Going, going, gone: our diminishing Modernist heritage

[lllARKlll]

Philip Johnson’s Glass House in Connecticut is opening to the public, but many 20th-century buildings are slated for demolition

By By Brook Mason and Jason Edward Kaufman | Posted 17 May 2007

Saved: Philip Johnson’s 1949 Glass House in Connecticut opens to the public next month

The celebrated Glass House designed by Philip Johnson in 1949, which served as his home for half a century and is considered one of the 20th century’s greatest residential buildings, opens to the public for the first time on 23 June. Like Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater residence in Pennsylvania and Mies van der Rohe’s Farnsworth House in Illinois, it is expected to be a pilgrimage site for architectural enthusiasts. The mid-century-modern glass-and-steel box—which has no interior walls (only a brick cylinder housing the bathroom)—is the centrepiece of the late architect’s 47-acre rural estate in New Canaan, Connecticut. Johnson lived in the house until his death in 2005. He donated it to the private, non-profit National Trust for Historic Preservation in 1986 on condition that he live there until he died and that the trust maintain it for future public viewing. The property includes 14 separate buildings, 11 of them designed by Johnson and filled with furniture by Mies, Frank Gehry, and others. The house will also contain Johnson’s contemporary art collection with works by Andy Warhol and Bruce Nauman among others.

Johnson was a longtime trustee of The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York and the founding curator of its department of architecture (1932). He offered the Glass House to the museum, but the trustees declined because of projected maintenance cost, says director Glenn Lowry, who added that he personally would have accepted the gift.

Facing demolition

Despite the success of saving Johnson’s masterpiece, other less well-known Modernist buildings across the United States are now facing demolition. The main threat comes from skyrocketing land prices; these landmark buildings are prized more for their land than their architecture, say design curators and preservation experts nationwide. Barry Bergdoll, chief curator of architecture and design at MoMA, believes that for every Modernist structure saved, two are torn down and many are altered. Other experts believe the number of modernist buildings demolished could be considerably higher.

Saarinen’s 1962 Bell Laboratories are described as “obsolete” by the developers who are set to own the building

Take, for instance, Finnish architect Eero Saarinen’s 1962 Bell Laboratories in Holmdel, New Jersey, where pioneering communication technologies were developed. Real estate developer, Preferred Real Estate Investments, has entered into an agreement to purchase the property from Lucent Technologies with plans to demolish part of the post-war two million sq. ft campus. A spokesman for the developer outlined the commercial aspect of the venture: “The building is, for all intents and purposes, functionally obsolete in today’s commercial market. The building was...constructed in a manner that would make modernisation extremely costly, if not entirely implausible. Our proposed concept plan for the site, however, does include preserving Phase One of Saarinen’s original design.”

Another building under threat is the Cyclorama Center in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, designed by Richard Neutra and built between 1959 and 1962 to house the painting Pickett’s Charge (1884) by the French artist Paul Philippoteaux. The building is a prime surviving example of 1960s modern architecture but is slated for demolition in 2009 under the National Park Service’s general management plan for the Gettysburg National Military Park. A spokeswoman for the National Military Park defended the move: “The Cyclorama building cannot provide for adequate display and preservation of the cyclorama painting…it was built upon the Union Army’s battle line of 1863, where heavy fighting took place during the Battle of Gettysburg and the National Park Service plans to return the site to its appearance at the time of the fighting.”

According to Nepal Asatthawasi of the New York-based Paul Rudolph Foundation, just over 20% of buildings by Kentucky-born Rudolph have been destroyed including a house in Westport, Connecticut. A legal attempt to save this residence, built in 1972 for Louis Micheels, the psychoanalyst, was mounted by the Connecticut Trust, a conservation organisation, against the property’s new owners, David Waldman, a local developer, and his wife Yvette. The case ended when a judge dismissed an attempt by Attorney General Richard Blumenthal on behalf of the State of Connecticut to forbid the demolition. The house was destroyed in January.

“We delayed the demolition of that Rudolph house for 90 days,” says Marian Castell, a historian based in the nearby town of Darien who helped orchestrate a demolition delay ordinance (a legal “stay of execution” allowing consideration of alternative plans). “But there is no way we can prevent a significant house from being demolished [if it is not listed on the National Register of Historic Places].”

Criteria for the inclusion in the register, which is administered by the National Park Service, part of the US Department of the Interior, include “[being] associated with events that have made a significant contribution to the broad pattern of our history”; “[being] associated with the lives of significant *persons”; “embodying the distinctive characteristics of a type, period or method of construction, or that represent the work of a master”.

While several Modernist buildings risk demolition, several others have been altered beyond recognition. In some cases, property owners have added a second storey to long, low slung buildings with flat roofs. “To put a second storey on a Modernist house is essentially to destroy it,” says Richard Bergmann, fellow of the American Institute of Architects.

Another issue is how preservationists prioritise these structures. “The iconic examples will be treasured, like Philip Johnson’s Glass House, while the lesser known homes which are equally stunning are being purchased…The level below is where the trouble is,” says Professor Theodore Prudon, an architect who teaches historic preservation at Columbia University and serves as president of the International Working Party for the Documentation and Conservation of buildings, sites and neighbourhoods of the Modern Movement. “The future of the enormous number of 2,500 sq. ft homes built in the 1940s is problematic,” he says.

Reasons to be cheerful

The growing threat to Modernist buildings is galvanising curators across the US. Staff at the Philip Johnson Glass House, the Connecticut Historical Society and the New Canaan Historical Society have banded together to create a comprehensive survey of Modernist architecture in New Canaan. “There’s an increase in interest in saving Modernist homes but it’s practically all volunteer effort,” says Christy MacLear, executive director of the Philip Johnson Glass House. “There is no designation for what a Modern building landmark is so many buildings from that period cannot be listed. By taking a survey of over 100 Modernist buildings in New Canaan, we can define the criteria and replicate that as a model across the country,” she says.

Meanwhile in California, Michael Govan, *director of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, says he wants to “collect” significant examples of Californian residential architecture by Richard Neutra and Rudolf M. Schindler among others. These buildings would be both museum pieces and double up as living quarters for the institution’s curators with tours conducted on a regular basis. His plan, which is in its early stages, is to either *purchase the houses or have them donated.

Modernist buildings fare better in California says Brooke Hodge, architecture and design curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles. “There’s more respect for them here,” she says. Tom Ford, the former Gucci designer, owns a Los Angeles villa designed by Richard Neutra in 1955 while publisher Benedikt Taschen lives in Chemosphere, a 1960 spaceship-like house set into the Hollywood hills designed by John Lautner.

Meanwhile, in Boston, architect Renzo Piano designed an 80-storey tower which involved removing a 13-storey 1960 edifice by Paul Rudolph (known as the Blue Cross/Blue Shield building) to make way for a new plaza. He then withdrew from the scheme. His studio told The Art Newspaper: “We are no longer working on this project.” The Boston Landmarks Commission imposed a 90-day delay in the *demolition of the structure on 13 March, but developer Steven Belkin reportedly said that the Boston firm CBT Architects intended to *“implement Piano’s design”.

Ultimately, the fate of Modernist buildings may lie in the hands of architects like Piano and the next generation of architects and designers. “[There] is enormous interest [in Modernist buildings] at *undergraduate as well as postgraduate level,”

says Professor Prudon.

Additional reporting by Emily Sharpe

Fonte: Theartnewspaper

[Dreamer]

Esta questão é deveras interessante... A vontade consevadoracionista é recente na história da humanidade, basta pensar-se que em cidades históricas, muitas vezes basta abrir-se o espaço das fundações de um edifício, para se encontrar vestigios de épocas passadas. O valor desses achados é naturalmente variável, mas chega muitas vezes ao ponto de condicionar a execução de outros projectos, para se valorizar a história da nossa civilização... O mundo do ser humano foi forjado em camadas, civilizações construiram as suas cidades sobre os despojos de outras cidades, fossem guerras, desastres naturais, a simples vontade de fazer algo de verdadeiramente novo para mostrar a grandiosidade dos seus líderes, tudo foram razões para por o passado para trás e voltar o olhar para o futuro... Podemos pensar em Atenas e na quantidade de achados que se encontram sempre que se abre um buraco, podemos pensar em Roma e ver quantos edifícios foram "assaltados" para se aproveitar a mármore para outros fins, podemos pensar em quase todas as cidades e encontra-se um vestígio aqui e ali... Como disse antes, a vontade consevadoracionista é recente na história da humanidade, mas parece que o ser humano ainda tende a cair nos seus instintos quando valores mais altos se levantam...