the space. With consultation from the architect’s grandson, Eric Lloyd Wright, they re-groomed the landscaping and gardens—and beefed up security. Their work won a 2019 award from the California Preservation Foundation, selected by a jury of top architects, engineers, and journalists—with an eye beyond urban centers. “It’s probably the only real farmhouse [Wright] did,” Dyson told Eichler Network following their accolade. “The only one in California at least.” Resource: https://news.artnet.com/art-world/frank-lloyd-wright-usonian-california-real-estate-2215298

Why the World is Obsessed with MidCentury Modern Design

Today, more than ever, the midcentury modern look is everywhere. DVRs are set to capture Mad Men‘s final season playing out on AMC. Flip through the April issue of Elle Décor, and you’ll find that more than half of the featured homes prominently include midcentury furniture pieces. Turn on The Daily Show and you’ll see the guests sitting in classic Knoll office chairs. If you dine in a contemporary restaurant tonight, there’s a good chance you’ll be seated in a chair that was designed in the 1950s—whether it is an Eames, Bertoia, Cherner, or Saarinen. A few years back, you could stamp your mail with an Eames postage stamp. Meanwhile, type the words “midcentury” and “modern” into any furniture retailer’s search pane, and you’ll likely come up with dozens of pieces labeled with these design-world buzzwords—despite the fact that there is nothing “midcentury” about the items they describe. Over the past two decades, a term describing a specific period of design has become the marketing descriptor du jour. “Midcentury modern” itself is a difficult term to define. It broadly describes architecture, furniture, and graphic design from the middle of the 20th century (roughly 1933 to 1965, though some would argue the period is specifically limited to 1947 to 1957). The timeframe is a modifier for the larger modernist movement, which has roots in the Industrial Revolution at the end of the 19th century and also in the post-World War I period. Author Cara Greenberg coined the phrase “midcentury modern” as the title for her 1984 book, Midcentury Modern: Furniture of the 1950s. In 1983, Greenberg had written a piece for Metropolitan Home about 1950s furniture, and an editor at Crown urged her to write a book on the topic. As for the phrase “midcentury modern,” Greenberg “just made that up as the book’s title,” she says.  A New York Times review of the book acknowledged that Greenberg’s tome hit on a trend. “Some love it and others simply can’t stand it, but there is no denying that the 50’s are back in vogue again. Cara Greenberg, the author of ‘Mid- Century Modern: Furniture of the 1950’s’ ($30, Harmony Books) manages to convey the verve, imagination and the occasional pure zaniness of the period.” The book was an immediate hit, selling more than 100,000 copies, and once “midcentury modern” entered the lexicon, the phrase was quickly adopted by both the design world and the mainstream. The popularity of midcentury modern design today has roots at the time of Greenberg’s book. Most of the designs of the midcentury had gone out of fashion by the late 60s, but in the early- to mid-eighties, interest in the period began to return. Within a decade, vintage midcentury designs were increasingly popular, and several events helped to boost midcentury modern’s appeal from a niche group of design enthusiasts into the mainstream. By the mid-90s, a niche market of collectors had already driven up prices of the original midcentury designs. A New York Times article notes that an original Eames molded plywood folding screen, which had been out of production, was worth as much as $10,000 in 1994. In December 1999, a George Nelson Marshmallow sofa sold for an unprecedented $66,000. A year later, two George Nelson “pretzel” armchairs sold for just over $2,500 apiece, while a 1965 George Nakashima cabinet sold for $20,700. Some midcentury furniture designs, like the iconic Eames Lounge Chair, never went out of production, but many others had fallen out of production by the mid 90s. And even getting your hands on the pieces that were still being produced would have been challenging without an architect or a designer to order a piece for you. In the early 1990s that began to change: In 1993, Knoll, a major manufacturer of iconic midcentury designs, opened its SoHo showroom, once to-the-trade only (meaning pieces were sold only to designers and architects, not to consumers), to retail shoppers.  Knoll’s direct-to-consumer strategy was in part a reaction to a major downturn in the office furniture market in the late 1980s and early 1990s—the company needed to increase its customer base to make up for lost office business. The manufacturer also did away with special pricing for architects and designers (typically 40 percent less), and instead offered the lower prices to anyone who walked into the showroom.  Knoll immediately saw a huge boost in business, and eventually converted its contract showrooms into “more visible, consumer-oriented sales centers.” As the years passed, more and more pieces that were once to-the-trade only would become available directly to average consumers. Simultaneously, the 90s brought about reissues of many iconic midcentury designs. Furniture manufacturer Herman Miller was synonymous with the midcentury modern style during its heyday. Under the guidance of George Nelson, Herman Miller was among the first companies to produce modern furniture.  However, by 1994, Herman Miller had scaled back its business to focus almost exclusively on office furniture and had been out of the residential furniture market for 30 years. Like Knoll, Herman Miller would have been impacted by the downturn in the office furniture marketplace. Noticing a trend towards people working at home and creating home offices, Herman Miller saw an opportunity to return to the retail market. The company decided to reissue pieces from the Herman Miller archive under the name Herman Miller for the Home, and to offer these pieces directly to consumers. The new pieces remained true to the original designs, but they were updated to use current fabric and material technology (the reissues were also stamped with a medallion to distinguish them from vintage pieces). The company was also motivated by consumer frustration, according to Mark Shurman, director of corporate communications for Herman Miller. Both the limited number of vintage pieces and the low-quality knock-offs that had flooded the marketplace inspired Herman Miller to reissue the beloved designs. By bringing these classic designs back into production, Herman Miller was protecting its designs and its reputation.  The copycat market also gave Herman Miller confidence that the designs had a market. Herman Miller also took an early wager on e-commerce, launching a website in 1998. The company’s bets

Bernard Marson, a Catalyst for SoHo’s Renaissance, Dies at 91

An architect and developer, he helped pioneer the neighborhood’s transition from manufacturing into lofts where artists could work and live. Bernard Marson, who as an architect and developer figured prominently in the transformation of a Lower Manhattan industrial district into SoHo, an affordable neighborhood for artists to work and live before it evolved into an enclave of chic boutiques, celebrity bars and overpriced apartments, died on July 9 at his home in Los Angeles. He was 91. His death was confirmed by his son, Alexander. “Mr. Marson was responsible almost single-handedly for the growth of New York City’s SoHo into an artist community and historic district,” Raquel Ramati, who headed the Urban Design Group in Mayor John V. Lindsay’s administration, said in recommending him for a fellowship with the American Institute of Architects. Mr. Marson was already a prominent architect in the late 1970s when he happened upon the South Houston Industrial District, a 50-block area of five-and-six-story buildings, many with elegant 19th-century cast iron facades. The district had just been spared the wrecking ball when Robert Moses’s plans for a Lower Manhattan Expressway were revoked. The neighborhood was in transition, ripe for the sort of project that Mr. Marson had undertaken with the Israeli architect Moshe Safdie in Jerusalem: renovating the plaza of the Western Wall and the Jewish Quarter in the Old City from 1974 to 1976. In Manhattan, many tenants between Houston and Canal Streets, mostly small businesses — twine and paper jobbers, rag converters, window shade and corrugated box manufacturers, and garment sweatshops — were moving to places with lower taxes and labor costs, leaving behind a dwindling industrial base that city officials desperately sought to preserve. These businesses were being replaced by a burgeoning artists’ colony in the area south of Houston Street, which had already been informally named SoHo. Artist were converting high-ceilinged, undivided loft areas into studios and living spaces — a violation of city regulations in a neighborhood zoned for industrial use. In the late 1970s, when the city was in an economic slump, Mr. Marson was at the forefront of adapting several former manufacturing buildings to create an entirely new neighborhood. With other investors, he bought the architect Ernest Flagg’s 12-story Little Singer Building as well as four other buildings, including a former glue factory. Some of the space was already being used illegally by artists, but Mr. Marson discovered a loophole in what most city officials believed was an ironclad prohibition — an obscure zoning resolution that allowed for “studios with accessory living” in manufacturing districts. To the officials’ dismay, the city’s Board of Standards and Appeals ordered the Buildings Department to allow Mr. Marson to proceed. What ensued was a protracted legal and administrative conflict. On one side were city officials and some landlords seeking to enforce the zoning law to protect existing tenants and forestall gentrification; on the other, with Mr. Marson at the forefront, were developers and artists’ groups arguing for zoning variances to reflect the new realities of the real estate market. In some cases, landlords and developers took advantage of tenants who had improved the properties at their own expense by raising rents (and the hackles of the tenants), even though they were still being occupied illegally. But the proliferation of conversions from manufacturing to residential use in SoHo and nearby neighborhoods eventually led to new regulations, the establishment of the Loft Board and the authorization of many of the loft apartments that were already occupied. “This basically legalized what was already happening,” said Peter Samton, an architect and former colleague of Mr. Marson’s. “The unique aspects of his contributions were the melding of architecture and development, which at the time, some 50 years ago, were so uncommon.” In 1982, state lawmakers passed legislation that Carl Weisbrod, director of New York City’s Office of Loft Enforcement, said would protect 90 percent of loft tenants, including those in the major loft neighborhoods like SoHo, Tribeca and NoHo in Lower Manhattan. Anthony Schirripa, who was president of the American Institute of Architects’ New York chapter in 2010, described Mr. Marson at the time as “a critical player in the transformation of SoHo from its sweatshop past to its jewel-like present.”null Recent recorded sales in the neighborhood have included a two-bedroom apartment at 561 Broadway going for $4 million and a one-bedroom at 242 Lafayette Street for $2 million. Bernard Aaron Marson was born on March 21, 1931, in Manhattan to Alexander Marson, an immigrant from Russia who became a paint salesman, and Etta (Germaine) Marson, who worked in a store in Harlem. He was raised in the West Bronx. After graduating from DeWitt Clinton High School in the Bronx, he earned a degree in civil engineering from New York University’s College of Engineering in 1951. He served as a nuclear weapons officer during the Korean War. After receiving a degree in architecture from Cooper Union in 1961, he worked with Marcel Breuer as that architect’s site representative during the construction of the Whitney Museum of American Art on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, a Brutalist structure now temporarily housing the Frick Collection while the Frick museum nearby is being renovated. In his own practice, Mr. Marson was notably commissioned to renovate the 1920s Montauk Manor, the Tudor Revival hotel on the East End of Long Island designed by Schultz and Weaver and built by Carl G. Fisher, who developed Miami Beach, when the hotel was converted into condominiums in the 1970s. He married Ellen Sue Engelson in 1978. In addition to their son, she survives him, along with their daughter, Eve; and two grandchildren. The couple moved to California in 2017. original source New York Times

After Nearly 60 Years, One of Marcel Breuer’s Last Mid Century Modern Homes Has Been Demolished

After Nearly 60 Years, One of Marcel Breuer’s Last Mid Century Modern Homes Has Been Demolished By Jessica Cherner The mid century modern homes that still stand proud are proof that the most influential design movement’s reign is still very much in effect. And if there is one group of furniture designers and architects whose instantly recognizable work transcends trends as much today as it did when it emerged, it’s those belonging to the mid century modernist movement. From Florence Knoll’s tufted three-seat sofa to Isamu Noguchi’s sculptural paper lanterns, the furniture and mid century modern homes that emerged throughout post-war Europe (and eventually sweeping across the U.S.) were a poignant response to the state of the world. And today, decades after the modish movement came to an end, mid century pieces and structures have been inducted into unofficial halls of fame to preserve their integrity, legacy, and even existence. That’s why fans of modernist design were shocked to find out that Hungarian-born architect Marcel Breuer’s Geller House I, commissioned on Long Island in 1944, was demolished on January 25. Named after its residents, Bertram and Phyllis Geller, Geller House I (there would later be a Geller House II, commissioned in 1969 just down the street from the original) boasted what Breuer called a bi-nuclear design: The living, dining, and kitchen areas were separated from the sleeping quarters by way of an entry hall. The home featured quite an extensive collection of furniture that the architect designed himself. There was also a Jackson Pollock painting that the homeowners commissioned specifically for their Lawrence, New York home. “I love the way Breuer expresses his chimneys: You can see the stone on the inside and on the outside. The irony of the demolition photos is that the only thing you see still standing is the chimney,” says Liz Waytkus, executive director of Docomomo US, a non-profit organization dedicated to the preservation of modern architecture. As is the case with so many homes—especially in the U.S.—the beloved Geller I house changed hands a few times. The Gellers deeded their home to their son and his wife, Burton and Helene Geller, who sold the home in 1992 to Edward and Laura Labaton. Seeing how nearly 30 years had passed since the home was built, the new owners commissioned John F. Capobianco to make a few much-needed alterations. Like the Gellers, the Labatons sold the Geller House I in 2020 to Shimon and Judy Eckstein, who would be the last to enjoy the home’s mid century splendor. For the same reason young renegades wouldn’t graffiti historic landmarks, design aficionados wouldn’t tear down a mid century icon—at least, they aren’t supposed to. It’s an unspoken rule. Perhaps the most egregious offense? It was knocked down to make room for a tennis court. The classic mid century structure was apparently knocked down to combine two plots (with room to create a larger home) and build the tennis court. Breuer wasn’t just an architect and furniture designer who happened to live during one of the world’s most influential movements; he is one of the most recognizable names to emerge from the movement, and his legacy is proof. Marcel Breuer’s chairs—including the highly coveted Cesca—may have made him famous, but his architectural triumphs will forever be remembered. He designed everything from beach houses in Cape Cod to the Whitney Museum of American Art, a brutalist concrete masterpiece in the heart of New York. His work is history that—in Lawrence, New York—has been erased. Did we mention that the Geller House I was Breuer’s first residential project? At just 19 years old, he enrolled in Germany’s famed BAUHAUS, where he honed his skills and developed his highly specific style. The tubular steel pieces, including the Wassily chair, brought him the international acclaim he deserved. That said, he wasn’t as esteemed for his houses as he was for his furniture. During his time as a professor at Harvard University—throughout the 1950s through the end of the 1970s—he actually established an architecture practice with his design mentor, Walter Gropius. Luckily, the architect’s collection of buildings still prevails throughout the world—from Massachusetts to California. He designed more than 100 buildings just in the U.S. that still—and will—stand proud. “If you look at anything Breuer completed earlier that the Geller House I, you can still see the connection to Gropius and the influence of international style. The houses were much more boxy and had flat roofs. And here’s Breuer doing a butterfly roof on his first house. It was expressive,” Waytkus adds. That sense of expression still reigns throughout the Marcel Breuer’s chairs, tables, and shelving units, and especially so in his homes that are still standing. Source: Architectural Digest

Richard Neutra’s Architectural Vanishing Act

Richard Neutra’s Architectural Vanishing Act The Austrian-born designer perfected a signature Los Angeles look: houses that erase the boundary between inside and outside. By Alex Ross On December 15, 1929, Dr. Philip M. Lovell, the imperiously eccentric health columnist for the Los Angeles Times, invited readers to tour his ultramodern new home, at 4616 Dundee Drive, in the hills of Los Feliz. On a page crowded with ads promoting quack cures for “chronic constipation” and “sagging flabby chins,” Lovell announced three days of open houses, adding that “Mr. Richard T. Neutra, architect who designed and supervised the construction . . . will conduct the audience from room to room.” Neutra’s middle initial was actually J., but this recent Austrian immigrant, thirty-seven years old and underemployed, had little reason to complain: he was being launched as a pioneer of American modernist architecture. Thousands of people took the tour; striking photographs were published. Three years later, Philip Johnson and Henry-Russell Hitchcock, the codifiers of the International Style, hailed Neutra’s work as “stylistically the most advanced house built in America since the War.” The Lovell Health House, as the behemoth on Dundee Drive came to be known, remains a dumbfounding sight. It occupies a steep slope at the edge of Griffith Park, plunging three stories from street level. The main structural elements are a skeleton of light steel, a thin skin of sprayed-on concrete, and ribbons of casement windows, which run across the south-facing side. It is a monumental yet unreal creation—a silver-white vessel that seems to have docked at the top of a canyon. Inside, you have the sense of hovering in space as you look down the thick-grown hillside toward a hazy horizon and a possible sea. Neutra wrote of the design in characteristically convoluted fashion: “Through continuity of fenestration, linkage with the landscape, we should draw again on what the vitally dynamic natural scene had been for a hundred thousand years, and make it once more a human habitat.” Can an aggressively modern house become indivisible from its surroundings? Neutra contemplated that challenge throughout his career, which extended from novice efforts in Germany, in the early nineteen-twenties, until his death, in 1970. The Health House, majestically at odds with its environment, doesn’t quite hit the mark. But if you venture a few miles to the southeast, into Silver Lake, you can see Neutra in a stealthier, suppler mode. In the early twentieth century, the neighborhood was settled by avant-garde artists, radical activists, and bohemians. Neutra joined the throng in 1932, building himself a studio-residence, the Neutra VDL House, by the Silver Lake Reservoir. Between 1948 and 1962, he built nine more houses a block to the south, in an area now called the Neutra Colony. Huddled under lofty pines and eucalyptus trees, these dwellings embody the architect’s seductive later manner: low, wide façades; plate-glass windows under overhanging roofs; darker, woodsier trim. Reticent, almost inconspicuous, they gaze out at joggers and dog walkers with a guarded serenity. The architecture within calls as little attention to itself as possible, so that your eyes are drawn to the reservoir shimmering through the foliage. “Thanks, I knew I could count on you to turn my problem into something way worse that happened to you.” Although Neutra enjoyed fame from the thirties onward—in 1949, he appeared on the cover of Time—clients of relatively modest means could still afford to hire him. (Several of the Neutra Colony houses were first owned by Japanese American families whose members had been in internment camps during the Second World War.) Those economics are long gone. Amid a prolonged vogue for mid-century modernism, Neutras go for extravagant prices. The Kaufmann House, a Palm Springs idyll that Neutra built for the department-store owner Edgar J. Kaufmann—who also commissioned Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater—is on the market for $16.95 million. Latter-day Neutra owners include hedge funders, shipping magnates, Saudi royals, and Hollywood superagents, although artists and academics remain in the mix. Those with more limited resources can settle for house numbers executed in Neutraface, a sans-serif font based on the architect’s favored lettering. Sometimes called the “gentrification font,” it adorns countless neo-mid-century developments. Neutra’s association with luxury may be one reason that he has failed to secure a central place in the twentieth-century architectural canon, alongside the likes of Wright, Le Corbusier, Mies van der Rohe, and Louis Kahn. Some critics would rank him below Rudolph Schindler, the other great Austrian modernist in Los Angeles, who helped bring Neutra to the city and later fell out with him. Neutra left behind no signature landmark on the order of the Guggenheim Museum or the Salk Institute. One project in which he invested particularly high hopes—a public-housing complex called Elysian Park Heights—stirred reactionary ire in the fifties, and was never built. Yet the fact that Neutra did his best work in domestic spaces should not detract from his significance. His mode of ground-hugging modernism—with clean, cool lines that play off against the year-round California green—helped to define the local architectural vernacular. Above all, Neutra has inspired lasting devotion in the people who have made his homes their own. Earlier this year, I began driving around L.A. with a copy of Thomas S. Hines’s authoritative 1982 book, “Richard Neutra and the Search for Modern Architecture,” seeking out more than a hundred local structures. I spoke to several original owners, ranging in age from eighty-four to a hundred and two. The houses may not be as dreamily immaculate as they are in the famous images by the architectural photographer Julius Shulman, but their stories say something deeper about Neutra’s achievement, which has less to do with stylish surfaces than with underlying rhythms—the search for a shelter that is also open to the world. “Well, I don’t know about favorite,” Susie Akai Fukuhara said with a smile, when I asked about her favorite memories of Neutra. She has lived in the Neutra Colony since 1962, when the architect built a roomy home for her and her first husband, John Akai. The interior designer David Netto, who lives in the Neutra next door, introduced me to her.

USModernist

USModernist For passionate architecture fans, which are many, Modernist houses evoke a true love. These houses connect people to nature and the land through carefully designed spaces that are relaxing, compelling, and utterly addictive. For many, Modernist houses are livable sculptures, and many of these mid-century sculptures are endangered. Their locations, often on prime real estate, can be worth much more than the houses, making demolition and development an attractive option. By connecting detailed information, histories, and maps, we help Modernist houses in danger be purchased or otherwise preserved. We raise awareness about Modernist preservation and preserve the legacy of exceptional design for future generations. We have been recognized with 16 awards for local, state, and national leadership in historic preservation, giving thousands of people access to the most exciting residential architecture, past and present. We connect people with their past or their future dream homes and preserve histories for future generations. We started as Triangle Modernist Houses in 2007 and became a nonprofit 501C3 in 2009. By 2013, having documented 2,400 Modernist houses and 300 architects in North Carolina, the name changed to NCModernist®. In 2015, we launched the national site USModernist®. NCModernist continually hosts wildly popular local house tours, design networking events, and architecture movies. USModernist hosts national and international tours; the largest online digital archive of well-known mid-century Modernist houses and architects in America; a 3.1M+ page architecture library, and the USModernist Radio podcast.  NCModernist has helped hundreds of Modernist houses change hands and was directly involved in saving The Taylor House, Chapel Hill, by John Latimer and George Matsumoto; The Crumpler House, Durham, by John Latimer; The Kornberg House, Durham, by Jon Condoret; The Lasater House, Charlotte, by AG Odell; The Carr House, Durham, by Kenneth Scott; The Howard Residence, Greensboro, by Thomas Hayes; The Mattocks House, Chapel Hill, by Sumner Winn; The Raleigh Frye Lake House, Hickory, by Jim Sherrill. We’ve lost too many to the bulldozer, such as the Catalano House, Raleigh, by Eduardo Catalano, destroyed 2001; Paschal House, Raleigh, by James Fitzgibbon, destroyed 2013; Ashford House, Raleigh, by Sam Ashford, destroyed 2014; Kistler-Hollstein House, Fayetteville, by Dan MacMillan, destroyed 2005; Goist House, Raleigh, designed by Terry Waugh, destroyed 2015. Original source can be read from: USModernist

MoMA Built a House. Then It Disappeared. Now It’s Found.

MoMA Built a House. Then It Disappeared. Now It’s Found. In 1950, the museum exhibited Gregory Ain’s modernist creation. It’s now nestled in Croton-on-Hudson, N.Y. CROTON-ON-HUDSON, N.Y. — In 1950, a glass-walled house, now nestled amid flowering trees here, spent a few months in Manhattan. Skyscrapers loomed over its flat roof while it was on exhibit in the Museum of Modern Art’s garden. The installation, designed by the architect Gregory Ain and co-sponsored with Woman’s Home Companion magazine, was meant to inspire creativity on a budget for residential subdivisions. A few months ago, however, George Smart, a historian who founded and runs USModernist, a nonprofit in Durham, N.C., which focuses on mid-20th-century modernist homes, pored through MoMA’s archives. He discovered that the building had survived and identified the owners, sharing this information with The New York Times. “I could not believe that the most famous house in New York in 1950 would simply vanish,” he said. This spring, when The Times contacted the owners, they were surprised to learn that scholars had been pursuing their home. Mary Kelly, a retired New York City Transit Authority executive, bought the property in 1979 with her husband, Ralph (who died in 2013), and she lives there now with three adult sons. Soon after the family had moved in, neighbors told them the building had been born at MoMA. Mary Kelly then alerted the museum, but apparently no records of her calls were kept. “I knew that it was a famous house,” she said. “This house was not lost. It’s been here all this time.” Amanda Hicks, a spokeswoman for MoMA, said that the museum is delighted by the Croton-on-Hudson finding and noted that its archival files are becoming more searchable. Research, she added, is “an iterative and revelatory process.” Ain, who died in 1988, collaborated on the house with his colleagues Alfred Day and Joseph Johnson and with museum staff members, including Philip Johnson and Natalie Hoyt. (The team’s original 51.5-inch model of the house, which surfaced a few years ago, has returned to MoMA.) The furnishings were practical, mass-produced pieces, by prominent figures like Charles and Ray Eames. Hanging on the walnut walls were paintings and prints by Georges Braque, René Magritte and Edward Hopper. Light bulbs were tucked into ceiling coves. Woman’s Home Companion described the interior as an ideal setting “for the odds and ends of family living that are bound to turn up in any happy home.” Cornelia Cotton, a nonagenarian in Croton-on-Hudson who is a writer and gallery owner, remembers touring the Ain house at MoMA (entry tickets were 50 cents). “It was very plain, it was very simple and affordable and appealing,” she said. For Ain, the commission did not amount to much of a professional springboard. His daughter, Emily Ain, said he was “extremely modest” and not a self-promoter. Based in Los Angeles, he did gain recognition during his career for designing unpretentious, sunny dwellings with changeable floor plans. “He wanted to solve problems for ordinary working people,” said Anthony Denzer, a professor at the University of Wyoming. Progressive activism, including support for desegregation, and an interest in Soviet architecture helped land Ain on the F.B.I.’s Communist Security Index of “‘dangerous,’ subversive individuals,” Denzer writes in an essay in the forthcoming book “Gregory Ain and the Construction of a Social Landscape.” Smart found correspondence showing that MoMA had auctioned off the house’s components to Isidore Skol, a periodontic technician, and his wife, Marcella Skol, a schoolteacher. Marcella’s father, Hyman Fleischman, a building restorer, disassembled the house in the museum garden and then stored the parts for a while in an airplane hangar until reassembly began on the Croton property. The Skols’ daughter, Sondra Skol Bell, said her family “felt just so fortunate” to own what was known as “the museum house.” With Smart uncovering her family’s role in the house’s journey, she said, “I’m glad the mystery is solved.” (A previous MoMA garden building, designed by Marcel Breuer, had been shipped to Tarrytown, N.Y., where it has been preserved. The Ain house’s successor, in Japanese style, was turned into a museum in Philadelphia.) In 1969, the Skols sold the house to owners who neglected the gardens, did not clean up after their two dozen cats and had a taste for purple woodwork and green carpet. A decade later, when the Kellys went house hunting, they recognized the property’s potential. “As soon as I saw the house, I said, ‘This is it.’ I said, ‘Go no further,’” Mary Kelly said. Since her childhood in Yonkers, Kelly added, she had dreamed of living in the kind of glamorous, transparent modernist homes she had seen in movies. In a mostly glass house, she said, “You don’t feel closed in to anything.” A local historian, Jane Northshield, would occasionally stop by to take photographs. But somehow word never reached MoMA’s circles that the Ain house was safe. The Kellys have preserved the interior walnut planes, cove lighting and most of the room configurations. They added reinforced window glass, skylights, pink carpet, crystal chandeliers and stained-glass lamps. Walls are covered in paintings and prints, whether reproductions of Impressionist masterpieces or folk art portraits, alongside family photos. “I just like art, I’ve got all kinds of art, I don’t care what it is,” Kelly said. Knickknacks on the shelves include creamy ceramic vessels that her sons made as children and souvenirs of vacations nationwide — the very kind of “odds and ends of family living” that Woman’s Home Companion had envisioned. A coating of sparkly green stucco on MoMA’s wooden exterior “makes it maintenance-free,” Shaun Kelly, the eldest son, said. He and his brother Scott are retired from the Postal Service and the New York City Transit Authority, respectively; a third brother, Parrish, works as a dietary aide at a nearby nursing home. (A fourth brother, Kryss, died in 2013.) The property’s 2.7 acres are lush with unusual trees, such as Japanese snowbell and weeping huckleberry. “If it doesn’t give me a flower, it can’t come here,” Mary Kelly said. Neoclassical stone statues, vintage

Mid-Century Modern Revival: To Many Millennials, Frank Lloyd Wright was Right

Mid-Century Modern Revival: To Many Millennials, Frank Lloyd Wright was Right When architects like Frank Lloyd Wright and Paul Rudolph first threw off the shackles of tradition and began building homes with flat roofs, large expanses of glass, and open floor plans, it was a revolution and a revelation for some, an outrage to others who felt that too many rules were being broken. “For a while people were just tearing them down, but people are seeking them out now — they’re the anti-McMansion,” says Ellen Hilburg, co-founder of the real estate resource Mid Century Modern Hudson Valley. “For some people, it’s a nostalgia factor. But Millennials are discovering them, too. It’s an aesthetic that appeals to people who are aware and environmentally conscious.” Hilburg grew up in such a house, then studied art and architecture in San Francisco and then at the Art Institute of Chicago. That background, honed by decades of Hudson Valley real estate experience and a longstanding love of the mid-century modern aesthetic, makes her uniquely well positioned to help you find the perfect mid-century beauty for yourself. But, for a brief shining moment before tract housing and McMansions began to dominate the landscape, they were the thinking person’s alternative: houses that were carefully sited for intuitive passive solar, full of light and space to bring the outside in. “I track interesting mid-century modern homes, from Scarsdale up to Hudson, and help the people who love these homes to find them,” she says. “We work with contractors who are experts at retrofitting and renovating them without destroying the original vision. They’re inherently livable—light and bright, often on one floor. You can update the original large expanses of glass, redo the radiant heating in the floor, and add whatever cutting-edge amenities you love—the bones of the house, the basic design, will work with you and not against you.” Original source can be read from: Chronogram