RIP VilLa NM; Bye-Bye Birth Canal

Here is how the Times Herald-Record of Middletown, New York reported the fiery, February 5 demise of the 2007 Record House that has been described as "this generation's Glass House:"

BETHEL — A hilltop home that was featured in the New York Times was destroyed tonight by a roaring, smoky fire with blue and orange flames.No one was hurt in the blaze, which started just before 9 p.m. The owner of the house off Burr Road, Leo Tsimmer, was in New York City at the time — it was his second home. By the time firefighters made it up the icy, winding road that led to the home, designed by a Dutch architect, the home with steel beams was ablaze.“There was nothing we could do to save it,” said Kenoza Lake assistant fire chief George Slater.

Clearly, the Times Herald-Record and Architectural Record have little in common beyond both having now featured this project, quite spectacularly, on its pages. The "Dutch architect" referenced in the former is Ben van Berkel, nameplate principal, along with his partner Caroline Bos, of the Amsterdam-based architecture firm UNStudio. van Berkel's newly incinerated VilLa NM -- the obscure name and typography having no publicly provided explanation -- was UNStudio's first project in the U.S. Leo Tsimmer, it turns out, is a Russian emigre who managed to rise from the ashes of the Soviet Union with lots of money and the kind of what-the-hell approach to life that allowed him to commission a second home that was more gotcha than dacha.

On their web site, the architects describe the project as

a box-like volume [that] bifurcates into two separate volumes; one seamlessly following the northern slope; the other lifted above the hill creating a covered parking space and generating a split-level internal organization. The volumetric transition is generated by a set of five parallel walls that rotate along a horizontal axis from vertical to horizontal. The ruled surface maintaining this transition is repeated five times in the building. From inside the huge window strips from floor to ceiling allow a fluid continuity between interior and landscape. From the exterior the reflective glass seams to become one with its surroundings.

Exterior photos make clear the project's homage to Philip Johnson's Glass House (and the Farnsworth House by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, from which Johnson stole the idea) as well as UN Studio's own Mobius House, built a decade ago in the Netherlands.

But there's a twist. What made VilLa NM remarkable, it seems, was its dazzlingly white interior that was comforting and cozy where Mr. Johnson and Dr. Farnsworth found themselves on public display. New York Times architecture critic Nicolai Ouroussoff, compared the staircase at the heart of the structure to a birth canal. You can't get much more intimate than that.

Ouroussoff loved the place. "In a society driven by rampant careerism and painfully averse to risk — especially the risk of being labeled gauche — the house is a monument to what can happen when you let go of inhibitions," Ouroussoff wrote in his October review of the project. "It proves that the slickness of the computer age does not necessarily have to lead us to a world sanitized of sensual charms."

Okay. But Nicolai Ouroussoff is no Ada Louise Huxtable, who created the paper's tradition of architectural criticism. Like his snootish immediate predecessor, the late Herbert Muschamp, but lacking Muschamp's flair for invoking big aesthetic ideas, Ouroussoff has no interest in placing architecture in its social context, so that the real people who read the Times on the subway might get some sense of why they should give a damn about some Russian oligarch's high-gloss vacation home. That was Huxtable's genius -- in proving, with every column, that architecture mattered. The Muschamps and the Ouroussoffs of the world are more intent on proving that they matter.

And so you get the phenomenon of what appears to have been a certifiable artistic treasure being spectacularly destroyed -- with the local newspaper having no sense of the project's significance or even knowledge of the name of the world-class architect who designed it. In a sense, VilLa NM never really existed in the first place.

To be fair, some of the problem is inherent in the nature of residential architecture -- private places, by definition. Huxtable earned her chops by railing about big fiascos like the demolition of the neoclassical Charles Follen McKim masterpiece, Pennsylvania Station, in favor of the banal Madison Square Garden Center.

But there was a time when custom-designed residential architecture was thought to be, if not a template, than at least a laudable example that builders for those of lesser means could follow. The Case Study Houses, commissioned beginning in 1945 by the now-defunct Art & Architecture magazine, showcased important architects like Richard Neutra and Charles and Ray Eames. More importantly, the Case Study Houses literally put contemporary architecture on the map in the U.S. right at the point of the postwar boom -- proving to the general public, at least for a while, that a successful house did not have to imitate some arbitrarily selected historical precedent. Baack on this coast, tour Frank Lloyd Wright's Zimmerman House in Manchester, N.H. and see for yourself how one designer's original vision spawned a million imitations as suburban sprawl overspread America.

VilLa NM is unlikely to have many imitators among today's residential developments. By all accounts, its demise was spectacular and thus more memorable, to the locals in Sullivan County, than its construction. But since UNStudio's ill-fated first U.S. building stood in, of all places, Bethel, New York, the fabled home of the Woodstock Festival, it's too bad that the unusual building materials, when going up in smoke, didn't create a little Purple Haze to go with those blue and orange flames.