You begin to interest me…vaguely
Remember the Silver Foliage glassware by Libbey? Well here’s the more popular Golden Foliage in a less common shape: the sugar and creamer set with a metal caddy, and the 16 oz. hostess pitcher with a removable handle. Found, unexpectedly, at a freecycle event.
Featured image: The Gothic-styled Union Trust Building, built in 1916 as the Union Arcade by Henry Clay Frick.
…Pontoon party boat included. A 1955 house in Upper Greenwood Lake, New Jersey, owned by Adam Horovitz of the Beastie Boys and Kathleen Hanna of Bikini Kill, is for sale. The house is listed for just under $1 Million and property taxes are a very-reasonable-for-New Jersey $15,000 or so. The furniture, which goes all-in on the MCM vibe, has a staged feel, but the house appears to mostly retain the original kitchen and bathrooms.
Jazz legend Dave Brubeck’s house has eight bedrooms, five and a half bathrooms, and at least four pianos. It’s not clear whether the latter, or the Nakashima furniture, is included in the $2.75 million price tag.
Dave and Iola Brubeck hired an unknown young architect, Beverly David Thorne, to design their first house, completed in 1954, in Oakland, California. When they moved east, Thorne also designed their Connecticut house. He “often slept outdoors on the property in a sleeping bag while designing the house to chart where the sun emerged in the sky each day so he could best position the structure for maximum sun exposure during season changes,” according to Brubeck. The house was completed around the same time Thorne designed Case Study House #26 in California.
Identify the different styles of breeze block in those mid-century houses in Vegas, Palm Springs, and elsewhere with this Field Guide produced by the Nevada Preservation Foundation and based on the book by Ron and Barbara Marshall.
A few years after completing the Trenton Bath House, Louis Kahn designed the one-bedroom Esherick house for a bookstore owner who wanted plenty of reading nooks. The current owners conducted a 17 month restoration of the house.
What does concrete block want? Probably a sympathetic and historically accurate restoration.
Louis Kahn is considered one of the most important architects of the twentieth century, but his early career was unremarkable. When Kahn was about fifty, he traveled through Italy, Greece, and Egypt. The ancient architecture he studied there transformed him, and when he returned to the United States, one of the first buildings he designed was the Trenton Bath House, one component of the Trenton Jewish Community Center. This unassuming structure, completed in 1957, is a landmark in Modernism and marks a turning point in Kahn’s design vision, and in twentieth century architecture.
