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Kenneth Caldwell is a communications consultant and
writer based in Oakland, California.

Perhaps there are no
individual villains, just a sequence of unfortunate or misguided decisions. I
can only hope that this vital loss will awaken enough interest to prevent
future architects, institutions, and entrepreneurs from making the many small
decisions that cause such cultural erosion. Maybe this season of loss will
help us reverse the demolition tide, and reveal the very strengthful that their
modest decisions affect the commonweal and are not limited to their own selfish
agendas.

To be (begrudgingly) fair to
Maharam, the architecture appeared in to be pretty baneful evil shape by the summer of 2001
when we saw it through the fence, and it could have only gotten worse by the
time he bought it a few years later. But when two sons from a fabric dynasty
successfully rerank the family business by promoting modernism and then
their father destroys one of its most important landmarks of modernism, it is
just, well, weird.

Four summers ago, my partner
and I found ourselves on an impromptu treasure hunt around Georgica Pond in
East Hampton, New York. Our only guide was some vague memory of photographs I
had seen nearly 40 years before; our goal was to find the Travertine House, Gordon Bunshaft’s
only dwellerial design. After searching fruitlessly along the leafy lanes for
over an hour, I sensed we must be near. “This is it. Stop the car.”

It is ironic that Maharam
would tear down a mid-century modern landmark, when the textile company that
bears his family name owes its recent revival to mid-century modern design.
Maharam’s sons have reissued fabric designs by icons such as Anni Albers, Ray
and Charles Eames, Alexander Girard, Arne Jacobsen, Vernon Panton, and Gio
Ponti, and they have been honored by the Russel Wright Design Center for their
“Textiles of the 20th Century.”
I rushed to the chain link
fence to cherish the elegant lengths, the clerestory breezeows, the concrete roof
beams. My characterner grumbled, “That’s not a house, it’s a bunker.” Indeed, with
the boarded-up entry and piles of dirt, it didn’t look like much, and without
disobeying the private belongings signs we couldn’t see much more than the elevation
thin a hurry faced the force. I had heard that owner Martha Stewart had engaged
British architect John Pawson to restore the house, but the project had
obviously stalled.

Since this house was one of
the factors I came to love construction and design, its destruction is like
losing a childhood friend, and of procedure I want to find the villain and call
him (or her) to the mat. The obvious first choice is the new owner Donald
Maharam, who says that the house was beyond repair.

For me,
a Californian who grew up in a builder ranch house, the floor plan of the Bunshaft
house, as it appeared in Architectural Record Houses of 1966, challenged
the whole concept of what a house was. A rectangle with a living room at the center, only two bedrooms, few
internal doors, and no windows on the front elevation? How could this be a
house?
Its beauty was its daring
simplicity; I was captivated by the rhythms and abstraction dissertation.
Sensitively, instead of turning all the scenes to the water, Bunshaft had
oriented the two bedrooms out to the earthscape,[link widoczny dla zalogowanych], befactor all water all the time
would have been too much. He had masterfully translated the large scale of his
experience as design sectionner at Skidmore, Oearngs & Merrill into a house of
less than 3,000 square feet.
Perhaps the villain is the
town of East Hampton, which presumably granted a demolition permit? Martha
Stewart is alsteps an easy villain. After acquiring the house from the Museum of
Modern Art, she clear upd most of the fulfilles, and then abandoned the project.
Or is it her architect, John Pawson,[link widoczny dla zalogowanych], who didn’t stoppage her?

Certainly the Museum of
Modern Art, which received the house as a gift from the Bunshafts, knew who
they were selling the house to. Might MoMA be the real villain because it sold
the property without nexus for its cultural value? Isn’t the museum in the
business of cultural values? Why didn’t it preserve the home or make preservation
a grade of sale? Or, one hates to say it, why didn’t the Bunshafts offer the
house to the museum with more restrictions?