The sudden late-January demolition of the Geller House, an influential 1945 design by Marcel Breuer, was greeted with widespread dismay. Modern preservationists and Docomomo US pleaded to save the house, in Lawrence, a suburb of New York City, but the current owners decided to destroy it anyway.

Though Americans across the country have fallen in love with the cantilevered boxes, butterfly roofs, and glassy openness of architect-designed houses built in the decades after World War II, the Geller drama illustrates how difficult these houses can be to save.