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Modern Ironies: Notes on Losing the Bunshaft's Travertine House (1963)
not to mention vulture martha stewarts stewardship :
For me, a Californian who grew up in a builder ranch house, the floor plan of the Bunshaft house, as it appeared in Architectural Record Houses of 1966, challenged the whole concept of what a house was. A rectangle with a living room at the center, only two bedrooms, few internal doors, and no windows on the front elevation? How could this be a house?
Its beauty was its daring simplicity; I was captivated by the rhythms and abstract composition. Sensitively, instead of turning all the views to the water, Bunshaft had oriented the two bedrooms out to the landscape, because all water all the time would have been too much. He had masterfully translated the large scale of his experience as design partner at Skidmore, Owings & Merrill into a house of less than 3,000 square feet.
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It is ironic that Maharam would tear down a mid-century modern landmark, when the textile company that bears his family name owes its recent revival to mid-century modern design. Maharam’s sons have reissued fabric designs by icons such as Anni Albers, Ray and Charles Eames, Alexander Girard, Arne Jacobsen, Vernon Panton, and Gio Ponti, and they have been honored by the Russel Wright Design Center for their “Textiles of the 20th Century.”
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Certainly the Museum of Modern Art, which received the house as a gift from the Bunshafts, knew who they were selling the house to. Might MoMA be the real villain because it sold the property without concern for its cultural value? Isn’t the museum in the business of cultural values? Why didn’t it preserve the home or make preservation a condition of sale? Or, one hates to say it, why didn’t the Bunshafts give the house to the museum with more restrictions?
And the August issue of Vanity Fair reports that much of the house’s former travertine floor now paves the kitchen of Martha Stewart’s new home in Bedford New York, a clapboard compound that also features an Amish-built barn and a century-old fence brought from Canada.they're letting vulture martha skate!? "Perhaps there are no individual villains, just a sequence of unfortunate or misguided decisions." b.s., me thinks theres too much punch pulling in this story but well keep it for the neato photos. and as record of this despicible patch of architecturaly historical record.