Is This House Too Modern to Exist?

Courtesy of

Lewis Mumford wrote that, in a city, “time becomes visible.” Not, it would appear, in Raleigh, North Carolina, where a city board has just decided that a rather discreet and understated modern house might need to be torn down because it damages the ambience of a historic district, which is to say it destroys the illusion that the neighborhood is a place in which time has stopped.

It’s actually a little more bizarre than that. Louis Cherry, a respected Raleigh architect, and his wife, Marsha Gordon, had long liked the Oakwood neighborhood, a pleasant, older section of town not far from the center of Raleigh, and a couple of years ago they bought a parcel of land on Euclid Street, in the heart of what is called the Oakwood Historic District. Oakwood is not the kind of historic district you would find in, say, New Orleans, where the buildings are of pretty much the same style and the same period. It’s a mix of 19th- and 20th-century houses, of varying size, style, and quality, and construction there is overseen by the Raleigh Historic Development Commission, which, working under pre-determined design guidelines for historic districts, opines on whether or not it considers plans for new construction in the district appropriate.

Cherry designs modern buildings, but he is sympathetic to the design guidelines; he had no desire to put, say, a Daniel Libeskind-style shard on Euclid Street. He came up with a plan for a simple two-story house with a low, peaked overhanging roof, sheathed in horizontal siding of unpainted North Carolina cypress. The house looks fairly conventional when you approach it: it does not have a flat roof, an unusual shape, a wall of glass, or any other standard cues signifying what you might call extreme modernism. Cherry’s house is an example of modern architecture trying hard, very hard, to be on its best manners—in essence, to be a good neighbor.

Courtesy of

The Historic Development Commission apparently agreed, and after a four-hour hearing it gave Cherry and Gordon a go-ahead last September. As they began to build, however, an across-the-street neighbor, a real-estate agent named Gail Wiesner, who had objected to the house at the hearing, decided she was not prepared to let the house go forward. She hired a lawyer to appeal the commission’s positive decision to the city’s Board of Adjustment, which reviews procedural errors by city agencies. Not long before, the commission had approved a modern addition to a house elsewhere in Oakwood, on Linden Avenue, and Wiesner was determined not to see this travesty repeated, certainly not right in front of her own window.

Because the Board of Adjustment’s mandate suggests that they would only be evaluating whether rules and procedures had been properly followed and not reopening the question of the design of the house, a staff member of the Historic Development Commission told Cherry and Gordon that there was no need for them to bother attending the Board of Adjustment hearing. They had already dug the foundation, and $100,000 worth of building materials was being delivered.

But in February, by which time the house was already partially constructed, the Board of Adjustment voted, three to two, that there had been “no rational basis” for the Historic Development Commission approving the house, and Cherry and Gordon no longer had a building permit. It was suddenly illegal for them to so much as hammer another nail, and the possibility that the half-finished house would have to be torn down became real. Just the other day they got a judge to give them permission to resume construction just long enough to close up the incomplete house and protect it from the weather, but the situation remains unresolved, and Cherry and Gordon have already spent so much money on lawyers that some local architecture buffs have started a defense fund.

Putting aside the absurdity of revoking a building permit that was legally given, months after a building is already well under way—and the requirement that its owner needs to spend money to fight to hold onto his permit—the Cherry case says a great deal about taste, not to mention different notions of what a historic district actually is, or should be. Gail Wiesner also lives in a fairly new house, built in 2008, but hers was designed to look like a much older house. Some of the other recent houses in Oakwood are also what you could call faux-traditional, like hers, and it is clear that at least some of the residents of Oakwood envision the neighborhood as a kind of stage set, an idealized little village in which every house looks like it has been there for a long time, a place where the buildings are old and only the people, the cars, and the kitchen appliances are young.

It’s not a view that prevailed in Oakwood 75 or 100 or 150 years ago, which are the very golden eras that these people want to evoke. What I found most striking about Oakwood when I visited it, along with Louis Cherry, earlier this month, is the mix of houses it contains, from stolid 19th-century brick boxes to ornate Victorians to early 20th-century Arts and Crafts bungalows. There was never, then, an insistence on using architecture as a vehicle with which to play pretend and to maintain some bizarre notion of stylistic purity. In Oakwood, the eclectic mix of styles has given the neighborhood a resonance. It shows that time was visible, and from the look of most of those old houses, the residents were proud of that fact. They knew that labels are not how you determine whether or not something fits.

What troubles Cherry most is how difficult it is to convince people that architecture is more than a matter of styles. “For most people, the idea of compatibility is ‘looks like,’” he told me. “They consider what I’m doing an affront to history. But I’m trying to celebrate vitality, and it is sympathetic to the spirit of the neighborhood.” It’s hard to imagine how Cherry could have designed a house that fit in better than the one that now stands half-finished on Euclid Street, unless he were prepared to throw in the towel and produce a make-believe Victorian. Not long ago, someone sympathetic to the plight of the house—Cherry says he doesn’t know who—started a Twitter account, @ModernOakwood, that pretends to speak in the voice of the house, with tweets like “‘Not in my front yard,’ said the house across the street to me this week. Still sad about that.”

It’s especially odd that this is happening here, since there is a lot of history for modern architecture in North Carolina, which actually has more significant modern houses than any state except California and New York. The state also has a wonderful preservation organization called North Carolina Modernist Houses that focuses on educating the public about modern design and saving endangered houses. The organizers have taken up the Oakwood cause—the first time, I suspect, that they have ever had to fight to preserve a modern house before it was even finished.

Correction: The original version of this article reported that the Board of Adjustment ordered that the house be torn down; though still a possible outcome, the Board has not specifically ordered the house razed.