Mies van der Rohe's Farnsworth House was up for sale at Sotheby’s in 2003, and Jean Prouvet’s Mason Tropical collapsible house appeared at Christie’s last summer. In the same "company" were the house of Wolfson Trailer in the state of New York, built by Marcel Breuer, and house No. 21 from the "Case Study" by Pierre Koenig.
Now it was the turn of the Kaufman House - "mansion in the desert" (1946-1947) by Richard Noitra in Palm Springs, one of the most famous works of the architect. It will be put up for auction at Christie's in the summer of 2008, among a program of masterpieces of post-war and contemporary art. The estimated cost of the construction is 15-25 million dollars, which distinguishes it from other architectural monuments of the 20th century that went under the hammer before him: the same Farnsworth House went “only” for 7.5 million. Experts note that it is not a matter of historical and the aesthetic value of the building: the geographical location played a role here. Neutra's home is in California, and Mies van der Rohe's masterpiece is in Illinois in the Northeastern United States.
Historians and just architecture lovers oppose this method of sale, since most often, as a result of an auction, buildings are in the hands of private individuals who are in no hurry to show their acquisitions to researchers and students-architects.
On the other hand, if a fashion arises among millionaires to buy houses with the status of a monument of modernism, then many buildings will not only be saved from destruction, but will also be guaranteed to be preserved in good condition for future generations.
The history of the Kaufman house is particularly revealing in this respect. Edgar J. Kaufman, a department store owner in Pittsburgh, commissioned Frank Lloyd Wright for the famous Falls House in the 1930s. Ten years later, he decided to build a villa in California where he could spend the winter months. Neutra created a project for him based on the opposition of floor platforms to visually supporting walls of transparent glass.
After Kaufman's death in 1955, the house changed several owners, which distorted the architect's plan with various additions. In 1992, its current owners, the Harris couple, decided to visit the famous monument and found that it was up for demolition. In Palm Springs, modernism was not very popular (stylized Spanish colonial style prevails there), and the house at that time had stood empty for three and a half years. The Harris couple purchased the building for $ 1.5 million, carried out a thorough scientific restoration of the building and bought additional plots of land around it, restoring the original ensemble of the Kaufman estate. Now the couple are getting divorced, and the house has been put up for sale again - but on completely different terms.
Another recent example of an attempt to turn a 20th century architectural monument into a "profitable enterprise" is associated with the last construction of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe in the United States, the IBM building in Chicago (1972). From the second to the fourteenth floor of this 52-storey building, it is planned to turn into a boutique hotel for 300 guests. In 2006, the main tenant left the tower, who gave it its name - IBM, and after that, the income of the owners of the building, including leaving for its maintenance in good condition, fell sharply.
