In 1987, Steven Holl completed the Berkowitz-Odgis House, high on the dunes in Martha’s Vineyard, overlooking the Atlantic Ocean. The wooden building’s slender rectangular form— outwardly expressing its balloon-frame structure—took inspiration from Herman Melville’s description in Moby-Dick of the shelters regional Native Americans created from whale bones and animal hides. The house touched lightly on this fragile landscape, hovering on stilt-like piers over the undulant, sandy terrain. The design—whose linear exoskeleton, particularly along the veranda, invited a poetic play of shadow—also responded to stringent building codes requiring significant setbacks from wetlands and limiting the house’s visibility from the beach. The widely celebrated building received a Progressive Architecture citation and a National AIA Honor Award—yet, by 2013, the 26-year-old structure had been demolished. Now in its place is a new house, by locally based Hutker Architects (HA), that pays homage to Holl’s forms and ideas without literally recreating the original. What happened?
As HA principals Gregory Ehrman and Philip Regan tell it, they’d long admired the house, even as it changed hands and slowly deteriorated over time. In 2011, their clients fell in love with its site—six acres in Aquinnah, bordering protected conservancy land—but wanted to demolish Holl’s modest, 1,600- square-foot, three-bedroom house and build anew. No landmark protections were in place. “So we did everything we could to ultimately convince them,” recalls Regan, “that the architecture was significant—well worth restoring—and they should renovate instead.”
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