The Architecture of Jim Crow

At some point I want to get serious about talking about how Jim Crow affected southern residential architecture. Leslie Kirchler talks about some of this in "Architecture and Landscapes of Segregation: An Historical Look at the Built Environment of Educational Facilities in the United States."

The Poland/DeFeo House: A moving preservation story

Congratulations to George Smart of Triangle Modernist Houses for organizing a terrific modern home tour in Durham Saturday! We enjoyed the three houses on the tour in Hope Valley--Brian Shawcroft's 1963 Bruce and Nancy Wardropper house, Robert "Judge" Carr's 1958 Miriam and Henry Nicholson house, and the new "Three Pavilions" by Bill Waddell for Monica Hunter.

Also available on open house was the wonderful house designed by George Matsumoto for George Poland, a professor of foreign languages and literature at NCSU, in 1954. The house, designed like Matsumoto's own house only on smaller scale, was beautifully sited above Crabtree Valley in Raleigh, but development crowded upon it and threatened to consume it. Poland's heirs worked with Preservation North Carolina in 2001 to find a seller willing to re-situate the house and give it the love it deserved.

Don DeFeo did just that, working with architect Ellen Cassilly to coordinate the move to a new pastoral setting in Durham County, to design modest renovations, and to design a new downstairs.

Now he is selling the house through the Modern Home Network and Preservation North Carolina. What a delight to be able to experience this special jewel box of a house.

Modern living

Yesterday Paul and I went up to the Vietri warehouse in Hillsborough to catch a shuttle bus out Route 70 to the east to see the Dwell Model Home. This beautiful house is prefabricated, which has many advantages, although cost is not one. It's about $250/sq. ft., and we think it's around 4,000 sq. ft. (You can do the math.) The architect claims many environmental advantages--natural light, shading, etc. Earth-conscious products are used, including bamboo flooring and "plyboo."

Rather apologetically, the architect points out that they were "required by the local covenants to build a rather large house," going on to say that they "decided to build the smallest home permissible on the site and to keep a very open floor plan to have the house feel very spacious."

Our goal is to show that a home doesn’t always have to conform to the status quo – even though it may be legally required to be a certain size or height - rules which we find to be contrary to sound design principle and any kind of environmentally-conscious thinking.

Which leaves me to wonder why they chose this subdivision to build this house in in the first place. It is beautiful, the siting is beautiful, the possibilities go on and on. But Paul and I figured we could do with about a third of it--say the main level alone, give or take.

A video tour (scroll down) from the Dwell folks.

The hidden costs teardowns/McMansions

On June 10, the News & Observer ran a front-page story on the teardown trend in Raleigh. It was too depressing to blog about. There was little critical voice. Mostly, teardowns were characterized as an economic benefit to a neighborhood.

Myrick Howard, president of Preservation North Carolina, has another view.