Another Look at Stone's Celanese House

Edward Durell Stone's Celanese House, two doors away from Philip Johnson's Alice Ball House, on Oenoeke Ridge Road in New Canaan, gets a lot of press, because of its style and because of the terrific renovation job its new owner, Bruce Capra, did. Capra bought it to renovate and sell but, despite all the press, it's still on the market.


New Canaan/Darien magazine has a nice story about it, here. Fans of the house won't learn much new but for those who are unfamiliar with it, it's a good introduction. And if you click here you can read what I wrote about it and a similar Stone House, in North Salem, New York, back in November. These pictures, which are better than the ones I've taken, are from the Flickr page of MidCentArc. - ta

From the newspapers

In today's Newsday, AP writer Stephanie Reitz has the kind of story that we like to see appear fairly frequently to keep the Modern Architecture movement present in the public's awareness. Bite-sized stories like this which include some history and some current issues are so valuable to inform people who don't know of these wonderful expressions of our recent history, and to keep those who appreciate and hope to protect them up-to-date and inspired.

We'd like to mention to her, though, that the status of the Alice Ball house has changed, as we noted Friday in the post below.

And we (well, Tom in particular) would ask her to reconsider the broad assertion that, "While pragmatists may worry about what others see while looking in [the large windows typical of Moderns], a modernist architecture buff focuses solely on the view looking out. That means the landscape is precisely designed, often with a few focal points such as strategically placed birch trees or a fieldstone courtyard illuminated by lights tucked under the roof line's metal fascia." Most of the Moderns we've known and loved and even lived in are designed to exist respectfully and unobtrusively in their landscape. But I know what she's talking about - homeowners like Craig Bassam and Scott Fellows, who she refers to in her story, have been extraordinarily attentive to the landscape around their homes (here's another they own in in New Canaan), as it is an extension the precisely and beautifully restored structures. They understand one of the most moving and important things about a Modern house, as Reitz quotes Craig Bassam, "It's not like living in a regular house because you're really living within the landscape" – GF

Heart of the glass house – it's definitely not a heart of glass

An interesting but perhaps overlooked part of The Glass House is its kitchen. Most people want to know how one uses the bathroom in a transparent house, and after they get over that, what about dressing and even just sleeping so exposed? Here is a short, sort of sweet story about the recollections of Raymond Girard, (88 years old), who spent a lot of time in that kitchen: he built it.

The story in the New Canaan News-Review says, "Girard's return to the Glass House marked the first steps in creating an oral history program at the Glass House museum. Christy MacLear, the executive director of the Glass House, said the staff plans to install an audio booth in the visitor's center."

The Glass House web site describes the Oral History Project thus: Artists from Robert Raushenberg to Frank Stella, architects and scholars from Vincent Scully and Robert A.M Stern, clients such as Gerald Hines, and close friends of Philip Johnson and David Whitney will be target of this Glass House project to capture and collect conversations, musings, and insight from people who frequented and contributed to the Glass House since it’s completion in 1949. – GF

Home again, home again in the Glass House

I've visited the Glass House a couple of times in my life, and passed by it since I was a child at school a half mile down the road, either on bike or in car, probably thousands of times. My most recent visit was in 2001, when it was included on the New Canaan Historical Society's Modern House Day Tour. It was a crystal-clear, deep blue-skied, but definitely chilly, day. It was October, and the trees on the facing ridge – High Ridge, in Stamford, CT – were just starting to turn color. In the G.H. itself, a small fire had been built in the fireplace which is a concave scoop from the only solid volume in the house - the cylindrical, dark brown brick bathroom enclosure. The fireplace was shallow and the fire was built of thin logs in teepee shape - converging at the top and fanned out at the bottom. The smell and the warmth of the fire and the way the house integrated with land and the brilliant day was such an inviting pull I didn't want to leave. . . But I did because we were allowed to walk all over the property, and go into the main house, the library and the brand-new visitor's center which Johnson designed and had built in anticipation of the property being turned over to the National Trust for Historic Preservation. The Library was completely enchanting, due to it's intimate size and situation, out in a field and reached by a path through the high grass. The conical volume on it's top with glass at the narrow top, funnels light right down onto the reading desk is also a bit like a thinking cap. . . really the perfect place for concentration, pastime and contemplation.

Well – OK. Thanks for putting up with my dreamy little digression . . . Here's what I intended posting about: In the house there is one painting. It is "Burial of Phocion," attributed to Nicolas Poussin (1599-1665), and it sits, because there are no walls to hang it on, on an easel in the middle of the living area. Here is a story from the New Canaan News Review that explains why a 17th C. classical painting was chosen and beloved by Johnson and his companion David Whitney, and how it lives so comfortably in the most iconic of Modernist houses. I can tell you first hand that although the easel is a little confusing and a bit of an obstacle to get used to, the painting is right at home. – GF

Friday morning note: Interesting story (and I don't say that just because you're my wife). There's a big and no-doubt mobbed Poussin show at the Met. The Times has a slide show of some of his paintings, if you're not familiar with his style, here.

On a related note, the Glass House has produced three short films giving people's impressions of the place. Most of it is very serious and solemn (the music is a giveaway that this is important stuff), and I watched it all and found only two things that were slightly funny (Frederick Noyes, Eliot's son, remembers visiting as an 8-year-old and wondering where you go to the bathroom, and someone else who I didn't recognize says that his impression of the Glass House was, "Nice wallpaper"). But they're worth looking at if you have an extra 20 minutes, here. -- TA

Architects We've Never Heard Of

Living near New Canaan, we sometimes let ourselves be fooled into thinking that if a house wasn't designed by an architect we've heard of, then it's not worth noting. We have the Harvard Five all over New Canaan, Edward Durrell Stone in North Salem, Bedford Hills and New Canaan, Edward Larabee Barnes in Pound Ridge and Mount Kisco, so what else do we need?

It's a ridiculous tautology of course -- this architect isn't interesting because we haven't heard of him; we haven't heard of him because he isn't interesting -- but it's sometimes true.

Overnight there was a notice of a house now on the market, designed in the late 1950s by Taylor Gates -- an architect I've never heard of. It's an interesting house, at least from the photos, and it's owned by a woman Gina and I sort of have a connection to, so I Googled the architect and found this MidCentArc Flickr page, which has a fantastic array of photos from around the country, many more than I could click through this morning and many of houses designed by architects I've never heard of.


So what about Taylor Gates? Unfortunately there's not a lot about him on Google -- in fact virtually nothing except the listing for the house now on the market in New Canaan, which perhaps explains why I've never heard of him. The house, by the way, is 3,500 square feet, has five bedrooms, sits on three acres, and can be yours for about two million. But it's not bad looking at all, and if you photoshopped out some of the furniture shown in the real estate ad, it'd be even better.

Marcel Breuer @ the National Building Museum

I'm sorry to be missing this show at the National Building Museum (it ends Feb. 17). Not only that, I'm sorry I didn't even know that there was a National Building Museum in Wshington D.C. before a Google alert told me that there was a show called Marcel Breuer: Design and Architecture!

Although I never met him, I could have (he died the year I graduated from art school, 1981). My parents were friendly with him and lived in this house (at left) for two summers while designing and building their own modern house in neighboring Pound Ridge, NY. The summers must have been 1949 and 1950, or maybe shift it back one to 1948 and 1949 . . .? But the house I grew up in bears more than a passing resemblance to the house on Sunset Hill Road. Only better: thanks to the radiant heat in our floors and the level rock-ledge the house grows up from, our shoes and leather items didn't sprout hairy green mold as things did at the Breuer house. Built on a hillside, rain or spring water apparently was drawn downhill, and moisture sort of got stuck in the lower floor of the house. A muggy summer meant moldy, green shoes. So goes the family story!

We visited this same house just this past Autumn as part of the New Canaan Modern House Day Tour + Symposium. The agreement with the New Canaan Historical Society was that the tour groups (16 people or so at a time) were not allowed to go in the house - or even peer in the windows! But as soon as we showed up, the gracious and willing-to-answer-questions homeowner invited us right in. A wonderful surprise and happy ending to the MHD tours, and, although I wasn't born until maybe 10 years after my parents rented the house, a sort of homecoming for me.

Here's one of those odd things that happens when you grow up hearing the names of famous people mentioned casually at home in daily conversation . . . I read the bios of these people, and I'm blown away by the brilliance they were recognized for. They spun out and away so obviously from all else that was happening at the time because of that brilliance. Their contributions have made all the difference. – GF

Alice Ball

Architectural Record published a story about the Alice Ball House today on its website to coincide with the expiration of the demolition moratorium. It runs through the usual background and then makes a couple of worthwhile points that are obvious but not often mentioned, which allows me to make some inferences:

Given the resounding success of the Glass House’s public opening last summer—tours of Johnson’s compound are sold out almost a year in advance—and the increasingly mainstream appreciation of Modern architecture, the uncertain future of the Ball house surprises many observers. But Johnson scholar Hilary Lewis points out that other trends are at work.

“We’ve seen a resurgence of interest in Modern design, but there’s been a change in people’s attitude toward size,” Lewis explains. “Johnson’s houses are part of what makes New Canaan special, but they require a different kind of living. Philip [Johnson] was proof positive that you can live comfortably in less than 2,000 square feet.”

Size may indeed be part of the problem. The Alice Ball House has been on the market for six months, and while Parris notes that in the New Canaan market many houses take that long to sell, most buyers in the area are looking for “a five-bedroom Colonial.” With two bedrooms and tile floors, though, the Ball House isn’t exactly family friendly.

So here’s what I take from that:

 Modern houses are trophies, particularly in New Canaan (as I wrote here, on my other blog). http://thissphere.blogspot.com/2006/11/collecting-modern-houses-supply.html
 expensive houses, even in New Canaan, often take a long time to sell; the Alice Ball House has been on the market for less than a year.
 rich people with families want big houses; many of the houses near the Alice Ball House, on Oenoeke Ridge Road, are obscenely big; the Alice Ball House is less than 2,000 square feet; there are plenty of rich people with no families who could happily live in the Alice Ball House as a weekend place.

And then there’s this:

According to Stover Jenkins, the author of The Houses of Philip Johnson, Johnson’s design for Alice Ball, a single woman in the conservative 1950s, was influenced by Mies Van der Rohe’s unbuilt Resor House. It features 10-foot ceilings, glass-enclosed living areas, and private bedroom and service areas.

“It’s a very rationalist house,” Jenkins says, adding that that its massing and siting give the composition the feeling of a romantic garden villa. “It’s not one of Johnson’s masterpieces, but it’s part of a collection of houses he designed in New Canaan. That collection is unique. When you start demolishing parts of a group, it’s like taking apart a community.”

So…

 it’s a nice house but it’s not a great beauty.
 We tend to think of modern houses, or any notable works of architecture, as public cultural assets, and destroying them is an affront; but houses are owned by private individuals; few private individuals who buy a house would welcome the responsibility of owning something that is part of a unique collection of houses; it’s extremely unrealistic to expect any individual to be responsible for holding together a whole community of architecturally notable works.
 The obvious exception to that last point is a situation where the “community” is a historic district, with standards for renovation and external (or even internal) changes; there are scores and scores of these – Providence, Nantucket, Old Harbor on Block Island, even the hamlet of Pound Ridge, in my town – but I don’t know of any historic districts that encompass modern houses.
 Attitudes about modern houses are changing in New Canaan but it’s still virtually impossible to imagine the town creating a historic district of modern houses, of which there are about 80 still standing.
 But the town isn’t the only entity capable of creating a historic district, and maybe isn’t even the best; private groups are trying to do it (here) but this Philip Johnson Glass House webpage, which explains the project, doesn’t seem to have been updated for at least seven months.

Tuesday is D-Day (for Demolition) for Philip Johnson's Alice Ball House

The Alice Ball House, designed by Philip Johnson and standing for all to see on Oenoeke Ridge Road in New Canaan, might be demolished in less than a week on Tuesday, January 29.

That's when an automatic demolition moratorium expires (I had mistakenly reported that the moratorium expires on February 15). The house's owner, Cristina Ross, is in a dispute with the town over the use of the property and says the only way she can resolve it is to raze the house. Although many other modern houses in New Canaan have been destroyed, including at least one each designed by the other four members of the Harvard Five (Breuer, Noyes, Johansen and Gores), this would be the first Johnson house to be demolished.



The Alice Ball House continues to be on the market, but Gillian DePalo, who specializes in selling mid-century modern houses for William Raveis Agency, told me on Tuesday that there's no cause for optimism on that front.

Here's what the New Canaan News-Review reported today:

Provided that landowner Cristina Ross submits final paperwork, building inspector Brian Platz said he will hand out a demolition permit. Ross needs to give notice of Connecticut Light & Power shut off and documentation of an asbestos survey and any necessary abatement.

"When the 90 days is up and the owner gives me all the paperwork, then I'll process the application and issue the permit," Platz said in an interview with the News~Review. "Which doesn't mean she has to."

Read more here.

Landis Gores's House for All Seasons Was Torn Down and Replaced by This

Greedy developers and homeowners who show off their wealth and bad taste by buying ostentatious and garrish homes are an easy mark in New Canaan. But just because they're easy doesn't mean we shouldn't aim at them. I used tol ike to walk along Laurel Road in New Canaan because its east side is a rocky ridge atop which sits five white moderns, at least two of which are gems. Nearby is a cul de sac called Soundview Road and the last time I was there, maybe a year ago, I did a double take because I thought I remembered a modern house there, at the top of the hill.

Then a couple of months ago I received an email from Pamela S. Gores, the widow of Landis Gores, one of New Canaan's Harvard Five architects. (She still lives in New Canaan, in the house he designed for them.) She was responding to something I had written about modern houses, sustainability and energy-efficiency:

The House For All Seasons designed by my husband, Landis Gores, included numerous energy conservation features, was demolished last year so that a larger house could be built upon the site.

Of course! That was the house I remembered, The House for All Seasons -- a house designed and built in the 1970s specifically to be energy-efficient. You can see pictures and diagrams at LandisGores.com, here.

What could be more perfect for the early years of the twenty-first century, when we need as much energy efficiency as we can get? And what could better epitomize attitudes in New Canaan, where they almost seem to be proud of destroying modern houses, than that a well-designed, energy-efficient house be razed in favor of this:


TA

Alan Goldberg Variations

There are certain houses in New Canaan that we refer to as “move-in-tomorrow” houses – places where, when we visit, we look at each other and agree that it’s so right we could move in tomorrow. One of them is the house on Laurel Road that Alan Goldberg lives in. We were there for a cocktail party that preceded the New Canaan Historical Society’s 2004 Modern House Day and immediately felt as if it enveloped us in warmth and elegance (the picture on the far right of the second row, here, shows the interior of the house).

Goldberg worked for Eliot Noyes (whose own house, on Country Club Road, is also a move-in-tomorrow house), heading Noyes’s firm’s architecture division, where he was noted for designing Mobil gas stations (among many other things – check out this story, from New Canaan-Darien magazine to get an idea of the range of his interests).

This came to mind this morning when I came across an ad for a house on Frogtown Road that Goldberg designed. It’s big by modern standards – 4,300 square feet – and was built in 1982, which makes it a late-century modern, if there is such a thing. I’m not sure I’d call it a move-in-tomorrow house but it’s worth looking at, here. --TA

Great Houses and Houses Architects Built for Themselves

It was fascinating a couple of months ago to hear John Black Lee, sitting in the living room of a beautiful and modest house he designed in New Canaan, say that he thought there were only five great houses in the United States: Fallingwater; the Glass House; a house Lee himself designed and Toshiko Mori updated, on Chichester Road in New Canaan (he called it Lee House number 2); Johnson’s Boissonnas house, and the Kaufman house, which Richard Neutra designed, in Palm Springs (my original post, a longish account of New Canaan’s Modern House Day, is here).

What called it to mind was a list that I came upon recently on a site called LottaLiving.com of 50 houses designed by modern architects for themselves. The houses are from all over and include three in New Canaan – the Glass House, Breuer’s house on Sunset Hill Road, and Eliot Noyes’s house (the other two-fifths of New Canaan’s Harvard Five – Landis Gores and John Johansen – were omitted). Nineteen of the 50 are (or were) in California, six in Illinois, and three each in Connecticut, Massachusetts and Florida. I’ve been in four of the 50: Breuer, Noyes, the Gropius house in Lincoln, Mass., and the Franzen house in Rye, N.Y. Take a look at all 50, here (there are a lot of good pictures). -- TA

Protect Your Modern House and You Might Get a Nice Income Tax Deduction

I know what Cristina Ross should be doing on January 14. Ms. Ross, you may remember, is the New Canaan architect who bought Philip Johnson's Alice Ball House for about a million and a half dollars, renovated it, put it on the market less than a year ago for three million, and now wants to tear it down.

On January 14 there are two meetings in New Canaan at which she can learn how she might be eligible for a nice income tax deduction if she protects the house with a historic easement. the money she saves in income taxes might be enough to let her keep the house on the market for a while longer, until a buyer appears who appreciates the house's historic value. Amy Grabowski of the Glass House sent me the media alert. Here's part of what it says:

This workshop will explain how to use preservation and conservation easements to protect historic properties in Connecticut and surrounding areas, using the abundance of New Canaan modernist buildings as a case study. Open to homeowners, real estate agents, historical societies, and preservation organizations across the state of Connecticut, this workshop will share the common components of easements, what to expect as the owner of an easement property, and what potential tax benefits are associated with the donation of an easement.

Representatives from the National Trust for Historic Preservation, Connecticut Trust for Historic Preservation, and Historic New England, will provide information on their preservation easement programs. Following the presentation, there will be a Q + A session as well as one-on-one consultations with participating organizations.

The meetings are at the New Canaan Historical Society. There's an afternoon session and an evening session. The hosts are the Connecticut Trust for Historic Preservation, New Canaan Historical Society, the Northeast Office of the National Trust, and the Philip Johnson Glass House. RSVP to Marty Skrelunas, the Glass House, 203.594.9884 or martin_skrelunas@nthp.org.

I happen to work for an organization that uses conservation easements as the foundation for its land preservation work. I can attest that when the conservation values are legitimate and well-documented, the tax deduction allowed by the IRS can be significant. I assume the situation is the same for an easement that protects a historic house.

I hope Cristina Ross and lots of other in New Canaan (and why not Pound Ridge, which has its own supply of modern houses) think about taking advantage of it. -- TA

Birth of the Modern

The world needs another blog. At last count there were only 39 billion of them in existence. So we’re starting this blog as a place to write about one of our enthusiasms -- modern houses, and the well-designed furniture and objects that fit in them.

We think that at their best, modern houses are beautiful, warm, inviting, and efficient in ways that are important in an era when energy consumption should be declining. And we think modern furniture and other objects are beautiful and functional, even when they’re not in modern houses.

What do we mean by “modern houses”? Generally we mean houses that were built from roughly the 1930s to the 1960s (our was built in 1939). Houses that are characterized by flat or gently-sloping roofs, an efficient use of interior space, a rejection of ornamentation for the sake of ornamentation, a connection (usually through large expanses of glass) with the natural world, and a sensitivity to the environmental conditions of the site they are built on – again, generally. But not always. Fantastic houses with a modern sensibility were built in the 1970s, ‘80s and ‘90s, and are being built today (although not many).

Unfortunately many more are being knocked down, to be replaced by cookie-cutter monstrosities. This is particular issue in our former home, New Canaan, Connecticut (the Alice Ball house, below, which was designed by Philip Johnson, is threatened now) but it's a problem elsewhere too.

Our goal is to write not only about modern houses that are threatened, but also about particularly interesting ones that aren’t, about the architects who designed them and, if we can, about the people who live in them – and also about the sensibility that informs them.

Modernism was a good model for domestic architecture in the middle of the 20th century, and we think it can be a good model for the early 21st too.