“Words like ‘holocaust’ have been used in reference to the idea that our house could inspire a rash of tear-downs which could then be replaced with modern homes. I designed my house specifically within the design guidelines of this historic district and to be compatible, a good neighbor. But the term ‘modernism’ just clicks a switch in people’s brain and they can’t see the house for what it is.” — nytimes.com
Previously: Architect Fights for His Home
40 Comments
Complaining neighbor's house
compared to Cherry house
Raleigh Historic Development Commission Design Guidelines
I say tear them both down.
Let the debate begin!
ugh.
when you create terrible preservation law, you create situations like this. I don't see what was worth preserving in this neighborhood... likely the law is being used as a town-wide HOA charter to enforce someone's idea of what Raleigh should look like.
still, that house is hideous.
I don't think the house is at odds with the neighborhood, even though it's fugly. More troubling is the ideological stance of historic preservationists who apparently don't approve of something architects have done since recorded history, and that's to strive for harmony with in an existing context. Architects have always designed buildings to look "old" for the sake of harmony or plain beauty rather than any nefarious plot to decieve the passerby that they might be in medeaval England or mid-century California. The folks protesting this house are nuts, but the historic preservationists aren't helping the situation by mandating that folks can't "blend in" simply for the sake of ideology.
The woman protesting that the architect's house is out of character with the neighborhood should tear down her own house.
Agree, Miles. The woman at the center of this debacle lives in a truly awful house.
I've been following this situation for awhile and it makes me sick to my stomach.
This house is not aesthetically appealing. I appreciate the neighborhood's response. From the photos provided ( I have not checked out Street View) one can assume most houses around are 1.5 stories. One house seems like a large bungalow. Understanding and appreciating this, who would then build a two story house with a two story garage? There are so many beautiful modern examples of single story homes. Why not design something less intrusive and tasteful that has a lower profile like the surrounding homes? The historic homes speak to an earlier time of a simpler life. The new house is about maximizing every bit of space that I assume the permit would allow. My suggestion; tear down the garage and call it even.
Builders of new houses have been pissing off the neighbors for centuries. Also not new is the hue and cry of those neighbors that the new house "ruins" the neighborhood.
Even the use of litigation to try and stop the builder is nothing new. What appears newer here is the intensity and dedication of a whiny neighbor who very probably needs to get laid.
citizen that's so harsh coming from you and I totally agree lol!
MikeNull the house is not significantly larger than the one across the street - lived in by the woman who needs to get...um, heard. And AFAIK it meets all the height and coverage restrictions on the lot. It's *allowed* exactly as-is by the process that approves such things. This one noisy neighbor just doesn't like it aesthetically and *that* is not a sufficient reason to force its destruction.
Hi, Donna... "needs to get laid" to me is crude-but-useful shorthand for "lacks a full and satisfying life, as well as compassion, and so has plenty of time to turn making trouble for others into a way of life."
And, you're right, this is a troubling case.
Oh jeepers I know so many people who "need to get laid" under that definition!
i can't help but think that it's the people more than the structure that makes a neighborhood. of course that only applies to neighborhoods where people leave their houses. do people still do that?
i was accosted by a neighbor the other day who decided it was probably illegal for my dog to pee on grass. it wasn't even his grass; it was across the street from his house. not that my dog wouldn't pee on his grass though. not sure why i don't just get over it...
i mean, wtf. dogs pee just like all the other animals that run around the 'burbs. it's not new. the difference is when my dog poops there is someone following to clean it up. i think i should call the HOA and have his house torn down.
Too many hall monitors. It just seems that there are no consequences anymore for being an asshole.
A legal battle is not the time to rely on the county planning officials to sort things out. The architect/ homeowner needs to counter-sue for an obscene amount with a great lawyer, ensure that the woman who is blocking completion of the house is forced to drop her suit, then collect emotional/ property/ whatever damages from her, buy her house, and tear it down.
A good rundown of the ridiculous process, and a link to the legal defense fund, here.
Donna, I do understand that the house meets all the legal obligations concerning it's size, but my guess is it takes those obligations close to the max allowed. I think the neighbor is unreasonable for wanting it all demolished ( if she does) but I also think the architect needs to be considerate to his adoptive community. All the houses in the hood were built prior to air conditioning, and the architecture reflects this with the low profile roof lines. As I mentioned before, there are many fine modern homes of 1, 1.5 stories that would have blended in harmoniously with the neighborhood. This architect chose to ignore the reality of the neighborhood and build a large 2 story house and garage that fails aesthetically on several levels. While the neighbor is unreasonable the architect seems equally arrogant in not being more clever in negotiating existing communal standards.
Reading Section 4.3 of the Design Guidelines for Raleigh Historic Districts one could easily make the case that the house doesn't fit. But then again neither does the complainant's green PoS house.
.6 Design new buildings to be compatible with surrounding buildings that contribute to the overall character of the historic district in terms of height, form, size, scale, massing, proportion, and roof shape.
.7 Design the proportion of the proposed new building’s front facade to be compatible with the front facade proportion of surrounding historic buildings.
.8 Design the spacing, placement, scale, orientation, proportion, and size of window and door openings in proposed new construction to be compatible with the surrounding buildings that contribute to the special character of the historic district.
.9 Select windows and doors for proposed new buildings that are compatible in material, subdivision, proportion, pattern, and detail with the windows and doors of surrounding buildings that contribute to the special character of the historic district.
.10 Select materials and finishes for proposed new buildings that are compatible with historic materials and finishes found in the surrounding buildings that contribute to the special character of the historic district in terms of composition, scale, module, pattern, detail, texture, finish, color, and sheen.
.11 Design new buildings so that they are compatible with but discernible from historic buildings in the district
The issue is not the arguably bad architecture - which is clearly a matter of personal taste (or the lack thereof) - but of a process based on subjective opinion and failure to enumerate acceptable finishes and details, where the homeowner is put in jeopardy solely because of politics.
When a municipal official makes a mistake , why should a citizen pay the price?
They should sue every member of the Raleigh Board of Adjustment who voted against AND every member of the Raleigh Historic Development Commission who voted for personally and let them duke it out in court. Either the former made an error in revoking the permit or the latter made an error in issuing it. In neither case is the property owner's fault.
i was expecting this neighborhood to be along the lines of the one I live in only a bit better as my neighborhood was peppered with truly shitty apartment houses back in the sixties. only one new construction has been done in my neighborhood in the four years i've lived here and it is an overbuilt brick barnacle that has the grace of a hippo in a tutu. this neighborhood reminds me of the east side of indianapolis where there are plenty of scabby faced woman walking around wanting to date you and where the redneck crack is a plenty.
Miles,
Yes, the complainant's house will surely win no architectural awards but it does meet the guidelines set by the Raleigh Historic District. If the original historical commission based there approval on the original rendering seen here http://www.ncmodernist.org/2014oakwood.htm then they were mislead by Mr. Cherry. The rendering offers a house that is quite different than the one built. Between rendering and materialization the house was given steroids. The proportions have been exaggerated in every aspect. What the community thought they were getting was ultimately pumped and bloated by Mr. Cherry. I believe Mr Cherry understood from the start that the initial rendering was a svelte gentle offering to mask a larger end.
We could argue all day about the accuracy of the sketchup of the house but I think it is a reasonable representation of what was built, if not exactly accurate in terms of floor height above grade.
The building clearly fails any reasonable interpretation of paragraphs 6, 7, 8 & 9 in the above list. There are no two-story facades, 'contemporary' windows, odd mixes of siding materials, etc. in the neighborhood. Under those guidelines the permit should never have been granted. But once it was, and considerable expense undertaken in construction, the owner should not be penalized. Thus the legal strategy outlined above.
OMG there is nothing "misleading" about that rendering. The house as it exists currently has no landscaping. It looks bleak and harsh like it's on the moon. There are no stairs to the porch which bring the brick front of the porch to human scale. This is what makes the rendering look so different from the reality. Let the architect finish the damn house already - within two years it will blend in perfectly.
FUCK NIMBYS
Just plant vines.
Miles,you may be more reasonable/ generous than myself in regards to this matter but according to the Guardian, the neighbor did file an appeal against the building permit about a month before construction began. The couple ignored the appeal and decided to build anyway.
^ Interesting twist. If they had knowledge, they are liable.
Another case where pretty much everyone is wrong. The Historic Commission for granting a permit, the neighbor in the fugly house being an asshole and the owner for building while under threat.
In the end The Board of Adjustment is actually starting to look good for revoking the permit.
As I read the story about this particular case, no one is suing anyone. (Oh, sure, it says so in the headline, but headlines don't count, do they?)
Lawsuits are mentioned about situations elsewhere, but this case is of a neighbor appealing a government approval, not a lawsuit. It's an important distinction, I think. It's also a blunder by whoever titled the essay (typically, not the journalist).
The hearing on the fate of the house is this afternoon at 2:30pm Eastern time. Follow @NCMHTweets for live tweeting of the proceedings!
thanks for the link donna - hoping they win...
You kids, with all your tweeters and interwebs!
Continued til tomorrow, it seems.
Reporter's wrap-up of the day's proceedings.
Kills me that Gail Wiesner is complaining about crowds coming in and "gawking" at the modern house - something that would NEVER have happened if she hadn't brought the issue to court! What a nightmare is would be to have a busybody neighbor.
I find it very interesting that this Gail Wiesner in question is a Real Estate Agent.
maybe she didn't get the answer she was looking for when she posted her 'what style is this house' thread on archinect, and this is how she acts out?
That article (Donna's link) is one of the funniest things I've read in a long time.
The appraiser’s report compared the effect to the construction of a shopping center or high school athletic stadium
That's not how appraisals work. Somebody should sue that idiot.
curtkram, I think you nailed it.
If I win the lotto I'm buying a lot in that neighborhood and building a gay club.
Or a mosque. Not sure yet which will piss of old white people more...
Actually scratch that...a death metal club should do the trick.
A car wash would be sufficient. And maybe one of those 24-hour checking cashing places. Paint it the same puke green as Weisner's house and it will fit right in.
Senior housing is enough to cause riots in some neighborhoods.
I like this, cited in the comments from Donna's link:
From Vanity Fair:http://www.vanityfair.com/culture/2014/04/oakwood-teardown-historic-district
"Putting aside the absurdity of revoking a building permit that was legally given, months after a building is already well under way—and the requirement that its owner needs to spend money to fight to hold onto his permit—the Cherry case says a great deal about taste, not to mention different notions of what a historic district actually is, or should be. Gail Wiesner also lives in a fairly new house, built in 2008, but hers was designed to look like a much older house. Some of the other recent houses in Oakwood are also what you could call faux-traditional, like hers, and it is clear that at least some of the residents of Oakwood envision the neighborhood as a kind of stage set, an idealized little village in which every house looks like it has been there for a long time, a place where the buildings are old and only the people, the cars, and the kitchen appliances are young.
It’s not a view that prevailed in Oakwood 75 or 100 or 150 years ago, which are the very golden eras that these people want to evoke. What I found most striking about Oakwood when I visited it, along with Louis Cherry, earlier this month, is the mix of houses it contains, from stolid 19th-century brick boxes to ornate Victorians to early 20th-century Arts and Crafts bungalows. There was never, then, an insistence on using architecture as a vehicle with which to play pretend and to maintain some bizarre notion of stylistic purity. In Oakwood, the eclectic mix of styles has given the neighborhood a resonance. It shows that time was visible, and from the look of most of those old houses, the residents were proud of that fact. They knew that labels are not how you determine whether or not something fits."
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