In January, the demolition of the Geller House by Marcel Breuer, built in 1945 in a suburb of New York, caused an outcry among preservationists and aficionados of Midcentury Modernism. The single-story cedar-clad “bi-nuclear” dwelling—with a plan that demarcated one wing for children, and the other for living, dining, and the kitchen—exemplified a new kind of domestic life in postwar America, with a flexible, open plan and easy access between indoors and outdoors. A similar prototype by Breuer was built in the garden of the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1949—inspiring, along with the work of many others, residential design around the country. As James Russell argues in an article on threatened midcentury houses, the Geller House was significant not only for its “style” but for the ideas expressed in its then innovative program, which have informed social as well as architectural history. Countless similarly significant houses have also been destroyed or altered beyond recognition.
Private property in suburbia tends to be beyond the reach of preservationists, but, in most cities, regulations for protecting historic architecture often come into play in urban planning and during the review of new construction.
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