A bit of a long backstory here, for a relatively simple conceptual project that to my mind seems hardly complete:

In 2016, I learned that Peter Eisenman’s famous—or rather, notorious— “House II” from 1970 was for sale up in the far north. And if it wasn’t sold, so I was further made to understand, it was likely to be knocked down for new and less-architecturally-iconic development. The horror! After an email conversation with the historic preservation officer for the state of Vermont as well as the elderly current owners—to make a tedious story short—I found myself on the long drive there, checkbook in pocket. I wasn’t an ideal savior, as I didn’t want the acres of organic farmland surrounding the House, to which the sellers were as attached as they were the architecture. It had taken many years for my family to dispose of my grandfather’s agricultural land, and I didn’t want to resume the entanglement.

Of course, there was also the issue of the designer, whom I knew from my internment at Yale School of Architecture. Like many of the architecture students of my generation, I did not have good memories of him, to say the least. When I mentioned what I was contemplating to another local architect, who also had encountered you-know-who in his youth, he immediately responded with some vehemence, “You should buy it. Yes, you should! And then you should call up Peter and tell him that you got it, and that you are going to put shingles on it, a hipped roof, and then paint it blue. Hopefully the news will cause him to have a stroke!”

But near the halfway point on my drive north, the current owners called me on my mobile phone. The elderly wife explained, quite apologetically, that another buyer had turned up at the last moment, and this other buyer would also take the organic farm, which was so important to her husband and herself. I told her to take that other offer with my blessing, because I had never been really sure what I was going to do with the House, if I had it. And no, I wasn’t petty enough to want it just to give old Peter an aneurysm, as vindictively appealing as the thought might be. I turned around and drove back home.

Of course, not too many years later when the COVID pandemic swept over the nation, I found myself desperately wishing for a country place, any place, outside of the desolate city where I and my family were imprisoned by “the lockdown”. If I could design a country place for myself, what would I design? And for lack of originality, I began designing something to sit on the exact site of House II.

And so here we are.

The gallery below contains some of the developmental images that I more-or-less accidentally preserved.