Vocapedia > Arts > Architecture > 20th century > Modernism

A 22-acre estate, Sea Cove Farms,

with 2,000 feet of waterfront

on Seatuck and Little Seatuck Creeks in Eastport,

is about to enter the market at $12 million.

The bi-level home,

designed by the modernist architect

Horace Gifford,

was completed in 1979.

An extension to its western side, seen above,

was designed by Philip Babb in 1994-96.

The 6,000-square-foot cedar-clad house,

set on a landscaped 5.1 acre parcel,

has six bedrooms and six bathrooms.

The property includes a 2.1 acre buffer lot to the east

and a 14.8 acre lot used for organic farming.

Photograph: Nicole Bengiveno

The New York Times

 Real Estate

A Secluded Modern

22-Acre Eastport Estate at $12 Million        NYT        JULY 25, 2014

https://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/27/
realestate/22-acre-eastport-estate-at-12-million.html

The master suite has 11-foot ceilings, a fireplace,

and an adjacent home office with curved walls of glass

overlooking Seatuck Creek and Little Seatuck Creek.

Photograph: Nicole Bengiveno

The New York Times

 Real Estate

A Secluded Modern

22-Acre Eastport Estate at $12 Million        NYT        JULY 25, 2014

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/27/realestate/22-acre-eastport-estate-at-12-million.html

The living room section of the great room

has a wood-burning fireplace with a stone surround;

a floating staircase leads to the great room,

which has views across Moriches Bay to Dune Road

in Westhampton.

Photograph: Nicole Bengiveno

The New York Times

 Real Estate

A Secluded Modern

22-Acre Eastport Estate at $12 Million        NYT        JULY 25, 2014

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/27/realestate/22-acre-eastport-estate-at-12-million.html

The 20-by-40 foot great room

has cedar walls, oak floors, ten-foot ceilings

and a wall of south-facing windows

with sliders that open to the half-moon shaped deck.

Photograph: Nicole Bengiveno

The New York Times

Real Estate

A Secluded Modern

22-Acre Eastport Estate at $12 Million        NYT        JULY 25, 2014

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/27/realestate/22-acre-eastport-estate-at-12-million.html

USA > modernism        UK / USA

https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/gallery/2018/sep/11/
memorable-monuments-to-american-modernism-in-pictures

https://www.theguardian.com/cities/gallery/2018/jun/05/
suburban-modernism-metroland-london-architecture

http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/06/06/
531751099/william-krisel-architect-who-helped-define-california-modernism-dies-at-92

http://www.npr.org/2016/02/21/
467352937/meet-the-architect-who-helped-bring-modernism-to-the-masses

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/26/us/
palm-springs-modern-architecture-tours.html

Modernist design        USA        after World War II        USA

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/17/
arts/design/walter-pierce-architect-of-modernist-homes-is-dead-at-93.html

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/27/
arts/design/balthazar-korab-architectural-photographer-dies-at-86.html

Modernist architect        USA

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/27/
arts/design/john-m-johansen-last-of-harvard-five-architects-dies-at-96.html

modernist architecture        UK

https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/gallery/2017/jul/19/
modernist-architecture-photography-corbusier-concrete-gibberd-hill

modernist villa        UK

http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2013/jun/30/
eileen-gray-e1027-corbusier-review

modernist house        USA

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/27/
realestate/22-acre-eastport-estate-at-12-million.html

the Modern House        UK

http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/gallery/2015/sep/12/
the-modern-house-in-pictures

the Harvard Five        USA

a group that made New Canaan, Conn.,

a hotbed of architectural experimentation

in the 1950s and ’60s

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/27/
arts/design/john-m-johansen-last-of-harvard-five-architects-dies-at-96.html

Interior with Mirrored Wall, 1991. Roy Lichtenstein

Oil and Magna on canvas,, 126 1/8 x 160 inches.

Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. 92.4023.

 © Estate of Roy Lichtenstein.

http://www.guggenheimcollection.org/site/artist_work_lg_88_3.html

Julius Shulman        Case Study House #22        1960

Los Angeles, CA        Pierre Koenig, architect        gelatin silver print

http://www.wirtzgallery.com/exhibitions/2003/2003_06/shulman/js13.html
http://www.wirtzgallery.com/exhibitions/2003/2003_06/shulman/shulman_2003_2.html
http://www.wirtzgallery.com/main.html
http://www.guardian.co.uk/obituaries/story/0,3604,1190539,00.html
http://www.usc.edu/dept/architecture/slide/koenig/

Related

http://www.latimes.com/features/home/la-hm-stahl27-2009jun27,0,504751.story

Julius Shulman        Case Study House #21        1958

Los Angeles, CA        Pierre Koenig, architect        chromogenic print

http://www.wirtzgallery.com/exhibitions/2003/2003_06/shulman/shulman_2003_2.html

http://www.wirtzgallery.com/main.html

Julius Shulman        Singleton House        1960

Los Angeles, CA        Richard Neutra, architect        gelatin silver print

http://www.wirtzgallery.com/exhibitions/2003/2003_06/shulman/shulman_2003_2.html

http://www.wirtzgallery.com/main.html

Julius Shulman        Chuey House        1958

Los Angeles, CA        Richard Neutra, architect        gelatin silver print

http://www.wirtzgallery.com/exhibitions/2003/2003_06/shulman/shulman_2003_2.html

http://www.wirtzgallery.com/main.html

Julius Shulman        Recreation Pavilion, Mirman Residence        1959

Arcadia, CA        Buff, Straub and Hensman, architects        chromogenic print

http://www.wirtzgallery.com/exhibitions/2003/2003_06/shulman/shulman_2003_2.html

http://www.wirtzgallery.com/main.html

Julius Shulman        Case Study House #9 / Entenza House        1950

Pacific Palisades, CA        Eames & Saarinen, architects        gelatin silver print

http://www.wirtzgallery.com/exhibitions/2003/2003_06/shulman/shulman_2003_1.html

http://www.wirtzgallery.com/main.html

Architecture

Architect Without Limits

May 15, 2009

The New York Times

By NICOLAI OUROUSSOFF

Frank Lloyd Wright died half a century ago, but people are still fighting over him.

The extraordinary scope of his genius, which touched on every aspect of American life, makes him one of the most daunting figures of the 20th century. But to many he is still the vain, megalomaniacal architect, someone who trampled over his clients’ wishes, drained their bank accounts and left them with leaky roofs.

So “Frank Lloyd Wright: From Within Outward,” which opens on Friday at the Guggenheim Museum, will be a disappointment to some. The show offers no new insight into his life’s work. Nor is there any real sense of what makes him so controversial. It’s a chaste show, as if the Guggenheim, which is celebrating its 50th anniversary, was determined to make Wright fit for civilized company.

The advantage of this low-key approach is that it puts the emphasis back where it belongs: on the work. There are more than 200 drawings, many never exhibited publicly before. More than a dozen scale models, some commissioned for the show, give a strong sense of the lucidity of his designs and the intimate relationship between building and landscape that was such a central theme of his art.

Taken as a whole, the exhibition conveys not only the remarkable scope of his interests, which ranged from affordable housing to reimagining the American city, but also the astonishing cohesiveness of that vision

— an achievement that has been matched by only one or two other architects in the 20th century.

One way to experience the show is as a straightforward tour of Wright’s masterpieces. Organized by Thomas Krens and David van der Leer, it is arranged in roughly chronological order, so that you can spiral up through the highlights of his career: the reinvention of the suburban home and the office block, the obsession with car culture, the increasingly outlandish urban projects.

There is a stunning plaster model of the vaultlike interior of Unity Temple, built in Oak Park between 1905 and 1908. Just a bit farther up the ramp, another model painstakingly recreates the Great Workroom of the Johnson Wax Headquarters in Racine, Wis., with its delicate grid of mushroom columns and milky glass ceiling.

Such tightly composed, inward-looking structures contrast with the free-flowing spaces that we tend to associate with Wright’s fantasy of a democratic, agrarian society.

But as always with Wright, the complexity of his approach reveals itself only after you begin to fit the pieces together. For Wright, the singular masterpiece was never enough. His aim was to create a framework for an entire new way of life, one that completely redefined the relationships between individual, family and community. And he pursued it with missionary zeal.

Wright went to extreme lengths to sell his dream of affordable housing for the masses, tirelessly promoting it in magazines.

The second-floor annex shows a small sampling of its various incarnations, including an elaborate model of the Jacobs House (1936-37), its walls and floors pulled apart and suspended from the ceiling on a system of wires and lead weights. One of Wright’s earliest Usonian houses, the one-story Jacobs structure in Madison, Wis., was made of modest wood and brick and organized around a central hearth. Its L-shape layout framed a rectangular lawn, locking it into the landscape, so that the homeowner remained in close touch with the earth.

The ideas Wright explored in such projects were eventually woven into grander urban fantasies, first proposed in Broadacre City and later in The Living City project. In both, Usonian communities were dispersed over an endless matrix of highways and farmland, punctuated by the occasional residential tower.

The subtext of these plans, of course, was Wright’s war with the city. To Wright, the congested neighborhoods of the traditional city were anathema to the spirit of unbridled individual freedom. His alternative, shaped by the car, represented a landscape of endless horizons. Sadly, it was also a model for suburban sprawl.

Wright continued to explore these themes until the end of his life, even as his formal language evolved. A model of the Gordon Strong Automobile Objective and Planetarium captures his growing obsession with the ziggurat and the spiral. A tourist destination that was planned for Sugarloaf Mountain, Md., but never built, the massive concrete structure coiled around a vast planetarium. The project combines his love of cars and his fascination with primitive forms, as if he were striving to weave together the whole continuum of human history.

In his 1957 Plan for Greater Baghdad, Wright went a step further, adapting his ideas to the heart of the ancient city. The plan is centered on a spectacular opera house enclosed beneath a spiraling dome and crowned by a statue of Alladin. Set on an island in the Tigris, the opera house was to be surrounded by tiers of parking and public gardens. A network of roadways extends like tendrils from this base, weaving along the edge of the river and tying the complex to the old city.

Just across the river, another ring of parking, almost a mile in diameter, encloses a new campus for Baghdad University.

Wright’s fanciful design was never built, but it demonstrates the degree to which he remained distrustful of urban centers. Stubborn to the end, he saw the car as the city’s salvation rather than its ruin. The cosmopolitan ideal is supplanted by a sprawling suburbia shaded by palms and date trees.

And what of the Guggenheim? Some will continue to see it as an example of Wright’s brazen indifference to the city’s history. With its aloof attitude toward the Manhattan street grid, the building still pushes buttons.

For his part, Wright saw the spiral as a symbol of life and rebirth. The reflecting pool at the bottom of his rotunda represented a seed, part of his vision of an organic architecture that sprouts directly from the earth.

Yet Wright also needed the city to make his vision work. The force of the spiral’s upward thrust gains immeasurably from the grid that presses in on all sides. The ramps, too, can be read as an extension of the street life outside. Coiled tightly around the audience, they replicate the atmosphere of urban intensity that Wright supposedly so abhorred.

Or maybe not. In preparing for the show, the Guggenheim’s curators decided to remove the frosting from a window at the lobby’s southwest corner. The window frames a vista over a low retaining wall toward the corner of 88th Street and Fifth Avenue, where you can see people milling around the exterior of the building. It is the only real view out of the lobby, and it visually locks the building into the streetscape, making the city part of the composition.

I choose to see it as a gesture of love, of a sort, between Wright and the city he claimed to hate.

Architect Without Limits,
NYT,
15.5.2009,
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/15/arts/design/15wrig.html

Wright

- Designed Fountain Works _ Finally

October 26, 2007

Filed at 10:48 a.m. ET

The New York Times

By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

LAKELAND, Fla. (AP) -- The giant water fountain Frank Lloyd Wright designed here is no longer the unworkable dud it was for decades.

Thanks to computers and extensive restoration, the ''Water Dome'' finally produces the three-story dome of water Wright envisioned 70 years ago as the centerpiece of his architectural design for Florida Southern College's campus.

''He was very far ahead of his time, and sometimes materials are just catching up with him,'' said New York-based architect Jeff Baker, who heads preservation work at the college where 12 structures make up the largest collection of Wright's works on a single site.

More than 1,000 people cheered the fountain's opening Thursday, when the school celebrated Wright's vision if not his engineering ability. Spectators ringed the fountain more than 10 deep in places, and some had black and white pictures taken with a cutout of Wright.

Construction of the fountain took place between 1941 and 1958, and Wright himself visited the campus during construction. Florida Southern students today attend class in Wright-designed rooms and walk under his covered esplanades. The school, affiliated with the United Methodist Church, also holds services in the architect's chapels.

Until now, his Water Dome though was a disappointment. Its pool was completed in 1948, and contemporary newspapers said the fountain's opening was imminent. That never happened. Low water pressure, or low funds, may have been the cause. In the late 1960s, the school covered much of the pool with cement, creating three smaller ponds.

A $1 million restoration started a year ago. Preservationists visited Wright's archives in Spring Green, Wis., to research early plans and letters between engineers. Paint analysis recreated the original bright aqua of the fountain's basin, and a Wright-designed pump house was reclaimed.

Other features, however, Wright might not recognize: Computers control the water streaming from the 74 nozzles; public water rather than a well fills the basin, which is a few inches shallower because of new building codes. Architects also added underwater lighting.

There's even a modern solution for a problem rumored in Wright's time: that wind blew the water around, drenching students. A wind meter on top of a nearby building can now help adjust the water height if winds get too high.

That feature had been turned off Thursday night, however, so the dome would stay at its maximum, 45-foot height. And mist swept off the fountain, cutting short a performance by a band under its path. Most students didn't seem to mind, however, taking pictures with cameras before heading to the library or dorms.

Freshman Shannon Ryan, 18, rode a Ferris wheel the school had set up for an overhead view. How would Wright feel about finally seeing his fountain on? Ryan thought she knew: ''Um, hello, it took you long enough.''

Wright - Designed Fountain Works _ Finally,
NYT,
26.10.2007,
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Wright-Fountain.html - broken link

Group Seeks

to Restore 1916 Wright Home

June 16, 2007

Filed at 10:25 p.m. ET

The New York Times

By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

MILWAUKEE (AP) -- Pieces of architectural history sit on Milwaukee's south side -- a row of four duplexes and two cottages designed by Frank Lloyd Wright more than 90 years ago for low-to-moderate-income families.

But years of extreme makeovers, including aluminum siding added to one house, rendered some of them shells of their former designs. Now a nonprofit group wants to restore the Frank Lloyd Wright charm to one of the single-family homes -- right down to the crushed quartz stone-infused stucco on the exterior.

Frank Lloyd Wright Wisconsin has bought one of the single-family houses and a duplex, and plans to start restoring an 850-square-foot, two-bedroom home to its 1916 condition, possibly as early as fall.

The group hopes to make it a museum, inspire others to renovate the four remaining structures and motivate architects to design housing for the disadvantaged.

Wright historian Jack Holzhueter said the houses, known as the American System-Built Homes, are the best example of the beloved architect's lifelong pursuit of providing affordable housing for low-income residents.

''It's early relatively in his career, 1916,'' he said. ''It's a very large group of buildings. No other cluster of Wright buildings begins to resemble this one, in proximity, density, etceteras.''

Wright, who was born in Richland Center, Wis., and died in 1959 at the age of 92 in Arizona, is known for his sprawling, earth-hugging homes in the countryside, but he took a special interest in creating low-cost shelter in urban settings. He believed all economic classes were entitled to good architecture.

Wright produced more than 900 drawings of various designs. To reduce costs, factory-cut materials were assembled onsite, said Mike Lilek, the group's treasurer.

Developer Arthur Richards built the compact, geometric homes -- five of the six have flat roofs -- in 1915 and 1916. They sold originally for $3,500 to $4,500. Eight others have been identified around the Midwest. Wright and Richards recruited builders from around the Midwest for the American System project through 1917, but the effort was largely abandoned because of World War I and Wright's other endeavors, Lilek said.

Frank Lloyd Wright Wisconsin bought the single-family home in 2004 for $130,000 from an owner who lived there for about 40 years and a duplex for $142,000 in 2005.

The group hopes its efforts serve as a catalyst for the entire block's restoration, said Denise Hice, the group's president. Members also want to create educational programs.

''We feel that it's important that we restore them as well and open them again leading into the educational component to maybe have people design homes today just like Wright did almost 100 years ago,'' Hice said.

Lilek expects work on the house to take more than a year.

They have so far raised $298,500 toward the $379,369 needed, Lilek said.

The home is in relatively good shape. One of the first tasks will be to remove an unoriginal enclosed porch, which surrounds full-length windows inside. The group wants to replace the 3/4-inch layer of stucco outside with an original 1/4-layer with crushed quartz stone. It will recondition the roof with modern materials and rebuild an enclosed rear stairwell.

Other repairs include updating electrical, removing varnish on woodwork, stripping the hardwood floors and restoring the wooden kitchen counter.

The Historic Preservation Institute at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, School of Architecture and Urban Planning, helped research the house's original condition, Lilek said. Its work, along with that of Italian conservator Nikolas Vakalis, can be seen in swatches of color on the walls that show the original paint.

Vakalis had 17 samples of finishes, plaster, stucco and paint analyzed by a lab to determine the composition so they could be replicated. They will try to restore as much as they can, but not if it won't hold up, Lilek said.

Eventually, they will also have furniture made, based on Wright's drawings. Wright saved space by adding a folding door to the kitchen, a built-in kitchen table and chairs and built-in closets, which are all still there.

Caretaker William Krueger said despite the square footage, the house is spacious. He earned his master's degree in architecture last year and gets a small stipend to live in the house and give tours.

''I have no problems entertaining up to 30 guests in this house,'' he said. ''It's so small and yet things are interlocked or overlapping each other.''

Hice said they have charged $2 for tours once a month for about a year and plan to give tours during restoration.

The group eventually wants to refurbish the exterior of the duplex, which is now a rental property. But what will be done, if anything, to the remodeled interior has not been decided, Lilek said.

Their intent isn't to make each house into a museum. ''We're going to try and turn these back to owner-occupied buildings,'' he said. ''I don't know if me or you would move into a building in its 1916 condition.''

Frank Lloyd Wright Wisconsin bought the two houses because no one else was making a major effort to preserve them, Hice said, except for the Arena family.

Jillayne and Dave Arena bought one of the duplexes 25 years ago. They put hundreds of thousands of dollars into making it a one-family home, after it had been a rental property, Jillayne Arena said.

They removed paneling, restored the original hardwood floors, added stucco on the exterior, created 80 leaded glass windows and attached trellises to the front.

She said living in Wright's design has taught her to approach problems differently.

''I think when you live in a house like this you ... understand that the conventional view, the conventional wisdom is not always what should be,'' she said. ''So you kind of end up thinking and being perhaps a bit eccentric.''

Holzhueter, the historian, said Wright wanted to bring beauty into everyone's home.

''Beauty was the goal -- to live in harmony with your surroundings, to have a more beautifully proportioned and designed house for very little money,'' he said, ''and that would bring you into a state of greater appreciation for the world around you and for your own potential.''

Group Seeks to Restore 1916 Wright Home,
NYT,
16.6.2007,
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/arts/AP-Wright-Restoration.html

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architecture, towns, cities

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