Duo Dickinson: ‘Antique’ and ‘Modernist’ homes make for strange bedfellows

What makes New England, well, New England? I think it is its unavoidable history. When you say the word “architecture,” what is the image that pops into your mind? For most, it is a Modernist home. In 400-year-old Connecticut there are thousands of true Antique homes. These homes fully manifest the power of history and are often more than two centuries old. There also are clusters of High Modern homes in Connecticut. These are not the Contemporary homes of superficially rakish styling; these homes are works of their architects’ art. They are Modernist statements. Phillip Johnson’s Glass House in New Canaan is literally a museum, but it is surrounded by more than 100 Modernist homes in the area, fostered before World War II by “The Harvard Five” (Johnson and four like-minded fellow Harvard School of Architecture professors). The presence of Yale’s architecture school’s faculty and students also make Modernist “Statement Homes” part of the home ownership landscape in Connecticut. Connecticut’s diversity is exceptional. The Trulia website says that more than 75% of Californians prefer Modern homes and only a 3% prefer “traditional” styles. Conversely, Ohio has more than 80% of its homebuyers preferring traditional styles — with only 12% liking “Modern” homes. But this is not about “style.” To almost everyone, Colonial and Contemporary homes are opposites — never the twain shall meet. But, if you close your eyes to the marketing of their imitators, I think truly Antique and Modernist homes impact their owners in strikingly similar ways. Just as Antique homes embody living history — time frozen in physical reality — the Modernist home freezes the mind of its architect in a moment of realization. Those hard-edge realities make those owning these homes stewards of a much larger truth than the occupants’ tenancy. The awareness of a truth greater than your favorite color often makes living in these originals an act of veneration bordering on worship. No other “style” of home has the provenance to become sacred to its owners. Fixing these home’s inevitable problems triggers huge issues of the home’s provenance that made the homeowners buy these treasures in the first place. Any desire to adjust the home to accommodate the base functions of every family has to negotiate the risk of wrecking that provenance. How these homes were built makes them inherently high-maintenance — putting them on a collision course between their origins and the desired outcomes of their occupants. Any updating, change or simply fixing the things that break in every home, whether on a classic Modernist or beloved Antique, the homeowner asks the same question: “What Would (insert the Modernist architect or the Antique’s era here) Do?” That realization comes after the homeowners realize that they hate their kitchen, or that their roof is rotting, or that their home just needs some curtains. If you own an Antique or a Modernist home, you are never home alone. In Antique homes, the wisdom of hundreds of years of aesthetic and technological insights by previous homeowners is always with you. Similarly, in a Modernist home the mind of the artist-architect creator is living in the home’s walls (or, as they are wont to be called in “archi-speak,” the “spaces, lines, planes and fenestration”) around you. Antique home technologies can only work if the owners can tolerate the infliction of their never-ending maintenance, compensating for the home’s low-tech and aging bones and skin. Similarly, those living in a Modernis home are trapped in the technologies of the home’s origin, in building’s that are designed to hide those technologies in deference to the “spaces, lines, planes” mentioned earlier. Interventions (like a working HVAC system or today’s refrigerator) can be a hideous buzz-kill to those who are sensitive to the intrinsic beauties of history or the creative mind of the home’s designer. Consequently, the never-ending leaks of a flat roof built in a climate that has rain, snow and 100 degree temperature swings are cursed by the homeowner, but tolerated in the cause of Modernism. Similarly, the ongoing wear and rot that plagues every Antique home are part and parcel with that home’s beauty, as experienced by the occupants. The vast majority of homes in Connecticut are aesthetically passive. Like the clothes you buy on Amazon, they are standard fare, designed to simply accommodate your needs. But true antiques are not mass marketed, they are one-off, literally made of idiosyncrasies. Fine art bought from a gallery is not mass marketed either, you either love it enough to accept it, or you do not buy it. Antique and Modernist homes are simply intolerant of their owners. The power of their creation, cast in the amber of time or the brain cells of their designer, overwhelms any occupant’s desire for creature comfort or expression. But these homes also fully feed their homeowners’ desire to live in a building that deeply enriches their lives, rather than blankly accommodate them. Hard bargains, but living in history or art swiftly becomes a hobby bordering on mission for those living in these two types of homes, and that devotion is what marries their mindsets. Duo Dickinson is a Madison-based architect and writer.

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