"Where were you when we needed you, DoCoMoMo?"

We can always count on Metropolis senior editor, Kristi Cameron, to be on the New Canaan Historical Society's Modern Day House tour. Here is a link to what she wrote about it this year which features an issue brought up by the first speaker of the day, Toshiko Mori. The accompanying slide show sums up the day very nicely. – GF

Coming soon: Modern House Day Tour + Symposium 2009

Modernism Moves Forward is the theme of the '09 MHD, which is being held May 2 in New Canaan, CT. 5 speakers will discuss, from the point of view of their respective disciplines, how Modern homes are being modified to accommodate the requirements of their 21st-century owners. The Symposium + Tour offer an opportunity to hear from foremost experts on modern architecture and design, meet the homeowners, designers and architects themselves, and participate in an in-depth guided tour of some of New Canaan's fine examples of Modern architecture.

The symposium speakers are:

• William D. Earls, AIA, author of The Harvard Five in New Canaan will moderate
• Bassam/Fellows, design team who integrate architecture, interiors and furniture of their own design, recently featured in the New York Times Magazine
• Toshiko Mori, AIA, architect and former dean of Harvard School of Architecture
• David Prutting, insightful builder of modern homes in New Canaan
• Linnaea Tillett, lighting designer and faculty member at Parsons and Columbia

The program begins at the New Canaan Country School. Breakfast will be served before the seminar starts at 10:00am. House tours will follow the seminar. Attendees will be driven to each house via private tour vans, escorted by an architect or historian of the Modern Movement who will be available to answer questions. Among the homes to be visited will be homes designed by Marcel Breuer, Victor Christ-Janer, Gates and Ford, Alan Goldberg, and John Johansen.

The first Modern House Tour in 1949 attracted more than 3000 visitors. The 2004 and 2007 Tours were sold out. Space is limited to only 200 attendees, and tickets are $250 per person which gets you breakfast, the symposium, the exhibit, lunch, a cocktail reception and transportation from the New Canaan Country School to all tour houses. Symposium only (no tour) tickets are $50.

Note: If you are arriving by train, the symposium location is about 5 miles away and you'll need to take a taxi from the train station.

The '09 MHD Tour + Symposium will benefit The New Canaan Historical Society’s preservation program. – GF

Updating a Modern, Slowing the Tear-Down Trend

Has the tide turned on the appalling trend of destroying modern houses and replacing them with huge and hideous monsters? Impossible to say. What is clear to me though is that we're hearing more lately about modern houses being renovated than about them being razed.

Last week's New Canaan Advertiser has an interesting story about an architect named Mark Markiewicz, who lives in a house on Ponus Ridge Road designed by Frederick Taylor Gates for himself and his family. (Devoted readers might remember that Gates was the architect I'd never heard of in a post from last spring called "Architects We've Never Heard Of" -- indeed, not only had I never heard of him but when Gina was telling me yesterday about him and another house he designed on the other side of New Canaan, I didn't even remember I had written about him. Since I'm already digressing, I should point out that we first heard about Markiewicz's house from his wife, who left us a comment about it yesterday but left it on post about the Glass House; I cut and pasted it onto the right post this morning.)

In the Advertiser, Markiewicz said one of his goals in the renovation was to improve the house so it doesn't become a tear-down, like so many others in New Canaan and elsewhere. Janet Lindstrom, of the New Canaan Historical Society, noted for example that 12 of the 29 houses in New Canaan designed by the Harvard Five architects are gone:

Of the original 29 built by Marcel Breuer, Landis Gores, John Johansen, Philip Johnson and Eliot Noyes, 17 are still standing, two of which have been significantly altered, according to Janet Lindstrom of the New Canaan Historical Society.

However, she also pointed out that the total number of mid-century modern homes in town, including but not limited to those of the Harvard Five, stood at about 120 since the 1950s and that around 100 of those remain, some with modifications.

“There was a period of time that they really were not looked at,” she said. “But with all the attention and celebrity surrounding them now, they are being revalued.”

Note that the Advertiser cites her as saying that about 100 of the original 120 or so mid-century moderns in New Canaan are still standing. Not long ago the accepted figure was about 70. Perhaps this inventory project has served to document that the tear-down phenomenon although bad wasn't really as bad as we all had thought. Does that constitute a tide having turned? Maybe not, but it's nice to see someone expressing an opinion that implies that the mid-century modern world isn't coming to an end.

Markiewicz, by the way, talks a bit about the conflict between the need to renovate and expand a modern house and the obligation to respect the original architect's vision:

Beyond bringing in more natural light via a series of clerestories — upper ribbons of glass that visually detach the space from the roofline — the purpose of the addition architecturally was to work with the existing space “without absorbing it into non-existence,” he said.

“Some of the houses you see being redone end up looking very different from the original,” he added. Of “utmost importance” to him was the need to maintain and complement the qualities of the structure Gates had designed.

“Coming up with a design that both completes it and has its own personality,” he said, was a challenge.

That very issue is going to be the theme of the New Historical Society's Modern House Day in May.

New Canaan's Next Modern House Day

The New Canaan Historical Society is planning another Modern House Day this year, on May 2. The theme is how modern houses have changed to meet the needs of today while keeping the characteristics and philosophy of mid-century modern design (according to the Historical Society letter we got asking us to help again).

On the tentative agenda for the day are houses designed by Hugh Smallen, Eliot Noyes and Marcel Breuer. Our guess is that the Breuer house is the one on West Road that is being expanded by Toshiko Mori. You can read about it on her website, here. I took this picture in August 2005, just before the renovation started.



The symposium and lunch will be at New Canaan Country School, down the road from the Glass House. Here's what I wrote about the last MHD, in November 2007. -- ta

If you should be passing through . . .

I wasn't aware that this was a permanent exhibition at the New Canaan Historical Society until just now when I was researching something I intend posting about soon (it's kind of exciting news, so stay tuned). Celebrating New Canaan's Modern Architects 1953 – 1983 is on the second floor of the main building in the collection of historic houses and out buildings that make up the Historical Society.

The exhibition ". . . gives an overview of thirty years of work by New Canaan architects. Most of the works selected for this exhibit are located out of New Canaan, for as their fame spread, commissions took the architects far and wide, and their styles developed in a variety of architectural expressions. Included among the works in the exhibit - mounted on the second floor - are personal interpretations and rethinkings of the International Style, restorations, eclecticisms, and post-modern allusions to our past."

The Historical Society is a short walk up from the MetroNorth train station, and about an hour and 10 minutes from NYC. – GF

Visit Johnson's Alice Ball House This Weekend

If you've been hoping to get a good look at a Philip Johnson house and haven't wanted to pay the $30 or $45 for a tour of the Glass House, you can get a discount tour this weekend of a house in New Canaan that isn't as nice as the Glass House but is way more controversial. And the $15 fee helps support a good Modern House cause -- the restoration of the Landis Gores Pavilion in New Canaan's Irwin Park.

The house is Johnson's Alice Ball House, at 523 Oenoke Ridge Road. The New Canaan Historical Society is sponsoring the tour from noon to 4 p.m. on Saturday, November 15, and Sunday, November 16. Here's the webpage. Everything we've written about the Alice Ball House is here. And there's a post about the Gores Pavilion from my other blog, here. (Thanks to Jane Campbell, the Modern House Notes reader who told us about the Alice Ball tour.) -- ta

In a Quiet Noyes House

I've written before that on the cold, windy day last November when Gina and I entered the house Eliot Noyes built for his family in New Canaan we both felt relieved, as if we were in a place that could be home, quiet and warm and comfortable. We're not the only ones who feel that way. Fred Noyes, Eliot's son, does too, and so does Skip Ploss, who writes the Embrace Modern blog, and who went to the Noyes house not long ago to do a Q&A with Fred. Here's an excerpt:

FN: ... The ones [i.e., the houses] where the architect has been able to touch into the emotional side we were talking about and the practical side, being able to understand that the design is centered more around how people live rather than making boxes and fitting people in to it. They become as warm as, or warmer than, some of the earlier houses which are constricted and feel tight. I think that this house is a perfect example of exactly that. You walk in to this space and you breathe out…

EM!: It’s amazing. It’s so tranquil and just a wonderful warm feeling sitting here.

FN: My father did another house in Vermont which we also still own and it’s similar in the sense that the “bookends” are stone. Very small, open stud construction because it’s just a ski house but in that house, when you walk in, you can hardly walk across the room before you kind of have to sit down its so relaxing. When I am under real pressure in my office, I go up there. I roll out the yellow trays on the dining room table and can be there for 15 hours without ever getting fidgety in any way, it’s such a relaxing space. It has a slightly sloped roof so it has some volumetrics to it. It comes down to our original point which is that sense of it being emotionally accessible in these things when they’re done right using the materials available to them.

Fred says a lot of interesting things, including an obvious one: just because it's modern, doesn't mean it's good. And, which is good news: Well, we are definitely going to protect the house in the sense that nobody will tear it down and then we’ll either sell it to someone who’s raising a family or understands what it is that they are buying and leaves it untouched. My hope of hopes would be to place it in the public eye and to do something similar to The Glass House but that’s a stretch because that means that you not only need the purchase price from us but endowment and that would be a lot of money.

I found the picture, by the way, by Googling Eliot Noyes and clocking on a Picasa page. It was taken the same day that Gina and I were there, during last year's New Canaan Historical Society's Modern House Day, by someone named Amanda, who I think is probably our friend Amanda Martocchio. -- ta

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

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