 Welcome everyone, big announcement, turn off your cell phones please, please, please. It's a beautiful day, thank you for coming, we're going to have a wonderful talk and now Beth is going to introduce our speaker. Walking at last. Walking yes, but not going to stand for the whole thing here. It's my pleasure today to welcome back Devin Coleman, you may remember he spoke here just about a year ago on the historic architecture of South Burlington. Devin is a graduate of Colby College where he earned his bachelor's in art history. He also holds a master's in historic preservation from the University of Vermont. Since 2006 he has served as the state architectural historian for the Vermont division for historic preservation and in that role he identifies and documents historic resources throughout Vermont. He also oversees the programs for the national and Vermont registers of historic places and one of his many interests is modernist architecture and he's here today to talk to us about modernist architecture in Vermont. So please welcome back Devin Coleman. Check, check, is that good? You hear me? Excellent. Well thank you Beth. Good to see you out and about. So today we'll be talking about mid-century modern architecture in Vermont and specifically houses because this is a far greater topic than we can cover in about 45 minutes. So really have to narrow it down and it's funny because I did my thesis at UVM in the historic preservation program on modernist houses in Chittenden County and even that was almost too big and when I first started people would laugh and say like oh it's like two houses. Like no there's a lot out there but as we'll see it's just not always as obvious to us but before we dive in I do want to take a minute and just dedicate this talk to Alice Outwater. Did any of you know Alice? She was, she passed away in December and she was one of the first people I met when I was in graduate school and trying to find these modernist houses and on the right is a picture of her house on Overlake Drive and it's in hindsight it was really the perfect embodiment of modernism in Vermont because the main house which is on the left side of the photo we're looking at the back of the house. The main house was a very traditional Tudor style 1930s typical Burlington house. You go on the backyard and it's this floor to ceiling wall of glass open floor plan modernist furniture just the contrast between the two was so striking and that's really what a lot of Vermont modernism is. It's not out right in your face it's kind of behind the more traditional facade of New England Vermont but it's there so you just have to search for it a little bit. So Alice was always very interested in my research and really supportive so I just wanted to acknowledge her. So as I said I came to Vermont in 2004 to study at the UBM graduate program in historic preservation and we were always being assigned projects go out find a building describe it analyze it research it and I found that I really wasn't interested in researching Greek revival or Victorian or you know not that I don't appreciate those styles but they have been researched to death you can find any number of books that talk about the styles the characteristics the significance. So I really sought out buildings that had not been studied such as this Macaulay Hall and the Trinity campus 1958 building by Marcel Bowden or Cathedral Church of St. Paul in downtown 1973 by Burlington associates and really looking trying to figure out why are these buildings here why do they look so different from the older styles and then houses buildings like the Bar House by J. Henderson Bar in South Burlington you know why is this house one story long and flat with walls of glass instead of a big hill section mansion what was what was leading to these these designs and that brings us to the first question you know we would call this a modern house or a modernist house their contemporary house there are a lot of terms that are used interchangeably and loosely but for our purposes modernism capital M modernism if you will is really referring to a specific moment in time late 19th early 20th century when there is at least in the western world a wholesale reconsideration of historic traditions and we see that in things like literature the work of T. S. Eliot or Virginia Woolf rethinking how narrative structures are formed in the use of language modernist artwork Picasso the Cubist George Brock rethinking how we depict the world in artwork this leads later on to non-objective art and abstract art and in music no composers like Igor Stravinsky or Carl Ruggles who are you know really rethinking what a work of classical music is and experimenting with atonal compositions and really exploring what the boundaries are or exploding the boundaries the traditional boundaries so it was more than just modernist architecture modernism was a wholesale movement across many different disciplines and architecture was one of those so if we look at architecture somewhat may not seem obvious but we actually have to go back to the mid 19th century to the roots of modernist architecture and a building that's known as the Crystal Palace built in London 1851 and what's amazing about this building is that it enclosed almost a million square feet huge structure and it was all built with cast iron and glass incredibly modern in its use of material and structure you can see the framework going up of standardized modular components this whole thing was built in less than a year because it was all standard there was no more handcraft you know hewing every single log and beam by hand this was essentially mass produced building later on in the late 19th century 1896 we have architects like Louis Sullivan in Chicago and his famous credo that form ever follows function and he was talking about the struggle that architects were having designing skyscrapers because this was a completely new building type up until the mid to late 19th century no one ever needed to build taller than five or six stories that was the limit of technology once we had steel and elevators we could go much taller but then how do you articulate that building so Sullivan's approach was to say that the form of the building follows the function of the building one of the key tenets of the modernist movement then in the 1920s we have architects this is Corbusier in France and he is really pushing the limits publishing a magazine called the spree vote excuse me get a drink of water here and in the spree new vote Corbusier really takes a hard line and says we must divorce architecture from the past clean break we're done with historical styles we're going to start fresh and probably the most pivotal moment would be the founding of the Bauhaus school in Germany and this is a school of design headed by Walter Gropius German architect and what was really groundbreaking about this school is that it was not just an architecture school it was a fine art school and a craft school and while they were looking at really promoting modernist design they were also teaching traditional crafts of weaving and silver smithing and you know handy crafts but in a very modernist aesthetic so that the rugs that were being made were not floral pattern oriental rugs they were very bold geometric designs that can fit right into buildings like this so a very strong interaction of an integration of modernist architecture and the arts and crafts so you'll notice we've had France Germany this is all happening in Western Europe early 20th century why well if you live through World War one in Germany in France and Europe the utter devastation destruction the massive social upheaval radically changed everyone's view of the past because what had come before led to this so maybe the past wasn't what they wanted to emulate and this was really a turning point for a lot of architects and designers we said we can either keep designing in traditional modes the way they did through the 19th century or this is our chance blank slate stark fresh and create a new a new ideal almost a utopian world and that's embodied in buildings like Mies van der Roos apartments in Germany we have just very pure regular form no decoration you know there's a saying German architect Adolf Luce who proclaimed that ornament is a crime you might be going a little far but as with anything there you know there's a broad spectrum none of this is set in stone it's it develops and some are more adamant than others so this is happening in Europe and World War one was kind of the genesis of this and then the next key turning point was World War two when a lot of these architects in Germany and France come to the United States and one of the first inklings that we see in Vermont is this house in South Burlington Pitsigalli house and this is as far as I've found the first international style house in Vermont and it's early I mean 39 this was cutting edge this was really right in in the thick of it this house was published in the the free press in 1936 it was an experimental house and somehow Pitsigalli got ahold of the plans and was able to recreate it he was a Mason so he could build a cement house very easily and he was also from Switzerland so this is a very European modernist house it must have appealed to his sensibilities and this is how the house looked leave that picture from the mid 80s it's still there it's near the airport it's been slightly altered but the overall form is still intact at the same time we have local architect Lewis Newton who's designing you know he was sort of a jack-of-all-trades you name it he could design in that style and this is a design he did for a developer and I love that it's labeled at the bottom as the quote modern house this was this was pretty edgy for Burlington, Vermont in 1939 and this was he did I think six house plans four of which were built this one was not built the most modern one is this one this is on Locust Street still there today and just on the left edge you can see another house with a Dutch gable roof he sort of did a Dutch colonial at New England colonial and then more traditional house and then this was the modern one and in it we can see kind of a Vermont interpretation of the modernist aesthetic it's very stripped down there's no decorative shingle work there's no extra trim there's not a big fancy cornice with dentals and it's very cubic in form everything's very linear horizontal so this is kind of the distillation of those modernist ideas in Europe coming to Vermont another building of note is the Freeman house this was built in 1941 it's on de Forest Road in Burlington and this was actually the home of Bill and Ruth Freeman who were partners with John French of the Freeman French Freeman architecture firm and when this was built in 41 the free press really didn't know what to call it other than unusual so I love that because it shows just how what is this was the kind of the thinking in in Burlington at the time you know in the article starts a distinct departure from the conventional style of architecture you know this this was a big deal it was called a chicken coop and but this is really embodying the form following the function you know that the form of their house they wanted a very simple easy to maintain house made with local materials but in a modern form it's a beautiful setting yes it's built on onto a rocky outcropping in fact the back half of the lower level is all ledge it's literally built right on the rock but this house undoubtedly has its roots in this house in this is not in Vermont I wish it was this is the Gropius house remember we talked about Gropius as the founder of the Bauhaus so he moves to the United States to teach at Harvard in 1938 and at the same time he builds designs and builds this house in Lincoln Massachusetts and this was groundbreaking this published internationally because what Gropius was doing was bringing the theory of European modernism in transplanting it to New England so that well it is a very bold geometric form it has vertical board wood siding so it's not a pure you know white stucco finish like they were doing in Europe it's wood siding that's a New England material on the back of the house which we can't see in this picture part of it is red brick there's a low stone wall like a traditional New England field stone wall around the back garden so he was really working on trying to not just drop a modernist box in the New England landscape but really integrate it through the materials to a New England for vernacular and I do want to note that because this is the hundredth anniversary of the founding of the Bauhaus historic New England which owns the Gropius house is doing a lot of programming this year about modernism in New England and this is their most recent magazine with a picture of Walter Gropius definitely if you're ever in the Lincoln area go to Gropius house it's well worth it so back in Vermont here's John French Ruth Freeman and Bill Freeman and they were really the leading practitioners at least in northern Vermont of modernism and you can tell by the house they built they were not ashamed of it that house was really kind of their calling card I think it's very obvious if you were thinking of hiring the Freemans to design a house for you and saw their house you kind of knew what you were getting into you didn't necessarily go to them for a colonial revival although they did that in during the depression they did a lot of colonial revival because they had to pay the bills but once they were back on their feet they were very innovative and Ruth Freeman was actually the lead designer in the firm which is which is very interesting for a female at this time to be lead designer and some of her projects this was a design for a house that was not built it was published in the book I think Libby Owens Ford Corporation commissioned an architect in every state to design a solar house this is 1946 so we think we're pretty hot shot with our solar panels today you know they were thinking about this and Ruth's Ruth Freeman's design takes into account the sighting the house is facing south lots of windows very low roof overhang so that in the winter when the sun is low in the sky the sunlight can come in so very very thoughtful designs and innovative designs trying to maximize you know this is really green design what we would call today they were doing in the 40s another key piece in Vermont is the marketing and development of Vermont as a vacation destination and that does has to do a lot with the growth of the ski industries and second homes the post-World War two baby boom and the economic rise and suddenly people had disposable income they had cars they could go to the mountains they could drive up from Boston New York Connecticut and spend a weekend in Vermont and gradually some of those people said wouldn't it be nice to own a little house in Vermont and so a lot of architects were designing simple you know summer cottages and camps in a modern style this is one by Julian Goodrich and you know this was a really important market for these architects to be able to try out these ideas on you know a second home you might be a little more willing to be a little more experimental you know you have your nice traditional home in New York you go to Vermont that's where you have the funky a-frame ski chalet or the you know the wacky modernist place so that was really important and that's part of why these buildings can be so hard to find because they might be up at the end of a dirt road on a mountain in Stowe or they might be you know on the shore of Lake Champlain where you can only see it from the water so trying to tease out where these buildings are has been part of the fun that unfortunately no it was not built in fact I tracked down the son of Dr. John about a Beijing and the son had no idea that this had ever been considered so he was like oh why didn't they build it so and so also at this time we start to see the the development of much smaller compact houses and this is all coming from Frank Lloyd Wright I can't give a lecture without mentioning Frank Lloyd Wright he was so influential and this is a house by Julian Goodrich a local architect and it's on Spear Street 1947 so post world war two Julian needed a small house for his family and he went to the bank with a flat roofed design the bank said nope we will not give you a loan for a flat roofed house so he went back to the drawing board he came up with this and it's really a beautiful little house this is the back elevation and you'll see that you know the street view is pretty closed it's not a super welcoming you know there's no big broad front porch and this was a shift in the the social ideas of what a house was and that you didn't want everything on display to your neighbors necessarily is make the back of the house open up into the landscape and we can see in the floor plan here this is a very simple plan combined living dining room two bedrooms shared bath kitchen and breakfast room together and then a bunch of closets a lot of built-ins and this was really about economy and Frank Lloyd Wright and his designs for what he called the Usonian house which was supposed to be an affordable small but well-designed house for the average American on grade no basement no attic typically no garage because that would just collect stuff maybe a carport but really just trying to distill the essence of a house down to the form follows the function you're living in this house do you need all that extra stuff it's a great house I don't know if I could live there but it's it's really even even the wall system there's solid plank walls sheathing boards and then siding inside and out no air cavity no space nowhere to run wires so really a lot of experimentation going on at this time and I happened to talk with Julian about this house before he passed away and that wall detail he said oh I stole that from Frank Lloyd Wright so what I love about this house is that this is on Spear Street in South Burlington and it's published nationally in better homes and gardens so little old Vermont you know things are happening here with design that are getting national exposure and better homes and gardens would do a monthly for a while it was the five star home of the month or the you know house house of the month and they chose this house by Julian and published photos a description and the floor plan and then you can send in your five dollars and get a set of blueprints and build your own so these might be all over the country who knows but you know the cover of another issue of better homes and gardens shows kind of the classic this is the 1959 idea home issue and you can see the types of houses that were being promoted one story you know easy to build economical not a lot of decoration but not the austere modernist white box you know there's a little more little more life to these a little more new england character if you will you know it's not a stretch to you know maybe say this is the basic you know cape cod house form with the bank of windows in the end and a little covered carport and garage you know so it's it's picking up on traditional new england building forms but tweaking it for modern life and floor plans definitely it's not just about the exterior look of the building it's how the spaces relate so you none of these houses have maids rooms the maid was gone most likely an open floor plan combined living dining room a kitchen that might open up into a breakfast nook so the disintegration of the in the boxes within a box concept of what a house is so you have very open flowing floor plans another one of my favorites this is the flick house 1953 in randolph and you know just almost like an airplane wing just it just i love the the sighting it's right it not not right at the crest of the hill it's kind of built into the hill and that was another frank Lloyd Wright approach is you don't build on top of the hill you build with the landscape sort of nestle it in and this house also very experimental published nationally in house beautiful and Miriam flick the architect actually got a bunch of corporate sponsors to provide new materials so it has a fancy foil faced insulation and double glazed windows and in-floor radiant heating all these things that we take for granted today but we're cutting edge at this time and supposed to you know 47 ways to lick a tough winter climate so you know using vermont as the the showpiece and this house is still there today it has been added onto but the overall concept is still very much intact and the illustration you can see all of the the structure of the house is exposed to all the the ceiling beams the framing of the windows so again that's the form following the function you know you don't need to cover that up let the structure express how is the ceiling held up well there the beams so it becomes and then in as a result that structure becomes in a way the decoration you don't need to add more stuff to it lots of decorative trim and crown molding that is the decoration vermont life magazine you know it's interesting if if you go back in the early issues of vermont life magazine it was not about old timey vermont it was really about 1950s vermont and showing how vermont is kind of keeping up with the times in this article you know new houses in vermont every house is a modernist design the burnt house and stow both of these are by dan keiley grenfell house out in charlotte so you know this is vermont vermont life was a marketing tool and a very conscious decision to do articles about how vermont is modern and progressive not how vermont is you know horse and buggy you know they they really wanted to show vermont as as looking to the future another house featured in the article is the pennington hail house in norwich by e h and mk hunter architects of dark myth and you know this is really really getting into the more academic modernism and what you would expect in in norwich proximity to dark myth college a lot of amazing modernist houses in norwich that are being researched and documented right now sadly this has been torn down replaced with a big three-story mic mansion thing you know modernized so but again we see the traditional you know a little more adventurous form but again it's got vertical board wood siding so it's still working in a new england materials mode a brick base so trying to make it fit with the landscape and then probably the closest thing vermont has to a franklode right house this is the coil house in berlington on fair mount street and really a perfect study of a franklode right usonian house in its one-story slab on grade very simple design a carport not a full garage and closed completely closed off to the street the front door is actually tucked behind a masonry mass here so the door is entered here so even just driving by you don't necessarily see how do you get in there very private but then on the back it's a whole wall of floor to ceiling french doors that open up into a beautiful backyard so again it's that that shift in the family dynamic the social dynamic where you know you're private to the street but you're open in the backyard and this house is still there today it's other than the carport being filled in as a garage it's pretty much intact i also want to point out that these ideas were not just for new construction there were certainly architects who took existing vermont farmhouses you know this pretty ramshackle classic you know made 19th century farmhouse out in under hill and it was converted into a very sharp modern interpretation of a new england farmhouse and this was bill linda who did this local architect and you know really it's about enlarging the windows new siding putting some roof dormers on and this too is published nationally as an example of how to take an existing home and modernize it and they also on the interior they broke up all the little independent compartments of rooms and made a more free-flowing open floor plan this house is in shelburn the harvard house charlie harvard certainly one of the most unique building forms the circular shape it's beautiful it's still there it's still in the family very well maintained and taken care of but again expressing the sense of experimentation that was available in the 40s 50s 60s where there there was a real interest and willingness to try something new try a new material try a new building form and see see what you can do and one of my favorites jim hill lived on east terrace in south berlington and this is partly because of this picture it's just classic the architect sitting in his eames fiberglass shell chair with his globe lights in the background and the wall of glass like this is 1960s architecture right here and this is the house that jim hill built for himself and his family on east terrace again long and low very gently slightly pitched roof exposed framework a wall of clear story windows along the top of the walls vertical board siding still that new england tradition and to show just how still this is 1967 so modernism has been around for a couple decades now but this is this is what it looked like literally cows grazing in the backyard of this modernist house so just and especially the car you know to me the car looks old-fashioned the house does not you know this house could be built today and it would be a contemporary modern house so it's all in you know your perspective of things but i i love this with the elm trees running in the background that's williston road the cows the elm trees and then this modern house and into the 70s again new forms are being experimented and tried out we start seeing what's known as the shed style you can figure out why and this even more so than probably the gropius house i mean this is taking the classic vermont barn that steeply pitched 1212 pitch roof breaking it up and rearranging the pieces and making a new form so this is really linking directly with new england and vermont traditions and the vertical board siding very natural landscaped and you know the headline here just off the screen it says happy symbiosis of ageless hills and modern house in heinsberg and i think that sums it up really nicely because in vermont modernism is human scale it is not new york city or chicago with skyscrapers that are just blank walls of glass you know that's another side of modernism that's not great but i think in vermont it's really a human scale modernism and something that people can appreciate and interact with and can be quite make for a quite wonderful house i also want to note that modernism wasn't limited to architecture it's also landscape architecture and in vermont dan keiley probably the foremost modernist landscape architecture of the 20th century lived in charlotte vermont worked for 50 plus years out of charlotte not a whole lot of projects in vermont but a few courier farm in danby where he's taken the traditional apple trees grove of apple trees that laid them out on a very strict geometric grid long low horizontal steps but again with a natural field stone wall on each side so integrating that very pure clean modernism with the more the rougher new england countryside and in berlington a cathedral of the immaculate conception in the news because it's for sale that landscape of 123 locus trees is a keiley landscape the only one in berlington and we're kind of worried about what's going to happen to that because it's it's the type of landscape and the building which is a great modernist church they look simple that doesn't mean that they were easy there's a big difference between easy and simple it it's actually really really hard to design a building that's just a handful you know wood siding glass in a flat roof that's much harder to design a good building than if you have three stories in a porch and turn columns and gingerbread details and single work in five different colors you know you can hide a lot of stuff with all that trim to do a really good modernist building and distill it down to the elements is really difficult and i think that's why keiley's landscapes with their geometry they look easy to do well i can plant trees in a grid but it's not that it's not that easy to make it successful so we're we're not sure what's going to happen with the cathedral property if anybody wants to buy it and save it talk to me if you want to know more about dan keiley i do want to put a plug in for an exhibit coming up this summer at the henry sheldon museum in middlebury it's a national traveling exhibit of keiley's work and it's finally coming to vermont it should have premiered here but we're we're finally getting it and it should be really great we have a lot of programming lined up with landscape architects and photographers talking about the exhibit so certainly check the henry sheldon museum website for more information if you're interested in that and with that i will finish up and thank you for your attention and i'm happy to answer any questions yes after a winter like we've had now snow on these flat roofs yes is that form following function it's it's not always perfect and there are absolutely cases where the the design that the architects came up with far exceeded the skills of the local builders you know how a flat roof can work perfectly well in a northern climate if it's done right and if you if you've never done a flat roof and you you know do the best you can and it's not detailed right it's going to leak so a flat roof is not as forgiving as a gable roof but with certainly with today's modern membrane roofs you can do a flat roof actually very few of the houses that i studied for my thesis actually have a totally flat roof most have a very slight pitch or they drain to the center to a central drain pipe but that certainly was an issue i mean frank Lloyd Wright's houses are famous for leaking roofs and he said well that's how you know that it you know you have a roof so any other yes where on spear street is that house that you showed it's right across from gutterson field house and there's an amazing picture from that a series that julian goodrich had looking out the kitchen windows towards what is now gutterson and the parking garage and everything and it's just open grassland in that house is a little hard to see because it does have a two-car garage built in front of the right side of it but if you drive down there and take a look it would be on the east side of spear street when it was built about 75 years ago saint marx was sort of on the edge saint marx church can you say anything about that so saint marx catholic church in the new north end on north avenue uh groundbreaking design i think that was built in 41 by freeman french freeman and you know right on i don't actually know how they got materials for it because right on the eve of world war two it was built through 1942 and really a groundbreaking design in that it was one of the very first modernist churches in the country it was written up in the new york times has and the headline in the new york times says something to the effect that who would have thought that one of the most groundbreaking church designs is in burlington vermont there it is and i'm not sure if it's just because it was burlington in the diocese said do it or you know it's uh but it's really remarkable if you have a chance drive up north avenue um and it will be on your left and it's a cruciform shape the interior is very pure you know some people say it's plain and cold it's red brick you know it's that classic new england material oak pews stone altar just very elemental very pure beautiful building oh right here thanks for the great talk what's the state of historic preservation on any of these buildings are they any of them landmarked or preserved in some way yeah we're making progress i mentioned that norwich has a good collection of modernist houses and about two years ago they did a whole national register historic district of modernist houses and they're now working on listing some individual examples around the community uh other examples you know it's it's getting a lot of these buildings are in institutional settings you know uvm bennington college has an incredible collection of modernist buildings and they know so that's good they understand what they have anyone here from uvm uvm's a little more dicey but we're trying you know it's about education you know for for a lot of people a historic building in their mind is something that looks old that my grandma lived in you know indeed that's not what these are so so it takes education and and some uh some convincing sometimes uh to to explain why these are significant as well where's the whoa where's that round house in shellburn it is no the street names because i drive them so often it's it's off of spears it's between spear and seven um is it french hill irish hill that's it yeah it's on just off of you can't see it from the road if you go to google aerial you can see it but yeah really an interesting design question here can you talk a little bit about the design and the materials used in the interiors of some of these sure yeah good question um like the exterior with experimental materials interiors also were using things like cork flooring uh linoleum real linoleum not sheet vinyl real linoleum flooring um metal kitchen cabinets that was a big thing in the fifties and there were in fact the house i live in had a full g e kitchen of the stainless steel wall ovens metal cabinets um and it's still there that's literally why i bought the house um and but interiors uh wall to wall carpeting that was a big deal no more cold hardwood floors wall to wall carpeting because it was new you know of course we bought our house and ripped out the wall to wall carpeting and put hardwood floors in so it's all cyclical um but you know with those huge windows picture windows a lot of draperies you know heavy window treatments were very popular um you know depending on the house in some cases if somebody had a really minimalist aesthetic they might just have you know uh venetian blinds in the windows but others might have uh more decorative drapes um so a pretty wide variety of treatments things like for mica uh that was a new material for countertops um and color you know a lot of especially into the seventies the harvest gold and the you know avocado green um trust me it'll come back we're we're almost there so but yeah and with with interiors the final piece is really the materials as well as the overall floor plan just totally changing the whole dynamic of how you know the basement rumpus room for the kids it was a new thing in the fifties hi um i'll talk about one of your failures burlington high school yeah burlington high school that's a tough one i do not understand why they built it where they did for the first thing it's an incredibly challenging site because it's a rock hillside so freeman french freeman did the building and their solution is actually pretty elegant given the site because they couldn't build a single one-story building you know if they built on a flat ground where the running track is they could have done a much more functional building but with that sloped site on bedrock they had to break it down into individual components that kind of step up the hillside and then are connected by skyways it's just not it served its purpose let's put it that way it will be replaced and that's one that i reviewed to look at is just a historic building and we decided it's there's really nothing that's special about it you know and that's an important thing to understand is that not everything old is historic so i'm certainly not saying that everything built 50 years ago or older is historic you know that's when we one will evaluate it and see and in the case of the high school it's concrete block glass walls flat roofs and that's about it you know drop ceilings there's nothing there to really latch on to as a really significant design feature or aesthetic it certainly didn't lead to other examples of building in that mode so that was a tough one and you know it's also important to remember that these buildings were built before the americans with disabilities act you know there are parts of berlington high school that somebody in a wheelchair you literally cannot get there even if you go outdoors and around and up a ramp and down and you cannot get there that wasn't a factor in the design of these buildings same with you know energy efficiency a lot of people dismiss modernist buildings because oh they leak heat and they you know those walls of glass are impractical that was not an issue in the 50s nobody thought about their heating bill it was just it was easy and our environmental consciousness which is absolutely essential today but it's important not to dismiss these buildings because they don't meet today's standards they can be upgraded you know you can put in double glazed triple glazed windows insulate the roof and keep the overall overall design intact while improving the efficiency yes i'm curious where the heinsberg house is the one with the shed roofs i don't know i have not seen that one i think that was one that tom cullen's designed of cullen's truex maybe for the ross family but i don't know for sure that that's one trust me i've got a whole list of places i need to track down so i have a question um when i was growing up in berlington my parents had an 1840s house in lincoln and a tech-built house in berlington on prospect parkway i know your house and a wonderful house was at the one before the garage at the top of the hill or the bottom of the bottom of the hill okay with the dip in the back yeah it goes down to the stream so it was totally private and all glass on that side my mom always complained that they use cheap materials or the cheapest materials when they built those houses and that they a lot of it didn't stand up could you comment on that i'm a little surprised because tech built was um what i term a pre-engineered house it wasn't a prefab where it arrived on site on a truck and they plopped it on the ground nor was it a pre-cut like a sears kit house where you got a railroad car of two by fours and put it together yourself it was a panelized wall system where the walls and floor plates and roof panels were all made in a factory shipped to the site and then bolted together and put assembled on on the property and generally they my understanding is they're they're pretty good i mean there are two in that what's that no closets yes open floor plan but a lot of light very modern and that was the architect of those was Carl Koch and he was really dedicated to trying to make modernism affordable because what happened is so many of these buildings became just for the elite and Carl Koch and others really wanted to design an affordable modernist house that could be built you know for a typical family two kids two adults and that's what the tech built was again no attic no basement so trying to cutting out the extra stuff to get the price down that was a real motivating factor in those houses i live a couple doors away from there yes why is it that that um immaculate conception that's for sale not um being involved in being a protected house or protected structure because of the preservation you can't get is it because it's in flux it's not an owner well it's it's the way preservation laws are set up in the united states in in america preservation is not buildings are not designated and landmarked the way they are in europe in the u.s it's really the owner has a lot of control and the owner can say no thank you we don't want to be landmarked in europe that designation can be applied against over owner objection to say that's an important site you will protect it we don't do that in america so it's it's tough to where where the regulations do come into play as if a project is involving put my work hat on state or federal funding licenses or permits so it's if there's public money involved in a project and historic resources involved then it goes on through review but if the catholic diocese were to sell that property to a private developer using their own funds getting their local permits they can really do what they want tear it down so the you know the process of listing a property in the in the state or national register in and of itself does not protect a property that's a big misperception that people have it helps inform you know it's part of the education so that hopefully somebody will read that information and think twice before tearing it down but at the end of the day there's not always much that can be done right anyone else thank you very much