You begin to interest me…vaguely
Saving (or not) Modernism in the Hamptons and What Historic Preservation is Doing to American Cities
Two different perspectives on houses and preservation that should have more of an overlap in Long Island, New York
Featured image: The Geller I house by Marcel Breuer in Lawrence, New York. Demolished 2022. Source: Docomomo/Syracuse University.
Previous views of Health and Ag. More about the buildings at Preservation New Jersey.
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.
