Modernism on the Jersey Shore

This week, I am vacationing on the Jersey shore, in Avalon north of Cape May to be precise. I had never been to this small town or the barrier island referred to as Seven-Mile-Island before: a beautiful area, especially this time of the year, before the masses arrive (if you can speak of masses with a serious lack of hotels and most residential structures being single family homes).

What caught my eye right from the first minute in Avalon was the rather uniform building style, locally referred to as Nantucket architecture:

Nantucket style via Jersey shore: mostly two stories, steep roofline, lots of 
dormers, shingled roofs and siding (often vinyl, sometimes cedar), emphasized 
fenestration, covered porches, ocean-facing balconies.

(Do bear with me, we're getting to modernist houses soon...)

A lot of the area houses are now build as pre-fabs, with plumbing, wiring, windows etc. pre-installed:

 Prefab "upside-downer" with main living area on second floor and six bedrooms, 

constructed from 14 modules. Time between two shots: one day. Move-in date: 

approx. three to five weeks from photo date.

Long-term visitors told me that even in the 1960s, Avalon and its neighbour Stone Harbor were expensive. $300,000 for a house on an interior lot was not uncommon then. Currently, oceanfront starts at approx. $5m asking, a vacant lot on a high dune is available for $10.0m, a small interior single story ranch home with 3 bedrooms and no pool on 8,000 sf in walking distance to beach is $1.0m. Originally however, most homes were humble seaside cottages:

(Really interesting, but no modern architecture? Anywhere? Just one?) 

From that style evolved a slightly larger variant, sort of a ranch on stilts, to counter occasional flooding typical on barrier islands (please note the gable windows below, first sign of modernism):

And – deep sigh – as everywhere, there's always room for more bling and less taste:

Misplaced Italianate on the ocean, clad in white marble.

18,000 sf Nantucket Style on steroids in the dunes. Potatoe-chips build that residence.

After one or two days, I started to see hints and glimpses of modernist architecture: 

Modern interpretation of the salt-box? Geometrical fenestration 

is actually a residential version of a curtain wall, facing east.

Ensemble of three individual residences on a triangular oceanfront lot near the inlet.

Detail of above ensemble shows house 1 and house 2. All three houses utilise 

different exterior materials and colours to emphasise their separate structures.

Architect's remodel of a non-modernist home includes greening of garage roof plus new facade.

Oceanfront residence with roof terrace, facade in typical local color (stained wood? planking).

Fourth house from the ocean (on right); vertical emphasis of wood planking and fenestration 

countered by three massive horizontal blocks formed by retaining wall, balcony on 

second floor and roof terrace on third.

Contemporary but clean interpretation of the upside-downer, with main living areas on second floor. 

Upside-downer on the Bay with lovely cedar-shingled facade. House orientated 

west towards the Bay. Garage and closed front facing east and street.

Looking elegant at first glance at dusk.

West elevation however shows messy design, restless details, fenestration not 

lined up and overall neglect. Pity.

Unassuming oceanfront; narrow 5,500 sf lot necessitates a smallish front and deep 

footprint. Three stories visually compensated by emphasis on the horizontal through 

bands of windows and pale horizontal planking.

 My favourite, right next door to above home. Near-Neutra-like use of emphasising 
the contours and construction with gray timber, spaces filled with white vertical 
planking (wood?). Smaller windows to the west, large expanses of glass facing 
the dunes and the ocean (on the right).

Thank you for reading this post. I hope you had fun – and looking forward to your comments!

Renderings in the Sand: Mid-century Modern Beachfront Homes and their Architects

Midcentury-modern beach houses, their jaunty, angled forms clad in weathered cedar siding, have faced tear-down threats for two decades now. The archives of their architects, however, are sometimes enjoying better fates. 

 

This 1961 image of Andrew Geller's Frank House in Fire Island Pines, on Long Island, was recently rediscovered. 

Two scholars are sorting through faded color slides, rolled blueprints and musty photo albums related to low-slung houses perched on dunes.

Christopher Rawlins, an architect in Manhattan, is poring over the papers of the architect Horace Gifford, best known for catering to Fire Island clients as prominent as Calvin Klein. Gifford died of AIDS in 1992, at 59, and an artist friend, Ed Di Guardia, had long stored the files in his Long Island garage. 

Jake Gorst, a documentary filmmaker, has moved into an 1890s Long Island home in Northport, where the architect Andrew Geller, his grandfather, spent a career playing with geometries. Mr. Geller’s most famous work is being preserved: the Pearlroth House in Westhampton Beach, N.Y., with two diamond-shaped wings often said to resemble a bra. 

Mr. Geller, 87, is in poor health and lives with his daughter, Jamie Geller Dutra, in upstate New York. Mr. Gorst; his wife, Tracey; and their two daughters have preserved the attic office, down to the tobacco-smoke stains on the wood ceiling and racks of tweed jackets, protractors and T-squares. Drawings and models keep turning up in closets and crannies. 

“I feel like I’m on a treasure hunt in my own house,” Mr. Gorst said. 

But storing aging paperwork and cardboard models safely, and preparing for exhibitions, books and documentaries, can be costly. Mr. Rawlins runs a Web site, horacegifford.org, and hopes to raise $70,000 for a Gifford monograph from Princeton Architectural Press. Mr. Gorst’s Web site, andrewgeller.net, links to his kickstarter.com campaign, trying to bring in $40,000 for archive preservation by June 2. 

The beach house architects did not prepare much for scholarly attention. Gifford, who suffered from manic depression, gave away many of his models and did not record street addresses on his vellum drawings.

“I love Horace Gifford, but occasionally I curse his habits,” Mr. Rawlins said. 

Mr. Geller kept working until recently, filing his documents in jumbled boxes and drawers. When fans would drop by, Ms. Gorst said, “He was just so thrilled that anyone showed interest in his work.” 

First published by Eve M. Khan in the NYTimes, 5 May 2011

OT: Apple, Google collect user location data

To be filed under "Dept. of Defenseless Consumer":

With modern smartphones, we are all equal; how lovely. Because not only Apple, but also Google collects user data.


When the news about Apple's collection lust broke last week I didn't believe they were the only ones. But here's the confirmation from the WSJ on Android phone data collection. Scary.

In the meantime, gizmodo.com has updated their first piece on the subject and added a nice handy chart in a second article explaining who does what with your location data.

Photo ©gizmodo

As Mattch Buchanan on gizmodo writes "There's no opting out, there's no knowledge, there's just creepiness."

Now, you must excuse me while I'm rummaging through the attic for my old Nokia 6100 classic.

The Florida Modern Homes Market in March

Interested in market data for modern homes?

I just published today the March data for modern single family homes at http://www.modernsouthflorida.com/current-market-data.html

Enjoy, and have a great weekend!

Three Modern Home Demolition-Alerts in NC

Headed for destruction unless quickly purchased, you can buy one of these three livable works of art and keep them from doom.


ALERT 1: Are you the ultimate tinkerer? Good with tools? Want a house for $14,000? The Collins Street Lustron in Nashville NC, less than an hour from Raleigh, is owned by the church next door which needs a new parking lot. 

This classic 1950’s prefab house will be carted off to the dump within two weeks unless you act now.  The demolition contractor hired recently by the church, Lane Johnson, has become a big Lustron fan and has offered a short “stay of execution.”  Lane will painstakingly disassemble the modular Lustron (like an erector set) and put it on a truck for $14,000. 

That’s an entire house, delivered to you, for the cost of a car. He’ll even get you the assembly manual. Bring this bad boy to your backyard! For more information, contact Tobias please.




ALERT 2: It takes a special kind of person to design and build their own home from scratch, and Raleigh city planner John Voorhees did just that in 1961.  

2727 North Mayview is wildly central inside Raleigh, just off Brooks Avenue. You could not get a better location. 

The owners have put the property on the market as a lot, which means certain death for this unique Modernist home. No doubt about it, the house needs some work, but can be saved by the right person. $269,900. For more information, contact Tobias please. 

ALERT 3: As reported earlier, News 14 Carolina picked up TMH's national preservation alert for A.G. Odell’s Lassiter House in Charlotte, NC. 

Steel beams support the roof and eliminate the need for load-bearing interior walls, thereby enabling large open spaces to predominate throughout the interior. 

A particularly ingenious scheme was an arrangement whereby the dining table could be set in the kitchen, complete with food and adornments, and slid through the wall into the dining room.  Appeared in Better Homes and Gardens September 1956. Charles McMurray did an addition in the 1970's. Included a saltwater pool at one point. In need of major renovations.

Unless sold, this unique modernist house will be demolished in June. 3 BR, 2.5 baths, $785,000. Watch the video, and contact Tobias for more information please.
____

Via Triangle Modernist Houses

Masters of Modern Architecture and their Dogs

Most lovers of modern architecture–given sufficient funds–have a very pronounced taste in design. They do not live in a modernist home by accident, but by careful choice.

They may have spent quite a few hours on the web, and even more with some poor Realtor who didn’t know Mashimoto from Matsushita, only to utter to the right house what Paul McCartney said to Linda when he saw her the first time: “Where have you been?”

So if the structure is asthetically appealing and visually pleasing, one wants the items that enliven the space to be as congruent with the architecture and perhaps even the architect’s vision as possible. It can’t and doesn’t end with furnishings, door handles, silverware and the dust collectors. Understandable then that creators of modern architecture are even more specific, including in their choice of pets. 

But what was previously unknown is that many of the modernist masters – including James Walter Fitzgibbon, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, I.M. Pei, Pierre Koenig, Marcel Breuer, Walter Gropius, Frank Lloyd Wright and Le Corbusier  – were united in their love for one specific dog breed: the Scottish Terrier. 

However, if you look at the similarities between design elements of modern architecture and Scotties, the parallels are obvious, the match is clear. Recently discovered photographs, many of them taken by the architects themselves, are proof:

Fitzgibbon, Paschal residence, Raleigh, NC

Mies, Farnsworth residence, Plano, IL

Mies, Kandinsky residence, Dessau, Germany

Koenig, Stahl residence, Los Angeles, CA

Le Corbusier with friends, believed to be NY at the UN, ca. 1951

Breuer, Breuer residence, Lincoln, MA

Wright, Kaufman residence "Fallingwater", near Mill Run, PA. Terrier on left under cantilever

Pei, Newhouse school, Syracuse U, Syracuse, NY

Gropius in his office, undated

Thanks for reading, and enjoy the weekend as well as the First of April. 

Photos © by TMH, suttonhoo, Stadt Dessau, meatiesmyrtle, unknown, Matthews, lipingzeng, Jordan, unknown.

The Tale of the Two Barcelona Chairs

Like every household with at least one modernist, there is a creeping infection in our home: the one where the sofa with the scrolled arms has to go and the overstuffed love chair won't do it anymore, where Brnos, Eileens and Barcelonas become such common names, outsiders think they are part of the family with their own voicemail.


But considering pricing, a Knoll Barcelona chair with ottoman sets you back $6,662 at the very least, and that's the crappiest leather you can buy.


Buying replicas (one shouldn't use the ugly term "knock off") on ebay or per mail order is risky, especially since originals come in over 30 different leathers, so matching later is impossible. Fearless and full of hope, I installed an rss-feed on Craigslist. And voila, I found chair and ottoman posted on Jan 5, in driving distance in Miami. But it was Jan 22 now, three weeks later. Still, worth a try.


Nine days later, while I was on travel in North Carolina, the seller wrote back that he was in Europe, but his dad was visiting. And yes, he still had the two chairs and two ottomans, for $700. 


Two? 


Another three days later, back in Fort Lauderdale, my wife and I made an appointment with the father of the seller, drove 40 min to Miami and looked at the chairs. They slightly smelled like an ashtray, but were in fine condition otherwise. We nodded, left the seller a message on his Italian mobile number and made an offer for $600. 


I made an offer, to be precise. Because my wife was busy planning where to hide my corpse, a necessary step after killing me for blowing the deal of the century.


But the offer got accepted the same night, and I got to live. A few days later, we drove down to Miami again, this time with two cars to carry off the loot home in one raid. Happy End.


Lessons: 1) our cats love the ottomans even more than chairs because of their flat surface, versus angled on the chairs. Sliding cats are unhappy cats. 2) Two Barcelona ottomans, two chairs and six cushions fit into one Jeep Cherokee. 3) When everyone else has given up, stubborness often pays nice dividend.