Requiem for a House
The architect Herbert Beckhard (1926–2003) and I took a drive one Saturday morning after I had begun writing a book in 1993 about the twenty houses he designed with his business partner and mentor, Marcel Breuer. Herb wanted to show me the very place where he had decided to become an architect, where, essentially, his career was conceived.
He picked me up at the Lawrence, New York, train station and drove me in his Mercedes (as the son of German-Jewish immigrant parents, he was partial, he often told me, to German cars) to a house in town. So attuned was Herb to the details of a house that he told me to listen to the crunch of the gravel as we coursed the driveway to a residence known as Geller I, in reference to its owners Bert and Phyllis Geller, an enlightened couple who had commissioned Breuer to design a radically new home for themselves—and their otherwise traditional town—in the mid 1940s.
Upon my learning that the house had been torn down last winter by its new owners, I now remember well the visit Herb and I had made to it those years ago. What was an important house to Herb and American architecture in general has become increasingly meaningful to me, too.
Before ringing the doorbell, Herb paused on the lawn to take in the form of the house on its site, tracing in the air the butterfly roof lines, the open-shed garage whose black void beckoned like a barn, and the white-framed trapezoidal windows. He visored a hand over his eyes so that he could discern in the bright sunlight the distinctive Breuer-blue hue on an interior wall and the cardinal red of the front door. He looked with reverence at the vertically affixed cypress boards, the mica glint on the stonework of exterior walls, and the way wings of the house seemingly hovered over the ground. “Breuer said it was an ‘atavistic instinct’ to want to have a house ‘float’ on its site,” Herb told me, putting a hand under the house to emphasize its gravity-defying dynamic. “He wanted the whole structure to be revealed with nothing hidden.”
Herb, who had been born in 1926, had grown up in Lawrence and he reminisced about how as a young, newly returned WWII veteran, having served on an aircraft carrier in the Pacific, he had heard much about this radical new house that had arisen in his Long Island town during the war. Some neighbors had derided the Modern house, whose profile was a decided foil to the lovely, if not predictable, neo-Tudors and Colonials that lined the town’s shady streets. Yet, other townspeople regarded the Geller house as the first residence representing a new era in American suburban architecture, one so revolutionary in form that it might imbue their town with a new history. While there had been an official moratorium on building houses during WWII, Breuer was allowed to design the Geller residence and see it through to completion because it was regarded as a potential prototype for prefab post-war houses. Another version of a Breuer prototype was, in fact, erected in the courtyard of the Museum of Modern Art.
“When I saw this house, soon after coming back to town from the War, I knew it confirmed my earliest thoughts about becoming an architect,” Herb said to me, as we idled at the curb. And it was shortly after that first visit that he and I were walking down a road in nearby Glen Cove, where he had designed a house for his family, that he said, “Breuer taught me to believe in an architecture without rules.” Upon his saying that phrase, we both stopped simultaneously, recognizing that what he had just uttered was the perfect title for the book I was writing about the houses he and Breuer had designed together.
The new owners of Geller I have refused to comment on why they tore down an historic house, one that set a precedent for Modern post-World War II residential architecture. But what we all know is that houses age—roofs leak (a common problem certainly with flat-roofed Breuer/Beckhard houses), foundations crack, cantilevered wings sag, aesthetic preferences change. While efficient contractors can solve those problems, a more intractable one is the fact that the way we live in homes now has changed.
Most of the interiors of Breuer/Beckhard houses are characterized by expansive living-dining areas, with kitchens well segregated from these spaces. Today’s so-called Great Rooms encompass all three. Bedrooms and bathrooms of Breuer and Beckhard’s era were diminutive in scale. In the late 1940s, 50s and 60s, when most of these houses arose, people seemed more sociable, certainly less reliant on technology for entertainment. People entertained, hosted dinner parties, families wanted to be together more of the time, and kitchens were kept behind closed doors; now, kitchens are often the metaphorical, if not geographically actual, heart of the home, with working/eating islands as large as airport runways. Bedrooms in new houses today are often expansive private domains, with ensuite bathrooms as large as the bedrooms in the Geller I house, and seating areas that rival living rooms. The Gellers later commissioned Breuer and Beckhard to design a new home, Geller II, for them on Ocean Avenue in Lawrence, one whose prevailing form is a parabola, yet another example of a house that didn’t follow rules.
Houses and buildings get torn down; without that dynamic, architects wouldn’t have much work. When my boyhood mid-century ranch house in Evanston, Illinois, went on the market years ago, I feared it would become a perfect tear-down, its large flat lot, within earshot of breaking waves on Lake Michigan, able to accommodate a much larger house. But it was sold to a couple who appreciated its Post War Modern roots; they replaced the casement windows, altered the floor plan, positioned a statue of Buddha in the front window, but preserved the essential house as it existed from its inception in 1955. It has since sold again, my 2200-square-foot, three-bedroom, one-story house for more than a million dollars (my parents had bought the empty lot and built the house for $55,000). Even though I harbored fantasies of rebuying the house when I heard it was on the market months ago, I am relieved, to some degree, that it sold for as much as it did, thinking that the steep price will keep it from being demolished. Meanwhile, the frame house next door to mine, a pre-Civil War farmhouse, was bulldozed in less than an hour and replaced with an amorphous edifice so large that it has been likened to the docking of the Titanic on my old street.
I spent a lot of time with Herb looking at and going into the houses on which he and Breuer had collaborated, as well as the houses Herb had designed solely on his own, including his family’s, which occupies a site on a shady lane in Glen Cove, with views of Long Island Sound coming into and out of sight through branches. I am glad for Herb that the house that had so inspired him and that led him to design some of America’s most distinctive residences had remained on its site during his lifetime, so that he could drive by it or ring the doorbell and be allowed inside to a domain that nurtured him for his entire career.
A house can feel like a living thing and when it is torn down, it deserves an obituary. And if we knew the deceased house well enough, even if it is a place in which we never lived, we are still able, in our imagination, to occupy its rooms.