Eisenman House II On The Block

                                                                      photo Brian Venden Brink

Eisenman House II

Peter Eisenman’s House II is on the block.

For a mere $2,800,000 you can own this 3 Bedroom, 3 Bath 2,554-square-foot 20th century architectural icon that was built in the late 1970s. The house sits on 110 acres; there is also a 4-stall horse barn with a studio apartment upstairs.

                                             Photo Brian Vanden Brink

House II, Side View 

Not only does the house have impeccable credentials – Eisenman routinely appears on lists of the “World’s Top 10 Living Architects,” --  it has been fully restored. The current owners, John and Lydia Makau, bought a ruin in 2000 that had been on the market for 10 years, and they painstakingly brought it back to life, as Gwenda Blair vividly describes in a NY Times article with the header “House Proud: A White Elephant Restored.” http://www.nytimes.com/2002/10/10/garden/house-proud-a-white-elephant-reincarnated.html

                                                   Photo Brian Vanden Brink

House II, Patio

House II, which is located in Hardwick, Vermont, is one of a series of ten houses that Eisenman designed early in his 5-decades-long career. The houses, which challenged every commonly held notion of “house” and “home,” catapulted Eisenman to architectural fame and, many would add, notoriety, as the houses had “confrontational” details like bedrooms separated by half-walls and large openings in the floors without railings or grates to prevent falling through.

                                                         Photo Cynthia Davidson

   Eisenman's Own House

In the years since he designed the houses, Eisenman’s own ideas on this subject have dramatically changed, as I discovered in an interview last spring: http://www.katherinesalant.com/columns/column268.html

For more info on the House II real estate listing and more pics: http://www.weichert.com/35620012

The Long Goodbye to a Dearly Beloved Neighbor

The House

For 22 years I lived across the street from a modest, one-story, modernist house designed by an architect who worked in Minoru Yamasaki's office in Troy, Michigan. The house was built in 1960, and it had some wonderful features. The most notable was the central living room with two glass walls and a 4-sided clerestory window that ringed the space.

The Central Living Room

My favorite thing about the house was outside -- an enormous, sheltering walnut tree in the front yard. It always reminded me of Longfellow and another very famous "spreading chestnut tree."

The Sheltering Walnut Tree

The original owners died. Their daughter lived there for a time and then sold the house last year. The new owners decided that they could not have the house they wanted simply by enlarging this one, so they elected to tear it down and start over. 

My beloved walnut tree went down the first day.

It took four days to knock it down.

Going.....

Going....

Gone

The new owners are building a two-story house that's twice as big. It will be very green. In style it will be colonial. We hope that in time we come to love it as much as we did its predecessor.

Home Builder Contracts: Definitely NOT a New Idea

Fragment of a Roman Contract

There may have been a time in the US when building a house was a "handshake deal" between the home owners and the builder, but those days are long gone.

Today, every builder presents the home owners with a contract that details what he promises to deliver. The contract, which can be many pages long, may seem like a new wrinkle. But in fact, mankind has been writing contracts almost as long as we have been writing anything at all, said Matthew Stolper, a professor and archeologist at the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago.

The first writing systems,  Egyptian hieroglyphs and Sumerian cuneiform, were developed around 3400 to 3200 BC. Even if written contract documents did not become common for another 200 to 400 years, that would still give legally binding contract documents a pedigree that is more than 5,000 years old.

Photo by Katherine Salant

Note: Comments and observations made during a trip to Italy in July and posted after my return.

In Rome, History Is Everywhere

Piazzo della Republica

One of the wonders of Rome is surely that ancient, modern and the millenia-in-between are mashed together cheek by jowl. Even within one building eras overlap.

The Piazzo della Republica shown here is a case in point. The Baths of Diocletian  (300 AD) overlook a modern traffic circle that surrounds the Fountain of the Naiads (1870) with frolicking nymphs (installed 1901-11). The water for the fountain is piped in through the Acqua Marcia, an aqueduct built by the ancient Romans in 144 BC. 

The Fountain of the Naiads, Piazzo della Republica

Inside the Baths of Diocletian, the central hall was converted into a church. The work was based on a design by Michelangelo, who died before it was finished in 1566. His work was later modified by Vanvitelli and that is what we see today.

The large central hall of the Baths of Diocletian, now Santa Maria degli Angeli church  

Even old trees are venerated in Rome. In a cloister behind the Baths of Diocletian, which was also designed by Michelangelo, this centuries old cypress shades a fountain that was built in 1695.

In Rome, even old trees are venerated

Rome: The Eternal & Sustainable City

A residential neighborhood in Rome

Travelers and tourists have gushed about Rome for centuries. Now they can add a new virtue to its list of "most-es". It is one of the world's most sustainable cities as well as one of its most beautiful.

Rome carries this distinction because the building height is capped at 78-1/2 feet, which works out to be 6 stories, the optimal number of floors from a density and energy use perspective, said Mathis Wackernagel, president of the Global Footprint Network (www.footprint.org) and a co-creator of the Ecological Footprint, a metric for measuring the impact of humanity on the earth's resources.

Multi-story buildings, including apartments, use resources more efficiently and occupy far less land that single family houses, but above 6 stories, electric elevators, which consume far more energy than the slow-pokey hydraulic models, are required and energy- consuming pumps are needed to get water to the upper floors, Wackernagel said.

Other cities which merit the sustainable moniker because six-story buildings predominate are Paris, Amsterdam, The Hague and Antwerp, Wackernagel noted.

Roman residential neighborhood near the Vatican

Commercial-residential area near Rome's main train station

Note: My observations were made on a trip to Europe in June and July and posted after my return to the US.

Cell Phone Use in the Car Can Be Bad for Your Love Life

Using a cell phone while driving is a poor idea. Not only do you endanger yourself, the other occupants of your car and the other drivers on the road. This can also bring down the curtain on a relationship that's already in trouble, suggests University of Minnesota professor of family social science Paul Rosenblatt,  in an article published in Family Science Review and noted in UMN's University News Service (http://www1.umn.edu/news/news-releases/2010/UR_CONTENT_202137.html) .

A conversation minus the visual cues -- gestures, facial expressions and posture -- combined with poor reception and pregnant pauses (the person on the other end doesn't know that you are silent because you're trying to avoid a pot hole) can lead to serious misunderstandings. If the relationship is already tenuous, Rosenblatt suggests, this  could be the last straw.

By the same token, if you've just starting dating someone and don't know each other well, a garbled call could end something that seemed promising.

Magna Carta: More Interesting As Idea than As Artifact

The Copy of the Magna Carta at Salisbury Cathdral

One of the original copies of the Magna Carta is kept in the Chapter House of Salisbury Cathedral in Salisbury, England. The parchment document is smaller than you might expect – it’s only about 12-inches wide by 18-inches long. The scribe who copied it had remarkably consistent penmanship, but the only people who can easily decipher it are Latin scholars who enjoy plowing through densely written, medieval text --  there are no paragraphs or indentations and none of the 63 clauses is numbered.

Salisbury’s copy of the Magna Carta is actually a copy of a copy of the document to which King John affixed his seal on June 15, 1215 at Runnymede. That agreement was formally recorded a month later on July 15, 1215. The recorded document itself was then copied and distributed. No one knows exactly how many copies were sent out, but the author of Wikipedia’s Magna Carta entry suggests there were more than 40. Of these, 4 survive (besides the one in Salisbury, two are held by the British Library in London and one is held by the Lincoln Cathedral).

As an idea, however, the Magna Carta definitely had legs. Though King John reneged and ended up in a war with the barons (wars between the feudal barons and the king were not uncommon in England at that time), the principles laid down in the Magna Carta did eventually became the cornerstones of British law and its parliamentary system of governing. For Americans, the most important of the Magna Carta’s  63 clauses  is the right to due process.

Salisbury Cathdral

Note: My observations were made during a trip to Great Britain, Italy and S. France in June and July, 2011. I am posting them after my return to the US.