A Noyes House in Stamford Finds a Spot on the National Register of Historic Places

A house in Stamford, Connecticut, designed by Eliot Noyes has been listed on the National Register of Historic Places, a significant honor for a modern house. Called the Graham House, it represents the evolution of an idea Noyes first tried out on his own house in New Canaan, known as Noyes II.

We learned about it yesterday while poking around on the website of the Connecticut Trust for Historic Preservation (scroll down). That's where we found this photo, which was taken by H. McGrath. Here's what the CTHP says about the Graham House:

The Graham house, built in 1968-1969 on the crest of a rocky outcropping in the Stamford woods, is one of the most dramatic and sculptural houses designed by Eliot Noyes (1910-1977), a master Modernist architect and industrial designer and a highly influential member of New Canaan’s famed Harvard Five. Although the house is less than fifty years old, the usual age requirement for the National Register, it was listed because of its exceptional importance as a work by Noyes and particularly as the culmination of a series of related designs by Noyes.
The series began with Noyes’ own house, built in 1954 with living spaces and a courtyard sandwiched between two massive stone walls (see CPN, November/December 2008). In the following years, the architect created several other variations on the wall-house idea, but they were not built. Finally, Robin Graham, owner of a Manhattan art gallery, provided an opportunity to construct the fully-developed version of the idea, a house with two walls close together forming a wide hallway, and the rooms hung outside the walls.
With its rugged fieldstone-and-concrete walls, stone pavement, and numerous skylights, the central space is more like a street than a hallway--in fact, Noyes sometimes referred to the space as a street. In contrast, the living spaces are lightly framed and cantilevered out from the stone walls so that they float over the landscape, with views defined by carefully placed windows.

There's lots more about the house, including plenty of photos, at the blog formerly known as EmbraceModern, now called Modisabi, here. -- TA

Did Eliot Noyes Design this Mobil Station in Sweden?

An email arrived the other day from a woman in Sweden, with a tale and a question. She and her husband, who are aficionados of modern architecture, bought a building that was about to be torn down, and are dismantling it and moving it to their property, to use as a small guesthouse. She wrote:

... it is an old Mobil station by Eliot Noyes according to books, newspapers & other facts. ... The building was in place in Holm/Sweden in 1959. According to papers/books it was built in the US & shipped to Sweden in a box. (We had at least 4 of these buildings shipped to different locations in Sweden but our building is the last one to stand.) The only problem we can see is this : According to the book about Eliot Noyes he started to work for mobil in 1964. But these stations are made in 1959...

So that was her question. If the buildings (you can see what they looked like shortly after they were built, above, and on this blog post) were shipped to Sweden in 1959 and Noyes started working on the Mobil account in 1964, how could he have designed them? In a subsequent email she told us more:

We have have moved parts of the old building, (construction / teak / glass / details etc.) The community of Halmstad had "doomed" the building and it was going to be torn down but we manage to save it with some help from a local paper. We will rebuild it in our garden... We are living in a house ... built 1954 & the "Eliot Noyes" building/station will be a small guesthouse ... for our friends ... We love the design of the old station. We also managed to save the Canopies designed in 1973 by Eliot Noyes & they will also be placed in front of building.

And she added these details in a subsequent email:

We have blueprints from 1958 from the station area in Holm made by MobilOil (USA). At least 3, (maybe 4 or 5) of these stations had their grand opening in 1959/Sweden. ... According to articles from different papers 1959/1960 they were made in the US & shipped to Sweden in boxes. (We have talked to old staff & children, they also say that they were shipped to Sweden in boxes.)

I of course had no idea if Noyes designed the building but because I happened to be working on the brochure for the New Canaan Historical Society's Modern House Day, I had been in touch via email with Alan Goldberg, who had been Eliot Noyes's partner. I forwarded our Swedish correspondent's email to Alan and told him I was skeptical about the Noyes connection. Here's what Alan said:

You’re correct, our office was not working on the Mobil account when the station was reported to be built. I can say with some certainty (I have a rather extensive file on all the design work for Mobil) that the building was not designed by our firm. However, the circular lighting fixtures in the forecourt were one of the elements (kit of parts if you will) for the “Pegasus Design”. I suspect the lights were added later which is why people may attribute the design to Eliot Noyes & Associates.

So Noyes did not design it, which I'm sure disappointed our Swedish correspondent somewhat, although she said she had received email from people who contended that Breuer designed it, perhaps in conjunction with Gropius. That sounds like wishful thinking to me but you never know. I've asked her to let us know if she learns more. You can see what the building looks like now, before renovation, here on her Flickr page. -- ta

In a Quiet Noyes House

I've written before that on the cold, windy day last November when Gina and I entered the house Eliot Noyes built for his family in New Canaan we both felt relieved, as if we were in a place that could be home, quiet and warm and comfortable. We're not the only ones who feel that way. Fred Noyes, Eliot's son, does too, and so does Skip Ploss, who writes the Embrace Modern blog, and who went to the Noyes house not long ago to do a Q&A with Fred. Here's an excerpt:

FN: ... The ones [i.e., the houses] where the architect has been able to touch into the emotional side we were talking about and the practical side, being able to understand that the design is centered more around how people live rather than making boxes and fitting people in to it. They become as warm as, or warmer than, some of the earlier houses which are constricted and feel tight. I think that this house is a perfect example of exactly that. You walk in to this space and you breathe out…

EM!: It’s amazing. It’s so tranquil and just a wonderful warm feeling sitting here.

FN: My father did another house in Vermont which we also still own and it’s similar in the sense that the “bookends” are stone. Very small, open stud construction because it’s just a ski house but in that house, when you walk in, you can hardly walk across the room before you kind of have to sit down its so relaxing. When I am under real pressure in my office, I go up there. I roll out the yellow trays on the dining room table and can be there for 15 hours without ever getting fidgety in any way, it’s such a relaxing space. It has a slightly sloped roof so it has some volumetrics to it. It comes down to our original point which is that sense of it being emotionally accessible in these things when they’re done right using the materials available to them.

Fred says a lot of interesting things, including an obvious one: just because it's modern, doesn't mean it's good. And, which is good news: Well, we are definitely going to protect the house in the sense that nobody will tear it down and then we’ll either sell it to someone who’s raising a family or understands what it is that they are buying and leaves it untouched. My hope of hopes would be to place it in the public eye and to do something similar to The Glass House but that’s a stretch because that means that you not only need the purchase price from us but endowment and that would be a lot of money.

I found the picture, by the way, by Googling Eliot Noyes and clocking on a Picasa page. It was taken the same day that Gina and I were there, during last year's New Canaan Historical Society's Modern House Day, by someone named Amanda, who I think is probably our friend Amanda Martocchio. -- ta

A Bit More on the Tour in New Canaan

The New Canaan League of Women Voters' Peggy Dannerman was nice enough to get back to me this morning with information about their upcoming modern house tour, the details of which were, in true League of Women Voters fashion, discussed democratically among league board members until a consensus was reached about what they could say publicly. Here's what she told me:

I spoke with our League of Women Voter's Board yesterday about your question, and they agreed that we could inform the public about the architects of the homes, but not the names of the home themselves, a policy we have followed in previous tours. Suffice it to say that we have two homes by Philip Johnson, one by Eliot Noyes and one by John Johansen. There are two fairly "grand" homes and two smaller homes.

I'm not sure I'd shell out a hundred bucks to see four modern houses unless I knew what the houses were, particularly since I've been on two New Canaan Historical Society modern house tours that included two Johnson's and a Noyes and I wouldn't necessarily want to pay to see them again. Offhand I don't know how many Noyes or Johansen houses there are in New Canaan, but there are six Johnson's -- the Glass House, the Alice Ball House and the Boissonas House, all of which have been on the historical society tours; the Hodgson House, which was going to be on last year's historical society tour, I think, but was being renovated; and the Wiley House and Wiley "spec" house, which I'm unfamiliar with.

A Visit to an Alan Goldberg House

There's probably no limit to the number of ways you can choose an architect, but during a visit to a realtors open house in Bedford, New York, yesterday (we were invited by the listing broker, a friend who knows of our interest in modern houses), we heard this story about the house we were in:

The owner bought the land in the mid 1980s, five acres or so bordered on one side by a lake and on another by a ravine through which flows the outlet of the lake. He knew he wanted to build his family's house there but he wasn't sure what it should look like, so he began to flip through architecture books. When he came to one with pictures of houses designed by Eliot Noyes, he knew he had found what he wanted. So he made a phone call.

Unfortunately Noyes, whose firm was based in New Canaan and who was one of the Harvard Five, had been dead since 1977. However the person who took the call was the head of the Noyes firm's architecture division, Alan Goldberg. And it was Goldberg who ended up designing the house.

It's a bit big to fit my amorphous definition of a modern, and the roof is peaked rather than flat. The lake views are spectacular and it has a terrific interior gallery (shown here) with native stone walls that were beautiful and Noyes-esque. If you have almost $8 million and can pay almost 35 grand in property taxes a year, it's yours. The listing is here. -- ta

Modern Postage

These almost make me want to give up electronic bill paying (which I love because saves paper, time and postage). These .41¢ stamps celebrate Ray and Charles Eames, and were designed by Derry Noyes, daughter of architect/industrial designer Eliot Noyes. When they become available this summer, take a break from email – send a letter! – GF

via land+living