marcel breuer

So the book finally came in: Architecture without Rules: The Houses of Marcel Breuer and Herbert Beckhard. Marcel Breuer came to the US in 1937, nine years before Gutnayer, to follow Gropius to Harvard. Breuer had studied at the Bauhaus and with Gropius, working in the woodshops of the two schools. He started designing houses with Gropius on his arrival, and worked with Gropius for a number of years. He established his own practice in New York in 1947. In 1951, he had two women working in his office, including one of the first African American woman architects, Beverly Green. Beckhard came into his office in 1951 and started working on major commissions in 1952.

The book has lots of nice photos of some of Breuer and Beckhard's houses with plans, which have been really useful to study in relation to the photographs. First a quote, from the afterword by Stanley Abercrombie:

[his work] also shows, when we look at the examples from the late '30s and early '40s, the originality and vigor with which Breuer greeted his newly adopted American and its construction conventions. The austere forms and anonymous smooth surfaces of European modernism were left behind in the old country, replaced here with durable, low-maintenance, natural maerials (most notably, wood frames, wood siding, and fieldstone) disposed in compositions that were becomingly modest and genuinely functional. These were not traditional houses in modern dress; they were genuinely new houses, thoughtfully planned to accomodate new patterns of living. Breuer invented a type of modern American house that was both more modern and more American than any that existed before it.

I am looking forward to looking at the plans with our architects. Meanwhile, here are some details that caught my eye...

I love this stair with the horizontal railing. There is a beautiful relationship of light and heavy.

This picture captures some of the common features of Breuer's houses: using fieldstone to build walls, glazing that goes floor to ceiling, and planes that push out in to space away from the main volume of the house.

Gutnayer built a massive fireplace in the center of our house. He designed significant fireplaces in a lot of his projects, and I wonder if he had seen Breuer's projects, which won awards and were published at the time. Our fireplace does not have as clear a form as Breuer's fireplaces pictured here. We are discussing ways of improving the form of our fireplace, and I like the prominent reveal in the fireplace on the left, and the asymmetrical volume (which maybe houses the flue?) that sits on top of the fireplace on the right. Lyrical and it activates the area above the fireplace.

 

 Here is ours.

turning back to your joy

We are starting to look at schemes for the house. Reed and I sit in the house, trying to visualize what will happen when we change what we have. It is imperfect for sure, and it needs to be massaged into something better. I keep thinking about the family that lived in the house before us, and about what it will be like to live there. Was family living in the 50s and 60s that different from how we live now? The ranch house is already less formal than a traditional house...did they really think about daily life differently? From the family's materials left in the house, and the space configuration, it does not look that different from life at this point in time.

 As we sift through the drawings and receipts and layers of dust on everything, I think about certain details from his buildings, like the graceful columns, the four narrow bays of his apartment buildings (built narrow as the first multistory building on the block). He added crazy flourishes to the brick and concrete faces of his houses, exaggerated gables that look graceful and right in most cases. He seemed to love decoration and eccentricity: scarves, bolo ties, narrow mustaches, drawings and stories of his life. In a way, what we are looking to preserve are some of his flourishes in the house. In a contemporary modern house, details tend to be so...responsible. Well placed, simple steel and wood, shots of color in orderly tile.  It seems that good details are hard, as they require so much follow through (see FLW and Greene + Greene, Mark Mack...when do you stop?).

Our schemes are just at the very open and exciting stage, and here I am talking about details. I think I am trying to articulate the conceptual model of preservation we are building: that is about the spirit of experimentation and casual-ness that exists in the house. Ok, so maybe throwing in all those materials that you found on job sites, maybe a little over the top. But we can work with that. Without being too sober about it, we promise.

Text from Gutnayer's 1957 Christmas card, while the house was under construction.

The drawings on the antipode side represent the Anatomy, Topography, Geography and Technological analysis of the Gutnayer's 1958 Flying Shelter, located on a plateau on Sheridan Road in Wilmette, Ill. (Indians called the place Ouilmette). This residential shelter is anchored temporarily onto vibrated columns of reinforced concrete also called "stilts". The upper part of the building is actually a ranch house floating on the second floor; the upper roof-deck is an extension of the ground-floor garden. I hope that you will soon be able to enjoy with us conventionally all the advantages of this unconventional shelter of our family.

On the antipode side, some drawings of the house made while it was close to completion.

As the house was originally designed the second floor floated over open space on the south side. In 1973 Gutnayer filled that space in and moved his architecture practice into it. The bottom drawing is the rear side of the house, ("as seen by neighbors, whether they like it or not!"). Gutnayer is acknowledging the funky joint of the south side to the north. We hope to resolve and clarify the joint with a stair coming down from the screen porch. The roof garden, complete with shower and sunning porch, is the part we hope to recreate in some very basic way.

South view: check out that boat! The windows are the kids bedrooms.

North view: The stair will be taken down, revealing a little more float in the volume at the front of the house. Not visible in this picture is the shift in material on the facade: it switches from terracotta brick (at the front) to regular brick (toward the back) about halfway along this face. Odd, but in the immortal words of Tim Gunn, we will make it work.

The house at night

While Kathryn Merlino was here we had our first dinner party in the house! Pizza and wine, but hey, it was a hot meal that we heated up in the oven.

I also had a chance to put in some more light bulbs and take a shot of the house from the outside lit up.

Reed and Kathryn and the kids are in the studio downstairs. In this photo the left corner of the house is missing: I would have to stand in the middle of Sheridan Road to get the whole thing.

The Ranch House

On my day of checking 15 coffee table books out of the Wilmette Public Library,  I checked out The Ranch House by Alan Hess. I read a fair amount of it tonight, amazed to see at every turn the houses that populate mile after mile of the Chicagoland suburbs I live in. Gutnayer designed many modern ranch houses in this area and did development projects throughout his career.

The architectural historian who came to look at his work described him as evolving from the avant garde to 'builder vernacular'. After reading this book, I don't see that so much as a derogatory characterization as much as a transformation that affected many architects throughout the country in the 40s and 50s. New technology was employed to make these houses easy to build and affordable, and modules were used to speed construction and preparation of building materials. Hess' book is from 2004, so I am not sure how much the dialogue in architectural history has changed since then, but I have checked out some more recent books to read more about them.

One thing I was looking for in 'The Ranch House' was the ways in which the homes had been remodeled and whether they maintained their historical pedigree, such as it might have been. Many of the ranch houses in this book (mostly examples in California with interior shots) had been remodeled by their owners, with sensitive additions made or simplifications done on the interior.  We are just starting to look at schemes with our architects and I was feeling some remorse about losing some of the interior characteristics of the house. But the more I look at our plans, the more I feel that we will be enhancing the character of the original house. And for many reasons, both budgetary and aesthetic, the outside of the house will not change significantly at all.

More rocket houses on stilts

Here is a the Villa Dall'Ava by the Office of Metropolitain Architecture: OMA. From the front, lots of connections to our house. No pool in our project though...

The home that gets referenced the most frequently is Le Corbusier's Villa Savoie when people see the house from the outside.

I took out a bunch of books from the library, really anything I could carry out on modernism and ranch houses and found these two projects:

The Cates House, by Julian and Barbara Neski

(from weekend utopia by alastair gordon)

And the Eagle House, 1992, by Dirk Alten

(from Modern House by John Welsh)

The architectural term used for the 'stilts' (which comes from Gutnayer's loving description of his own house as a rocket ranch on stilts) is pilotis. I was looking for ribbon windows and pilotis in my search for houses with a similar character to ours. Some have spiral stairs in the plan, and most have roof gardens or roof spaces. I like the delicate railing on the Eagle House quite a bit, and it has a delicate metal stair in front that was added after this sequence with the shutters was taken. The Eagle house was built on top of a villa's garage, so it is supposed to feel like it dropped down on an unlikely base. I find it interesting that the houses have such light ground floor volumes: my instinct is to make the base of our house all the way around darker to accent the light color and significant volume of the top.

I am also getting a book of the work of Marcel Breuer. His houses have a lot of the modernist ranch to them and I look forward to seeing more than I can find on the web.

Gutnayer visits more modernist beauties

Photo of Philip Johnson's Glass House

Under Construction. Id like to learn more about this (subfloor?) construction.

No photos of Gutnayer with Johnson. Perhaps he went and saw this without his knowledge?

We'll never know...

It is worth reading this POV, which I found looking for a reference image for this house. It articulates clearly the dilemmas we face with updating our house. Do we keep the kitchen enclosed? Add a green roof to the roof garden? Open up the space and create better access to the windows (which now are divided by a wall and a bookcase)? We feel if we keep the spirit of our 'rocket ranch house on stilts' alive, we are preserving the house. The exterior will not change much at all. The architect's plan is to clarify the architect's original spatial organization and keep it very apparent in the re-design. But we will be moving elements around and simplifying the palette, which the architect seemed to have built with a combination of materials left over from other jobs. Preservation benefits will likely not be ours since we plan to update and improve the house based on its original design.

Name that project:
this project seems as if it was photographed at the same time as the glass house. 
Is it another building on the same site? Anyone know what it is?
(update 12/02/09: I am pretty sure this is Johnson's other project
in New Canaan, CT, where his Glass House is: it is called the Wiley Speculative House.)

our architects

We did end up finally choosing a wonderful architecture firm: Wilkinson-Blender. We found them on the web via the Chicago AIA sites awards categories. They have done some really wonderful projects and a number of green roofs, which was one of our high priorities at the start of this project. It is still a priority, but the triage repair on this poor house may mean that the true green roof is in phase 2 or 3 of our renovation. Check out their portfolio!

the 40s

So Gutnayer's materials are being sorted for various archives. I love these photos of him visiting significant buildings of the time. I am a bit embarrassed to note that this is the first time I have paid close attention to the buildings of Frank Lloyd Wright, Philip Johnson and Mies van der Rohe. I have of course looked at their drawings as part of my teaching, but always looked at their work out of context, both historically and physically. Now that we are in the midwest and can look at these projects firsthand, I am learning so much. 'The Goot', as he was affectionately called by his students at UIC, visited the FLW projects in October of 1947. The Johnson project photos are not labeled, so I am not sure that I have the right buildings, but see what you think...

Frank Lloyd Wright and ? name those architects

I think this is a photo of a critique that Gutnayer arranged with Frank Lloyd Wright out at Taliesen. It is mentioned in one of the student newsletters that he kept from his period at UIC.

This photograph is labeled in polish as the Willitt House and Frank Lloyd Wright.

Gutnayer is on the left.

Name that...crypt?

From the leaves on the ground I think this is probably from the same October trip out to visit Taliesen. Anyone know?

labeled: Masselinck chief architect for FLW at Taliesen

Gutnayer in front of Taliesen

Alright, I have to get back to work. Next post will be the Johnson house and a mystery building...perhaps the other structure at the Johnson House? Will need some ID help on that one!

Keeping the Torch of Architecture Burning

Gutnayer drew christmas cards in ink on vellum and printed them as blueprints every year to send out as Christmas cards. The house figures in each one, as do the kids, Alice, and their activities that year. They are whimsical and so rich with great drawings. He has a symbol of the house as a torch that re-occurs in cards over multiple years.

I have been looking at a lot more of his projects and have started trying to identify them in Google Maps. I am building a public map that you can search for, I think. He did a high rise in Chicago and one in Evanston, and designs for two major highrises on in the 4200 block of Marine Drive that you can see from Lakeshore Drive. Given the volume of drawings in the house for these, I am quite sure they are built, but the Marine Drive project may not be his, I cannot tell yet. I need to go look at it and compare it to the drawings. His buildings seem to consistently have four bays in the front and exterior columns with volume underneath. Our house is consistent with that expression. The other interesting project he worked on was the transitioning of Louis Sullivan's Auditorium Building into Roosevelt University in the 1970s. Kathryn and I went to look at this building the other day, and it appears he did a lot of design of infill classrooms, lockers, mechanical, etc. He also designed a small workshop theatre and some other spaces. Now that I have seen the building and understand its significance I cannot wait to go back and look at the drawings. (Me in the studio:"why is this Louis Sullivan photograph in the studio? and why is it in a roosevelt university interior rendering? where is roosevelt anyway?") Obviously my education in Chicago architecture is just beginning. But Kathryn and I got a lot under our belt in a few short hours: the Mies apartment buildings at 860 Lakeshore (just steps from the American Girl Store!), Mies' Crown Hall at IIT, the Auditorium Building, and the Robie house. And those are the ones we got inside, not to mention the many we drove by while kids listened to storytapes in the back seat.

So, the torch of architecture. Gutnayer had a lot of passion for art and design, and he kept it very alive in his work and his personal life. I love the symbolism of the torch. It reminds to be a bit more attentive to keeping energy and excitement active in my own life and work. He lived so fully. We should all aspire to that.

Illinois Heritage

So today the historic preservation architect came and visited the house. He knew all about the names and dates of the fixtures, the plywood, and so many things. It seems unlikely that we will preserve as much as necessary to receive the landmark property tax freeze, but it was very interesting to learn things about our house from him. And, there is the opportunity for dialog: houses form the 50s are a little harder to nail down in terms of preservation constraints than the late 19th century farmhouse. So we will see...

He identified this lamp, which we have been holding onto, because, why? well, it seemed too sort of big and odd to get rid of. And sure enough: it is (marked on the bottom) as a Laurel lamp designed by Frederick Weinberg. Google these things and some run in the 2-3K range. Wow! Another beautiful thing he identified is the plywood called 'driftwood' on the ceiling of our sun porch, which does look like driftwood, and is an early type of specialized textured ply.

Technology

J. Marion used state of the art technology in his home. We hope that continues to bode well as we start to peel away the layers of materials to get down to the structural elements. A couple of our favorite elements are his stereo, which had built in speakers in the sideboard in the dining room:

Those who know Reed and remember his speaker system in our old house will understand that this made total sense to us. I will post pictures of the stereo, which is a big box with the turntable inside. It came with construction drawings which I found in the living room storage along with a series of articles about building bomb shelters.

There are two giant dimmers like this one:

 

They feel wonderful to operate. You can sense the scale by comparing them to the lowly standard wall switches just to the left. This is a serious piece of lighting equipment.

This OSB composition board has caught the eyes of the architects. I love it. They have said that is a pretty early application of this material. It is the wall material in the kids bedrooms.

On Saturday the Illinois Historic Preservation architect comes out to talk to us about what we would need to replace/restore/retain if we were to apply for Landmark status and benefits (a ten year property tax freeze!) We are looking forward to meeting him. We will be holding our breath about the replacement of the blown aluminum windows (the 40 feet of them on the front facade in particular) which is a big ticket item already and could get much bigger if we are required to keep everything quite close to the original. We'll see...

Slow Going

We are in the process of choosing an architect, working through the choice between two different firms. One is a design/build firm and the other would likely come with a construction manager as part of the process. It is a slow process being thorough about making a balanced choice. They are both great options and it is really hard to choose which way to go. It feels a bit like looking at two big, expensive wrapped gifts and trying to pick one.

So, in the interim, Ive been working on getting J.Marion's papers into safer, drier, warmer places than our house, and it looks like we will have some success. I have found lots of his houses around to drive by,and buildings too. As the dispersal of the images become imminent, we are figuring out what we might like to keep ourselves.

The same questions will come up regarding interior details. Here are some good ones that we hope we can keep, and some that will surely go, but give us a sense of J. Marion and Alice's funky style.

The master bedroom. Lamps and built in headboard with blanket storage and closet on the rear side.

 

master bath tile.

second bath tile and velvet stripe wallpaper.
J. Marion specified some awesome wallpapers in his projects.
Silver foil sunsets in one kitchen, huge musical notes in another kitchen.

the circular stair.

Even beautiful with white carpet and plastic tread.

Originals

(11/05/09) I recently found two more interior photographs and a little more information about when and why they were taken. Gutnayer put his house on the market in 1973, and these photos were the interior shots from the sales materials (which look like old test results from elementary school: how marketing has changed!). He wrote a letter to the agent cancelling their agreement around selling the house because they could not get an offer at their asking price ($156,000). Lucky for us, I think. So below I have added the other two interior views. Don't miss the huge paintings in the dining room. I will try to identify them from his art inventories.
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I got a request for more images, so here they are. We are working on making our architect choice and I am meeting with landscape architects: gotta plant some new trees to replace the cottonwood tree cover that came out. The operative word for our house with the designers has become 'tree house'. Also news on getting the house local landmark status will be coming up: I am starting discussions with a local historian who does those requests.

Here are some images of how the interior and exterior of the house looked in the 50s. And a photo of Gutnayer's immigration card.

J. Marion. DP stands for Displaced Person.

early view of the house.

That window is 40 feet long. I want to expose it all, but we will see what the architects think. Right now it is broken up by some bookcases (that might be bearing some structural weight!) and a maid's room. You can also see the original roof garden structure which is no longer there.

 

interior looking west.

 

interior now.

Paintings on the wall to the right are Courbet and the like.

African art all over as well. Couch and coffee table remain.

View to the east. 'Structural' bookshelf to the right.

 

that same spot now. So much wood, and so many different kinds!

interior, dining room. Table and chairs are still here.

I'm hoping to find a buyer for them somehow, someway.

master bedroom.

that crazy growth to the left of the door?
who knows...must be a sculpture because it is no longer there.
Can you imagine sleeping with that figure looking at you?
I wonder if they had a name for her.

Some visitors seem mildly icked out by the master bedroom opening on the living room, and there is inevitably an uncomfortable joke made about the evening's entertainment! I think I spent enough time in unconventional houses as a kid (those 70's treehouses in Marin and Sea Ranch come to mind) that I am not phased by this layout. The bedroom will be a great art gallery, because all it can really have in it is the bed. The wall to the right inside the bedroom has a picture rail: I hope we keep it as an artwall.

The Big Prize

So we picked the house first, not as much the neighborhood. It is on a busy street with a very public face, but it is also just a few minutes walk to the beach. We spent many days in September going to the beach after school and walking Sadie there before school. The beaches on the great Northern Sea remind me of California, minus the salt. On a warm still day, the Mediterranean. On a windy day with surf, CA. As a biased coastal girl, I had no idea the beach would be this, well, true beach.  My friends in HI and CA will scoff, but really, it is lovely. And on a still morning in September, when you think you could wade in with your clothes on, take a swim, and then walk home, it is pretty wonderful. I have big plans for our first summer here. I hope you are coming to visit.

The weather is cooling off rapidly: Im stocking up on smartwool for everyone and unpacking the winter coats. I am posting these so I can scroll back and visit them when it is freezing here in February.

walking to the beach from the road

Seriously? THIS is the beach near our house?

I couldn't believe it.

Looking south toward Wilmette's main beach

and the sailing beach, where Ella's friend Gretchen
hangs out all summer. We had fun swimming with her in the lake.

Homage to Dappled Light

So Reed was a little sad when he came home and saw the stark reality of the treeless backyard. So here are some images of how the screen porch felt before the tree came down, when it was wrapped in ivy and getting filtered light through the trees.

And here is a picture of the backyard with the tree in full force.
You can see the current naked backyard in the earlier post "a backside only a mother could love".

I am working on planning some screening trees: we had a beautiful katsura tree at our house in Seattle, so we will put some of those in, and, if they are good trees for the site, quaking aspens along the north edge of the house.

Wood

Unfortunately the cottonwood is too rotted to save any for building something. Our tree guy offered to save us some wood from other jobs to build things in the house. It got me thinking about the possibilities...There are many wood details in the house, from cheap pressboard wood paneling to beautiful custom paneling. Here are a couple of my favorites:

The pickled ceiling meets the 1/4" paneling detail

Wood paneling, wood flooring, and wood kitchen table

I think none of these kitchen elements will remain, but I love the subtlety of the color and grain changes with all that blond wood in one place.

Alice and J. Marion

Reed and I have put our hands on every piece of paper and every book in the house, as well as every hanger, sweater, jacket, hat and old magazine that was left here. We've sifted through so much material. As we do so we clear the house from this

To something more like this:

We've kept a lot of their older furniture, a piano, some jewelry, and lots of books. Depending on what the local historical societies and libraries decide, we may also be deciding what to do with J.Marion's copious drawings and documentation of his projects on the North Shore.

Here's some of what we know so far about them. He was a Polish Holocaust survivor, and there are many papers in his materials about the efforts to return stolen artworks to Jews after World War 2. He studied in the Ecole des Beaux Arts and had an architecture studio in France with his brother Henry. They did a number of interesting projects in France, including working on a house for Jacques Lipschitz in LeCorbusier's studio. He also designed a house and studio for the painter Robert Helman in Paris. After the war it appears that he worked in Poland doing reconstruction, and then came to the US in 1945 as a Displaced Person. He worked in New York with his brother Henry, then was offered a job at the University of Illinois at Chicago as their first architecture faculty. He taught at the Navy Pier. A number of prominent local architects came out of the program while he was there. He left the UIC in the mid 50s and must have at that point moved out to the suburbs to practice. In the early 50s he did a wide range of projects: many single family houses on the North Shore and in Chicago, a motel, highrises on Lakeshore Drive, Marine Drive and Sheridan Road in Chicago, and a series of commercial designs for a builder called NAMCO in Evanston. His work seems to have evolved from avant garde to 'builder vernacular' (as the architectural historian who came to look at the work gently put it) as he practiced through til the 90s. Alice, his wife, was a French teacher at New Trier High School and led abroad programs to France. Vive Alice! I have a number of her pieces of jewelry that were left in the house, mostly modern mexican silber. They were serious art collectors: J. Marion's family in Europe had quite a collection and he bought and sold many pieces. They seem to have really enjoyed going to auctions and there are many many catalogs from auction houses, all carefully marked up with sale prices. More on their collecting and their house in a future post: cooking dinner calls.