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“It’s a narrow market. It’s an active market. And it can be a lucrative market,” said Ron Scherubel, executive director of the Frank Lloyd Wright Building Conservancy, an international preservation organization based in Chicago. “Some of these houses can be seriously overpriced. But most of the time, buyers pay a 25 to 40 percent premium because it’s a Wright design.”
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The Alice Ball House’s owner, an architect and developer, Cristina Ross, decided a few years ago that the building would make a worthy pool house for a much more au courant dwelling to be built at the back of the property. But that move was blocked, first by the town, which has since been mollified, and now by the neighbors to the rear, who have not.
This would not be an unprecedented development in New Canaan, a suburb forever of two minds about its place as epicenter and laboratory of the International Style: about two dozen of the 90-odd modernist dwellings built in New Canaan by Johnson and a group of fellow modernists known as the Harvard Five have been torn down in favor of buildings that cast more shadow on the landscape. This would be the first Johnson house to fall.
“It’s basically an option,” said Ms. Ross, who has the demolition permit to prove it. “Investment in property is only worth what you can get out of it.”
Ms. Ross, who lives in a five-bedroom colonial elsewhere in New Canaan, had her office in the Ball house for a while and now rents it out while it sits on the market. By her count, there have been at least a dozen prospective buyers in the last year, and a Finnish fashion shoot and a 50th birthday party for an architect, but there have been no takers.
The fact that such an architectural trophy has gone unbought for a year speaks less about any ambivalence for modernism, or even a softness in local property values, than about the domestic expectations of the superprivileged. “No one builds with less than five bedrooms now,” said Prudy Parris, Ms. Ross’s real estate agent. “People with no kids or one kid want five bedrooms.”
[...]
Even some modernist partisans say the price seems high. Ms. Ross bought the house for $1.5 million only three years ago, and says she has overhauled “all major systems: roofs, walls, woodwork, plaster, stonework.” But Helen Higgins, the executive director of the Connecticut Trust for Historic Preservation, said, “There haven’t been enough improvements to suggest that the value is doubled.”
[...]
The math on the Alice Ball house works out to $1,750 a square foot, ignoring for the moment the value of land, which is of course considerable. That’s about triple the average price per square foot of houses that sold in New Canaan in the last few weeks, on lots that average the same size, according to statistics from a local brokerage, Barbara Cleary’s Realty Guild.
Ms. Ross said she would sooner knock the house down than lower her price.
“The bottom line,” she said, “is that if there’s a buyer out there, great. If there isn’t, then I’ve done my due diligence.”
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In the wake of Hurricane Katrina, the basement of Charity Hospital suffered water damage and some of the electrical and mechanical systems were damaged or destroyed. After the water receded, the medical community, the military and a number of volunteers pumped out the flooded basement, cleaned up the debris, and restored electrical power to make the building usable again, but the doors to the hospital were permanently locked when the building was deemed unsafe and unusable by the Louisiana State University (LSU) Medical System.
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I had known of Richard Neutra's Kaufmann House, in Palm Springs, Calif., for years, but only when I finally stood inside it did I realize how powerful an impact this modernist classic makes, how fully and brilliantly it blurs the distinction between inside and outside. In most of the iconic photographs, the house appears to sit alone in the vast open spaces of the desert. Today, however, the surrounding area has been built up, and the site I found was relatively small, its primary connection not with the expanse of the desert (though you are conscious of the mountains and the totality of the landscape) but with the house's own, more conventionally sized lawns and terraces. Another thing I didn't anticipate was how important wood and stone are to this house, to achieving the complex series of counterpoints that Neutra pulled off here—harmonic juxtapositions of mass, of light, of solid and void, of rough and smooth textures.from the may/june 08 preservation magazine special modernist issue
All of this would not have been as apparent had the Kaufmann House not been lovingly restored, an effort that was as ambitious, in its way, as the creation of the house in the first place. The house had been treated terribly for years—it had gone through a couple of owners, one of whom had tried to turn it into a conventional residence, expanding it in ways that suggested no understanding whatsoever of what Richard Neutra was trying to do when he designed it in 1946. But the challenge went beyond ripping off the mistakes and stripping the house down to its essence. Much of that essence had to be re-created; it was not as if the original house were sitting, undisturbed, underneath the alterations. Windows, doors, floors, partitions, all kinds of elements needed to be re-created. Furniture needed to be found again, or remade to original specifications. And since architects are only now beginning to look at modernist buildings with the preservationist's eye, some of the challenge was in trying to determine what we might call a system, or even an ethos, of modernist preservation.
Some of the issues involved in preserving modern buildings are unique to the period in which the structures were built, such as the technology of flat roofs or glass-window walls. When New York City's Lever House, the great glass skyscraper on Park Avenue, was restored, Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, the architects, had to find a replacement for the original glass curtain wall that would look the same but perform completely differently, since the old wall from 1952 was thin, almost flimsy, and air leaked through it like a sieve. It didn't come remotely close to meeting the energy requirements of today. But if the new glass didn't look like that old, badly functioning glass, the appearance of the building would have changed dramatically.
Skidmore created an insulated, double-layer glass wall that looks pretty much like the original. And the restoration of the Kaufmann House has allowed it to look almost exactly as it did when Edgar and Liliane Kaufmann took possession of it in 1947. Though the technical issues of glass walls are a lot different from the technical issues of shingles or adobe or stone, the philosophical questions and dilemmas underpinning modernist preservation are familiar. Do you restore a building to the way it looked when it was new, or to a particular period that was most important in its history? Or do you seek to show the passage of time, and the layers of time, that a building reflects?
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