This weekend, a home designed by modernist architect Marcel Breuer will hit the market in Andover.
Named for its original owners, “The Grieco House” offers three bedrooms and three bathrooms in 3,721 square feet on 1.07 acres. The Janovitz + Tse Team of ModernMass at Compass is handling the listing at 81 Sunset Rock Road, which will come with a $1,500,000 price tag.
— Boston.com
Breuer supposedly took the commission after the Grieco family dismissed Frank Lloyd Wright from the project following a disagreement. Its binuclear plan incorporates some of the lessons Breuer learned in the Bauhaus studio of Paul Klee that relate to relaxation and the spatial distribution of light. It is one of Breuer’s last completed New England residential designs following his tenure on the faculty of the Harvard GSD, and comes with a fully renovated interior, refurbished original woodwork, and brutalist wine cellar, according to the website ModernMass.
News of the listing comes just months after the demolition of another early binuclear design – the erstwhile Geller House on Long Island – which preservationists saw as evidence of the difficulties in maintaining some of the traditionally overlooked examples of midcentury modernism in America.
“There aren’t very many tools to aid the preservation of these houses,” Docomomo US executive director Elizabeth Waytkus told the New York Times in February. "The best activists can do is promote the value of postwar architecture to the community, as well as to sellers. Then try to find buyers willing to preserve them.
1 Comment
This architecture makes me feel better about how restrained and mindful the modernists were with materiality and excess. Of course, the modernity of the clients too. FLW would do a nice job with a Usonian house too. But, maybe he wanted to do more and got fired.
These days, it is more about a material world opulence and all.
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