Before last December, the large “9” painted in black on the front of an odd-looking house in Barnegat Light, New Jersey, was a rarely noticed anomaly in an ordinary beach community. Only when the house was scheduled for possible demolition by its new owner, a developer, did the public find out that number 9 was the address of Lieb House, designed by the groundbreaking firm Venturi and Rauch in 1969, the same year Denise Scott Brown was added as a third partner. Built after Robert Venturi’s famous home for his mother (1964), it is a seminal work of Pop architecture. Using cheap materials such as asbestos siding and off-the-shelf windows in ironic ways, it brings attention to its own ordinary qualities while subverting those same conventions. “It’s a real dumb house, just a box, but it’s gorgeous,” its owner, Judy Lieb, stated in a 1970 New York Times article, impervious to her neighbors’ occasional objections.
Concerned about its fate, Sheila Ellman, who subsequently owned the house for nearly 30 years before selling it to the developer, frantically called New York architect (and former Venturi, Rauch and Scott Brown employee) Frederic Schwartz. He contacted James Venturi (working on a documentary about his parents’ career, Learning from Bob and Denise), who then rang up Robert Gotkin and Deborah Sarnoff, patrons of his film and owners of a 1985 house designed by Venturi and Scott Brown in Glen Cove, New York. They agreed to take the Lieb House onto their land on the Long Island Sound, where it would form a pair with its younger relative. The team worked quickly to save the house, which, due to the developer’s existing contracts, needed to be off-site by February 1, 2009.
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