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.