Gordon Bunshaft

Gordon Bunshaft of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill designed very few houses. The best known was his own, on a 2.4-acre lot on Georgica Pond in East Hampton, completed in 1963. It was known as the Travertine House. It was demolished in July 2004.

The house belongs on a South Fork architect list because of what happened to it. It was published, admired and willed to a museum, then sold without any restriction on its future and torn down within a decade. It is the clearest local case for a point every buyer of a modernist house should understand: architectural significance protects nothing unless it is written into a designation, an easement or a deed.

The house

The house was a single rectangle, 100 feet long and 26 feet wide, set with its long side parallel to the pond and raised on a six-foot berm above the floodplain. The walls were poured concrete clad in travertine. The roof was made of prestressed concrete double-T beams — precast units shaped like a double letter T in section — left exposed at the ends, with the gaps glazed as clerestory windows. Floors were travertine over a concrete slab. The north wall facing the approach was nearly solid; the pond side was floor-to-ceiling glass. Architectural Record included it in its "Record Houses of 1966."

What happened to it

After Bunshaft's widow died in 1994, the house and its art went to the Museum of Modern Art. The museum removed the art and sold the property with no covenants or restrictions. A later owner began a renovation that removed interior finishes and then stalled. The property sold again in 2004 and the house was demolished that July to make way for a new one.

Nothing in the public record cited here shows that the house was ever landmarked or protected by easement. Its national reputation did not slow the sale or the demolition.

The lesson for buyers and sellers of modernist houses

• Protection has to be on paper. Designation, an easement or a deed restriction runs with the land; reputation does not. Whether a demolition can be refused depends on the parcel's designation and the municipality's code, so check both. Some Hamptons modernist houses do carry preservation easements; see Julian and Barbara Neski and Andrew Geller.
• A gift is not a covenant. A bequest to an institution conveys the property, not a promise about it.
• Stalled work changes the asset. Here, interior demolition began and stopped before the final sale. Once original finishes are gone, restoration costs more and the case for keeping the building is harder to make.
• For a seller, documentation of an intact original house is the evidence a buyer who values it will ask for.

See postwar modernism for the broader South Fork context.

Bunshaft's East End circle

Two architects who shaped later South Fork modernism worked at Skidmore, Owings & Merrill: Harry Bates, who worked under Bunshaft from 1955 before founding the practice that became Bates Masi + Architects, and Norman Jaffe, who joined the firm after 1961.

How to research a modernist house's status

Check whether the parcel is in a local historic district or individually designated, through the East Hampton Village or Town preservation records. Search the county clerk's records for conservation or preservation easements and deed restrictions. Read the building department file for prior demolition or alteration permits. Original publications — Architectural Record's annual houses issue, monographs — are the evidence for what the house was.

Considering a modernist property?

Request a property brief from The Roebling Research Desk that establishes whether the house is protected or not, documents its original state, and prices the realistic options: restore, adapt or replace.