Word: glassing
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Modernism has another architectural-pilgrimage site. Like the Farnsworth House in Plano, Ill., a Ludwig Mies van der Rohe creation that the trust also owns, the Glass House has become a place where people come to marvel at the elegance and incontestable beauty of the Modernist idea in the hands of a master. (And also at things like the skimpy-looking electric range that Johnson tucked into the ultraefficient, small kitchen zone.) But even while the Glass House has been scrupulously restored and preserved, there are thousands of less well publicized Modernist homes on a kind of architectural death watch...
...irony is that so many of these houses are in jeopardy just as the Modernist era--all those decades of severe glass and steel--is being re-evaluated. By the 1970s, the sheer quantity of mediocre boxy office buildings had given the style a bad name. The history of architecture since then has been largely an effort to find a way out of that aesthetic dead end. Still, the enduring virtues of Modernism--clean lines and lucid structure--have been carried into the present by architects like Norman Foster and Richard Rogers. Meanwhile the furniture and graphics...
...older Modernist homes face extinction. (Or a fate almost as bad: death by renovation.) And when the bulldozers start their engines, even architectural pedigree is no barrier. Richard Neutra, who died in 1970, remains one of the best-known California Modernists, the man whose work defined the romance of glass-enclosed living rooms cantilevered over Hollywood hillsides. His houses have become trophies for West Coast tastemakers such as fashion designer Tom Ford and hair-care mogul Vidal Sassoon. All the same, five years ago, an important Neutra house was pulled down almost overnight. Then there's Paul Rudolph. For decades...
...late. Michael Govan, director of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, has said he wants to explore the idea of having his museum "collect" a few L.A.-area houses by name architects such as Neutra and Rudolph Schindler. And the National Trust is using the opening of the Glass House to kick off a campaign to educate people about the virtues of Modernist architecture of all kinds, including home architecture, and to lobby for its preservation...
...Glass House proves, the best of them are coming of age splendidly too. All we have to do is let them live long enough...