Private Lives

Janet Lindstrom, executive director of the New Canaan Historical Society, devotes much of her time trying to save the town’s exemplary Modern-ist houses. A roster compiled by architect Landis Gores in the late 1960s listed 75 such buildings. But don’t ask Lindstrom for a copy of the list or the accompanying map. “We don’t circulate it any longer,” she says, “because people are brazen about disregarding the fact that these are private homes.” Nobody wants to find a stranger in the bushes—not even a stranger motivated by the love of Modern architecture.

That is the dilemma of preserving New Canaan’s architectural legacy. From 1947 to the ’70s the town was part of a triad—with Southern California and Sarasota, Florida—of Modernist experimentation. But the houses, many of which are hidden from the street, are privately owned and—unless Congress creates a “New Canaan National Park”—are likely to remain that way. Meanwhile, families continue to live in them, and sometimes that means making changes.

Lack of access to the houses also stymies preservation groups. But even perfectly preserved, the houses would still be off-limits to the public, which would continue to know them through decades-old photos. So why does it matter if the houses—forever young on film—are altered? Preservationists argue that the houses embody a midcentury “ethos” that can only be experienced by visiting them. Many of the features championed by New Canaan architects—carports, kitchens that open into family rooms, sliding glass doors that combine to create slide-away walls—became standard features of American residential design. The houses’ modest scale and humble materials hark back to an era when ingenuity—not opulence—was architecture’s lodestar.

Currently only one of the 75 houses is safe: Phil-ip Johnson’s Glass House, which he willed to the National Trust for Historic Preservation. Richard Bergmann, a local architect and veteran of many preservation fights, estimates that a dozen of the houses on Gores’s list have been torn down. Many others are endangered. “The developers have moved in, and they’re making a lot of money,” says John Johansen, a celebrated 89-year-old Modernist who designed seven houses in New Canaan. Three have been demolished, and one has been altered beyond recognition. “It’s a very ugly situation.”

John Black Lee, a New Canaan architect, speaks to preservation groups around the country about saving clusters of Modernist houses. “I tell them that the only way you can do it is through publicity—you have to give tours, publish articles, do anything to get the word out. I think some preservationists are disappointed that I don’t have a magic bullet.”

The great successes of the preservation movement—New York’s Grand Central Station, for example, or Carnegie Hall—have involved prominent buildings, usually owned by companies or agencies that could be more easily influenced by picket lines and op-ed pieces. In New Canaan, where significant architecture sits at the end of long driveways, preservationists find themselves with fewer public options.

Right now a number of houses appear to be changing hands. “And any time that happens, you have to worry,” Lindstrom says. The bucolic scenery and proximity to New York—exactly what drew Modernist architects to New Canaan in the first place—means that lots are worth as much as $1.5 million an acre. At those prices 50-year-old plywood houses, often with bathroom-size bedrooms and closet-size baths, are often thought of as teardowns. And sympathetic owners—many of whom are at retirement age or beyond—can’t stay in them forever.

Among those properties being watched by the preservationists is Edward Durell Stone’s 1959 Celanese House, designed as a showcase for the eponymous company’s products. Its gray-shingle facades are overlaid with an extensive wooden lattice, the work of the trellis-fixated Stone. The flat roof is punctured by a dozen pyramidal skylights, from each of which is suspended an inverted metal pyramid that serves as an overhead planter. In 1950s photos the house is filled with custom furniture by Edward Wormley, who was also commissioned by Celanese. Today the building is in poor shape—so much so that the owner, who is reportedly 102, would prefer that visitors not see the interior. Someday the house will be sold, and the worse its condition, the harder it will be to find a buyer who appreciates the orig-inal Stone design.

Johnson’s Ball House, down the street from the Celanese House, also seems vulnerable. This year Janet Phypers, the longtime owner of the single-story plywood house, sold it for $1.5 million. The buyer, who is an architect, says that she plans to save it. And perhaps she will. But New Canaanites have reason to worry—Bergmann has no problem pointing to sites of Modernist houses whose owners promised to save them but in the end demolished them in favor of huge and gaudy McMansions. And the Ball House, which sits on a gorgeous site, is tiny.

If the new owner is lucky, she will be able to expand it without having to add a disfiguring second story. Current zoning regulations sensibly limit the percentage of a lot that can be built on. These regulations are not new, but with opposition to McMansions at a fever pitch, enforcement has been tightened. And that means that the only way to expand most of the Modernist houses is vertically. “The single-story house is penalized,” says architect Laszlo Papp, chairman of the planning and zoning commission.

Later this summer the town is expected to adopt a new regulation allowing exceptions to the coverage rule for “recognized Modernist houses.” The rule was drafted by Glenn Chalder of Planimetrics (an Avon, Connecticut-based planning consultant) at the request of preservationists. “Now if a person wants to maintain the basic look of a Modernist house, but maybe add a couple of bedrooms, the town should be able to permit it,” Chalder says. But, he adds, “If you have a buyer who has no intention of keeping the house, the regulation is not going to help.”

A house renovated by Joeb Moore demonstrates the problem with current regulations. An architecture professor at Columbia University, Moore welcomed the chance to remodel the Prutting House, by Eliot Noyes, one of the New Canaan architects known as the Harvard Five. (Noyes, Johnson, Gores, Johansen, and Marcel Breuer all migrated from Cambridge after World War II.) Moore’s clients, husband-and-wife builders, were looking to maximize return on their investment.

“We had two choices,” Moore says. “Knock the house down—they could have put up a colonial and made a lot of money—or find a way to do alterations within the existing footprint, which was permissible under the zoning regulations.” Moore chose to retain Noyes’s strongly horizontal exterior, clad in cedar and zinc alloy, while adding space above and below it. The new house—nearly twice as large as the original—contains features, such as cavernous bathrooms, that Noyes never envisioned. Moore tried to honor the 1950s design with both imitation (he used Noyes’s mate-rials) and separation (he designed a band of glass so that the new lower level “visually does not touch the existing building”). But parts of the design, he concedes, were compromised to save money during construction.

When the project was complete, Moore’s clients sold the house for more than $4 million, demonstrating that contemporary architecture can attract buyers, even in a neighborhood of faux châteaus. “There’s no question that it’s a very striking building when you see it from the road,” Moore says.

But what it demonstrates about the viability of Modernist preservation is less clear. Joeb Moore realizes that much of what made the house special has been lost, but he remains unapologetic. “I would emphasize that the whole model of what constitutes preservation is being looked at academically,” he says. “In the United States the reigning model has been to freeze-dry the object. But it’s a questionable model,” he says, for the New Canaan buildings, which are no longer functioning as houses. “They’re functioning as museum pieces. And they can’t all be museums.” Which is another way of saying that unless someone very rich is willing to preserve a house as an objet d’art, it has to change or die. But New Canaanites are determined to do more than watch the houses slip away. Moore says that the Prutting House—which he enlarged within the existing footprint—might have turned out differently if the lot coverage rules had been relaxed.

Some houses have benefited from subtle renovations. A house that John Black Lee designed for his own family in 1955 was updated by Toshiko Mori in 1994. Mori replaced 40-year-old wood posts with stainless-steel columns, raised the roof (which had the effect of heightening existing clerestory windows), and replaced 1950s sliders with far more elegant (and functional) metal-framed windows. Lee calls her work “a very nice improvement. It’s a terrific house now.” The house has recently been on the market—but, having failed to find a buyer as devoted to the house as she is (and able to pay more than $2 million), the owner is considering staying—and having Mori design a new bedroom pavilion.

Mori has also been consulted by the owners of a house built by Breuer for his own family in 1951. The house was owned by a builder, who—upon learning the importance of the house—decided to hold off on razing it until a buyer could be found. Then on a house tour sponsored by the New Canaan Historical Society last year, a local couple saw the place and decided to buy it—a tribute to their tour guide, Richard Bergmann.

There are other preservation routes available. An owner can create an easement—a promise not to alter the house (or some aspect of it) written into the deed. Because the easement reduces the house’s value, the owner is allowed to donate it to a nonprofit preservation group and take a tax deduction. But no owner of a Modernist house in New Canaan has gone the easement route, Lindstrom says. It may be that five- or six-figure tax deductions pale compared to the possibility of seven-figure profits.

Some houses qualify for listing with state or federal preservation groups. The house designed by Gores for his own family in 1948 is now listed on the National Register of Historic Places—a designation fought for by his widow, Pamela, who still lives there. Johnson’s Hodgson House, across the street from the Glass House, is expected to join it on the list. Its owners began the process several years ago, and reportedly won’t sell it until the application is approved. Listing doesn’t prevent demolition of a house, but it may make owners think twice about changing it.

Johansen is working with the owners of two of his local houses to get them listed by the Historic Preservation and Museum division of the Connecticut Commission on Culture and Tourism—a process he describes as time-consuming and expensive. He says he tries to be philosophical about the teardowns. “The reward is in the doing,” Johansen says. “Having built the house, I’ve already won.” But he doesn’t sound terribly convinced.

If Johansen lives to be 98 (as Johnson did) and somehow amasses a fortune (as Johnson had), perhaps he can leave one of his houses to the National Trust for Historic Preservation. But even that’s an imperfect solution: controversy over how many people will visit the Glass House, how they’ll get there, and where they’ll park persist. And even if those issues are resolved, Johnson’s masterpiece will never again be what it was designed to be: a house. Even Johnson—the architecture world’s ultimate string-puller for 50 years—couldn’t solve that conundrum.