Not so long ago, the attention of specialists was attracted by several annoying episodes related to the fate of buildings by prominent architects of the middle of the last century. All of them are residential buildings, and the authors of their projects are Richard Neutra, Louis Kahn, Philip Johnson …
It would seem that these names alone should provide these buildings with a cloudless future. But the reality turned out to be darker. The "alarm bells" were the failures at the auctions of two masterpieces of modernism - the Kaufman Richard Neutra house in Palm Springs (1947) and the house of Margaret Escherick (1961) by Louis Kahn in the Philadelphia suburb of Chesnut Hill. The first was sold at first with difficulty at Christie's in New York (with a starting price of $ 15 million, it was given $ 16.8 million), and then the deal fell through (reportedly through the fault of the buyer). The second villa, listed at the lesser known Wright auction in Chicago for $ 2 million, did not find a buyer at all. After the previous success in the auctions of buildings by Breuer, König and other masters of the international style, this turn was a complete surprise both for realtors-specialists in houses with “history” and for heritage conservators.
Blame for this is the crisis in the real estate market in the United States, which caused a sharp drop in property prices in general. But the attitude towards such monuments in society also played a significant role. Firstly, the main importance for the vast majority of American buyers - even those who are aware of the architectural and historical value, for example, the building of Kahn - is still the size of the future home. And all the buildings up for sale are small, the same house in Chesnut Hill has only one bedroom. Their discreet appearance also finds few fans: most of the buildings sold and bought for similar amounts are designed in a specific neo-colonial style, Georgian or Spanish, with a huge amount of detail and a large area.
This situation also affected the unique Alice Ball (1953) house of Philip Johnson in New Kanen: it is a "residential version" of the famous "Glass House" by the same author, located just three miles from it. It is not only not large at all (total area - 160 sq. M), but also very modest in appearance: glass, metal and pinkish plaster of concrete walls. Its current owner, inspired by the success at the auctions of all the same houses of Koenig, Darrell Stone and Prouvé, decided to sell it for at least 3.1 million, and if there is no buyer (and she has been looking for him for a year now), then she plans demolish the building. Johnson called the work “his jewelry box,” but it is now surrounded by three-story “Tudor” style “palaces” with at least 1,500 square meters of space. m., and the attitude towards it is appropriate.
At the same time, it is far from always possible to say unequivocally that a “private trader” is worse than a public organization in the role of the owner of an architectural monument. Of course, in the first case, the villa of Le Corbusier or Alvar Aalto turns out to be in the same dependence on the life circumstances of the owners as any shed: for example, the Kaufman house was put up for auction, because the couple of its owners decided to divorce (up to this moment they loved this construction and spent astronomical sums on its restoration).
But the example of the desperately dilapidated and threatened VDL II Pilot House in Los Angeles, bequeathed by the architect's widow to a public institution, makes one wonder about the positives of private funding.
However, one more question remains: how is it that $ 33.6 million is easily paid for a painting by Lucian Freud, and $ 2 million is spared for Kahn's house? Of course, an architectural monument cannot be taken away with you, it requires significant costs to maintain it in good condition, etc. But it seems that the main reason here is that the public is not used to viewing 20th century architecture on a par with modern painting: Francis Bacon's triptych may cost 86 million, and Neutra's key building barely reaches 15 million. At the same time, society will be high to appreciate everything for which they pay big money (far from everyone is attracted by the work of the same Bacon or Pollack, but the cost of their work is universally respected, and their paintings may well appear on the wall of a monstrous "Spanish-style" mansion in the same California Palm -Springs).
But privately owned buildings may seem “lucky” when compared to government or commercial buildings.
The Turkish section of DOCOMOMO asked the international community to help at least by signing an open letter from the Commission for the Protection of Monuments of the city of Kayseri, where it is planned to demolish the complex of the Sümerbank textile factory (1934-35), built according to the project of Ivan Nikolaev. In fact, this is a whole town: with industrial buildings, housing, recreational areas and infrastructure.
In 1998, the factory was closed, and its entire territory was transferred to the local university Erciyas, whose management, together with the city authorities, plans to create a new campus at the construction site of Nikolaev. We can only hope that the dilapidated buildings of the significant monument of constructivism will seem to Turkish officials involved in the protection of cultural heritage worthy of preservation: at least as a monument to the first years of the country's industrialization.
But not always the issue of protecting a building from destruction can be resolved unequivocally. A prime example of such a situation is the controversial position of the Robin Hood Gardens affordable housing complex in London (1972) by Peter and Alice Smithson. This is an experimental project, both architectural and social. Its authors, inspired by Le Corbusier's Living Unit in Marseille, created the so-called. streets - wide lines of balconies along every third floor. These galleries, as well as the green area around the two buildings of the complex, were to become a new public space for residents. Instead, "Robin Hood Gardens" turned into a very dangerous place from the point of view of a criminal situation, and no tenants began to gather on its "streets" and in the lobbies. A certain role in the decision to demolish the complex (apart from almost unanimous public opinion) was played by both the out-of-fashion brutalist appearance of the building and its poor condition: there has been no renovation there since its commissioning in the early 1970s.
As a result, the English Heritage organization has refused to put the complex on the state list of monuments, and 80% of Londoners living in Robin Hood Gardens seek an apartment elsewhere (despite its advantageous location next to the new Canary Wharf). However, Building Design magazine's conservation campaign, which is considered central to the Smithsonian heritage, was led by Norman Foster, Richard Rogers and Zaha Hadid, who see the complex as an important British architectural landmark that influenced the subsequent development of the typology of the residential apartment building.
The solution to this issue, where the interests and preferences of specialists and the public collided again - and from a somewhat unusual angle - is expected in the near future …
