OT: The Wiesn (aka Oktoberfest)

(OT means Off Topic: Being from Bavaria, I can't resist the subject. Of course no relation to modern architecture or South Florida real estate... this is where the "Plus" in the blog-title "Modern Plus" comes into play.)

In Bavaria, the Munich Oktoberfest is referred to as "Die Wiesn" (the meadows), after a large meadow of sorts it takes place on, the Theresienwiese. Watching over all the cavorting is the statue of...? You guessed right, Princess Theresa, who married Crown-Prince Ludwig I here in 1810.

Confused? But wait, there's more!

It doesn't start in October, but runs through the last two weeks in September and the first week of October. Which happens to be one of the nicest times of the year in Bavaria; a Bavarian Indian Summer of sorts.

To limit the confusion somewhat, the Munich newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung, sz for short, published two very helpful guides. One is in English – The Wiesn-Alphabet, from Anbandeln (flirting) to Zelt (tent) – the other one (even better in my opinion) is in German: an interactive map of the beer-tents, explaining the characteristics of each tent and what's going on there - once you make it in, that is.

Find the glossary here: http://www.sueddeutsche.de/,tt6m1/muenchen/215/311138/text/ and the interactive map here: http://www.sueddeutsche.de/app/muenchen/oktoberfest/wiesn2008/wiesnplan/

Prost.

The Need to De-Renovate

As I also mentioned on http://www.modernsouthflorida.com, a lot of local mid-century modern homes are messed up and in need of de-renovation. They suffer from what could also be called a cob-job: like kernels on a cob, everybody subtracts, changes or adds piece by piece, without concept or longterm vision.

Botched renovations with wrong colors, wrong materials, wrong shapes, wrong dimensions... the list for possibilities to go astray is long. And people invent new ones all the time.

A typical example is this midcentury-modernist 2/2 in Pompano Beach:




Do you see the problem I have with the front door?

Another good example is a listing in the Victoria Park section of Fort Lauderdale, a 2/1 design by John Crowell on a corner lot with room to expand. It has good details, including clerestory windows and a real coral wall, but did someone ever ruin the appearance of that house! It used to be pale yellow, not quite convincing but not totally offensive either, if you overlooked the front door. But at some point during the long and fruitless listing period with several Realtors over several years, someone decided that dark-brown would be a much better color to match that red front door with the fake lead-glass insert. And so they painted away. Now it looks like a sorry pile of... of... I don’t know.

It needs a buyer with a vision. Or someone with enough taste to buy it and hire someone with a vision, so it can be brought back to modernist life.

Any takers?

Modern Architecture in North Carolina

My wife and I returned from a long weekend in North Carolina, and we are impressed.

There is an incredible trove of modern architecture in NC's Triangle region (see article below), which I was completely unaware about. Plus great BBQ, people so friendly it made my wife and I wonder why they are the way they are, nice vineyards (we bought RayLen again; expecially the 2006 Cab exceeded our expecations) and great roads for motorcycle riding. I suppose I'm just so easy to please.

Staying in Winston-Salem with close friends who are also relatives, we twice drove 1.5h over to Raleigh. One day we had the good fortune to speak with two extremely hospitable and friendly realtor colleagues, Anne Hughes and Roger Kenny of Re/Max Integrity in Cary, who gave us great insights into the Cary/Raleigh housing market.

Another day we attended a workshop on preservation easements, under the perspective how they could be used to preserve modern architecture. Afterwards we had lunch with the organiser of the event, George Smart, the founder of Triangle Modernist Houses. TMH is a non-profit organisation which aims to protect and promote modern homes in the Triangle region of North Carolina, an area formed by the cities Raleigh, Durham and Chapel Hill (the mystical city "Raleigh-Durham" seems to be the airport's fault, which is called RDU or Raleigh-Durham). A nice piece in the NYT on the area: http://travel.nytimes.com/2009/06/14/travel/14hours.html

George Smart and TMH leave me amazed and speechless. These folks - George, the board, the advisory council and the volunteers at TMH - have their act together, big time. They research, they find, they photograph, they list, they run the website, they do house tours and now field trips. Incredible. In comparison, I feel rather lonely in SE Florida with my passion, sometimes wondering if there are any other like-minded modernist fools like me bumbling about.

So, bumbling fools, please speak up!

Modern Architecture in Munich II

As I keep seeing interesting examples of modern architecture in the Munich/Starnberg area, I notice though how many fewer midcentury homes than in Florida I encounter. That may be odd, but is no indicator for the frequency of that style in Germany, as far as I know.

Some more examples:







(Please forgive the photo quality, some pix are taken with my cell phone, others with my PDA.)

Modern architecture in Munich I

I am working from Munich for about two months. Every time I’m home I’m baffled and delighted how much modernist properties - old and new - I discover.

Spec houses are not common in Germany, and especially modernist architecture is practically always commissioned. From my observations, it seems modernist architects in Germany are stylistically more daring and experiment more in comparison to what I see in SE Florida. I’d be very curious to hear German and US architects’ opinion on this though.

Germans are sticklers for privacy, so I will not list owners or addresses with the examples I’m showing:








From top: Starnberg ca. 2006, front; Starnberg ca. 2006, back; Starnberg, ca. 2004; Starnberg, ca. 1960



(Please forgive the quality of the photos; they are mostly taken with my mobile which uses an extraordinary amount of jpg-compression.)

Unclear Market Direction

I looked at a (non-modern) house in Lauderdale-by-the-Sea with clients of mine. Interesting project, but what a project. I wonder: are deepwater (= waterfront with no fixed bridges) home prices on their way up?

I run my own statistics every month, condos and townhomes in Palm Beach, Broward and Dade, as well as single family homes in these three counties. Yes, you certainly can atomise the market into nano-sectors. But I don’t have the time to do that. I created two subsets of two “model homes”, one on a dry lot and one on the water with no fixed bridges.

After the peak in Jan 2006, where $527 per sf under air were paid on average for my waterfront “model home”, prices tanked to a low of $355/sf or so under air. Now I see three months of increases, and a preliminary April search showed another uptick.

This would be in line with what I had previously mentioned in my client newsletter*: houses will recouperate before condos, and the best locations will improve before the others. Three-and-a-half months sure don’t make a trend, but I will keep an eye on that one.

(*Please let me know if you are interested in subscribing; I'll be happy to send it to you).

The List

Stemming from my love for modern architecture, I have been “collecting” modernist properties for several years. Searched out, observed, accidentally found or through our Multiple Listing Service, every find ends up in a list of contemporary and mid-century modernist properties - mostly single family homes Southeast Florida, with a condo building, a supermarket or even a car dealership thrown in for good measure.

Our MLS (for Non-Americans: a shared database of properties for sale; only participating real estate real estate agents have access to it) is a bit tricky, because there is no filter “Modern”, so I devised my own. I have as many as five “modern” MLS searches running parallel, handpicking modernist properties from them every few days.

Over the course of the years, this list has grown to over 1,300 buildings in Southeast Florida, covering roughly an area between the Florida Keys and Stuart. It’s a bit of work to keep it updated, but an excellent education for me, a great tool, and of course invaluable help when it comes to finding modern properties for like-minded buyers.

If you know of a modern building - house, townhouse, apartments - would you let me know please? Even better: if you can send along with the address also a photo, even one quickly taken with your mobile phone is totally fine. - Thank you!