GRAPHĒ

Another Norman Jaffe Gem Gets Bulldozed—and Everything Else You Need to Know About This Week

I.M. Pei's Dallas City Hall is declared an endangered building, the near-collapse of Pfizer’s former New York headquarters reignites safety concerns, and more.

In May of 2025, Norman Jaffe’s Stern House in East Hampton Village was demolished, adding to a growing list of significant homes by the modernist architect that have met the fate of a bulldozer. Now, the Bliss House in Southampton, New York, has been demolished, too. Here’s how the celebrated example of organic modernism ended up a "pile of rubble" despite years of preservation efforts. (The Architect’s Newspaper)

At the former Pfizer headquarters in Midtown New York, inspectors found buckled structural columns that were "bending like cigarettes," which prompted an emergency evacuation. Records show the building had already racked up numerous safety violations and worker injuries before the near-collapse. (The City Reporter)
Plans from the 1980s for an unrealized 60-story "Trump Castle" in New York City by Philip Johnson and John Burgee have resurfaced, detailing an extravagant design complete with spires, drawbridges, and even a moat. The drawings foreshadow some of Trump’s grand architectural ambitions today. (The New York Times)

A building in Midtown was emergency evacuated after its structural columns were visibly bending.

Dallas City Hall, the brutalist landmark designed by I. M. Pei, has landed on both the World Monuments Fund and Preservation Dallas lists of the nation’s most endangered places. But it might not be enough to save it: Preservation advocates warn that pressure from private developers and hefty rehabilitation costs are putting the building at risk of abandonment, and even demolition. (The Dallas Morning News)

A recent investigation revealed that a mafia-like network of unlicensed food trucks has taken over stretches of the National Mall in D.C., operating with alleged food safety violations, majorly inflated prices, and aggressive tactics that have driven out many licensed vendors. Authorities say the operation is tied to a group of repeat offenders who use shell companies to stay under the radar. (Washingtonian)

Top photo by Tim Godbold

A Mirrored Kitchen Makes This Very Narrow Sydney Terrace Home Feel Much Larger Than It Is

It gives depth to the ground-floor living space, made brighter by a wall-to-wall skylight and floor-to-ceiling glass doors that open onto a rear courtyard.

Houses We Love: Every day we feature a remarkable space submitted by our community of architects, designers, builders, and homeowners. Have one to share? Post it here.

Project Details:

Location: Bondi Junction, Sydney, Australia

Architect: Studio Carson Kelly / @studiocarsonkelly

Footprint: 1,023 square feet

Builder: First Grade

Photographer: Dina Grinberg / @dinagrinberg_

From the Architect: "For a year, the principals of Studio Carson Kelly—architect Klaus and creative director Nicholas—lived in the house as they redesigned it, studying its light, its failures, and its latent capacity before submitting a fresh scheme for approval. That period of occupation is embedded in the outcome. The planning reflects a close understanding of how a house of this scale can sustain daily life without expansion—a compression of circulation achieved through spatial logic rather than sacrifice. A dog-legged stair performs double duty as both movement and infrastructure, integrating the laundry within its form and resolving into a compact landing from which each bedroom on the first floor level occupies the full boundary-to-boundary width of the site. Redundant corridors are removed; movement is folded back into the architecture itself.

"The roof became the primary surface for introducing daylight. A series of skylights—including a boundary-to-boundary skylight at the center of the plan—draw light deep into the section, allowing it to move and shift throughout the day in a house that might otherwise read as dark and compressed. Clerestory glazing extends this vertical distribution further.

"Material selection is structured around contrast as a way of giving each zone its own register while maintaining coherence across the whole. A custom elongated brick format carries the exterior language inward, appearing underfoot in the courtyard, rising into built-in seating, and forming the enclosing walls of key interior spaces. Its recurrence across these thresholds dissolves the boundary between inside and out, allowing the courtyard to extend the living zone without additional area. At the lower level, a patchwork terrazzo field operates as a composed surface that catches light and shifts in tone across the day, anchoring the space with a quality closer to permanence than finish.

"The kitchen is conceived as a sequence of interconnected zones. Mirrored joinery defines the primary storage wall, amplifying light and extending sight lines to work against the house's narrow dimension. Intersecting this is a stainless-steel working zone whose reflective quality ties it back to the mirrored elements and maintains a coherent visual language across the space. A floating stone slab, pulled off the perimeter to allow full circulation, operates simultaneously as dining table, island, and social anchor—consolidating functions into a single monolithic object and allowing the kitchen to remain open and flexible across different modes of use.

"The bathrooms shift into a more immersive material register. Stone is handled as an enveloping surface rather than an applied finish, wrapped and varied in scale across mosaic, elongated formats, and larger slabs. Glass brick introduces a softer atmospheric layer in the primary bedroom within the otherwise rectilinear geometry: a circular aperture formed from square units that reads as a moment of visual relief within the ordered framework, filtering light into a diffused glow while obscuring sight lines with depth and texture. The primary ensuite carries this furthest—a generous shower volume set beneath a full skylight that opens directly to sky and tree canopy above."

See the full story on Dwell.com: A Mirrored Kitchen Makes This Very Narrow Sydney Terrace Home Feel Much Larger Than It Is

From the Archive: A Closer Look at Artist Jim Isermann’s Pattern Happy Universe

"Ultimately, I still believe in the pragmatic populist ideal that nothing is beneath being improved by being well designed," the designer—whose work spans tiles, handmade rugs, paintings, and more—told Dwell 20 years ago.

Welcome to From the Archive, a look back at stories from Dwell’s past. This story previously appeared in the June 2006 issue.

Many contemporary visual artists are mining the reservoirs of design history in their art practice. Museum exhibitions on the conflation of "art" and "design" abound, generating new discourses and practices that blur critical distinctions between the two realms. One of the artists who has been at the vanguard of these concerns is Palm Springs, California-based Jim Isermann.

Over the last 25 years, Isermann has combined the functional and the aesthetic in complex but surprisingly undidactic work that has consistently provoked questions about the status of art and design. Focusing on the fertile exchange of visual information between high art and postwar industrial design, Isermann has created (among other work) wall hangings, handmade woven rugs and tiles, and vacuum-molded wall modules that seem to celebrate—in the boldest sense—idealized and unmediated visual pleasure.

Today, Isermann divides his work between large-scale commissions like a 9,000-pound chandelier for Genentech Hall, in University of California, San Francisco’s Mission Bay Campus; gallery shows; and new projects, which include the most recent iT House decals and a graphic pattern for fashion designer Trina Turk’s spring line. On the occasion of his recent Deitch Projects show in New York, we thought it was the perfect time to check in with Isermann.

Unlike the artists in last year’s Cooper-Hewitt exhibition Design ≠ Art, which featured functional designs by visual artists like Donald Judd, Dan Flavin, and Rachel Whiteread, your work engages with design on another level. I see your Corvi-Mora modular wall, for example, as a portal to understanding your work. It looks commercially fabricated, but is in fact handmade.

Fabrication of work for gallery shows creates a conundrum for me because it raises all those old questions for viewers as to whether the work is "art" or "design." I work with commercial manufacturers and art fabricators, and I make work by hand, depending on the project. Many artists work with fabricators, but they don’t make art that exists in this no-man’s land between art and design. Yes, at first glance the Corvi-Mora wall looks like it is commercially fabricated, but in fact I spent six months making the 112 modules myself. They are hand-painted and there is a degree of imperfection and difference between them. Like a lot of my practice, the work is not exactly what you initially think it is.

Your work has a very strong effect on its audience. I see it more in the tradition of installation and site-specific art than design, which further complicates what you do.

It’s true that what I do is very open-ended. I design, or I propose, or I make something that functions in a space and has a dual or multiple purpose because it functions as art but does not knock you over the head as being art—or as having an impenetrable concept. It is about a particular quality of experience.

I approach art making, and especially the commissioned work, from a pragmatic point of view. I want to do the best within the given limitations and give something that has a slow, long-term enjoyment that resonates with its site. When you live with something day in and day out, you become attached to it in another way.

Where do you situate yourself on the modernist map?

"Modern" is a word that has many different meanings and is often misused. I used to really be fascinated by work like Verner Panton’s that existed between modern and postmodern. He made the leap, left behind the sterile materials that all the architects were using, and took on new synthetic materials that were all about colors and shapes. It was no longer about ergonomics and organic materials. Instead, he invented a supersaturated color theory and was famous for saying, "One sits more comfortably on a color one likes." I love that stuff. It exists for reasons other than the modern rules. It doesn’t do that postmodern thing, looking backwards—it is very optimistic and forward-looking.

You mentioned that you visited artist Donald Judd’s home and that, in your view, he really was an interior decorator. He made furniture and was obsessive about placement. Do you identify with the term "interior decorator"?

I cavalierly use the word "decorator": I am old enough to have grown up without openly gay role models. Homosexuals were accepted as florists, hairdressers, and, yes, interior decorators. I am not very militantly gay, but when I identify myself as a decorator it is as close as I get to being so. I do think my work has a gay melancholy or sensibility that is very difficult to talk about, and is not available to all.

The art critic Dave Hickey has referred to your work as having a "utopian optimism" that is "essentially domestic" and of the moment. Can you address the idea of utopia?

I guess I do aim for the perfect ideal. The early work was about the failure of modernism’s utopia to solve all the problems with good design for all. So there is a built-in melancholy of that not being achieved. With some of my newer work, there is the physical reality of human imperfection in hand-fabricating modules. Ultimately, I still believe in the pragmatic populist ideal that nothing is beneath being improved by being well designed. And I continue to remake the world piece by piece, object by object.

Photo by Tom Powel Imaging / Courtesy Jim Isermann and Deitch Projects

See more from the Dwell archive on US Modernist.

From the Archive: Remembering Alexander Girard, the American Master of Colorful Modernism

Bernard Maybeck’s First Home in This Bay Area Enclave Just Hit the Market for $13M

Set in Ross, California, the renovated wood-and-stone residence showcases the famed architect’s focus on craftsmanship.

Location: 126 Winding Way, Ross, California

Price: $12,950,000

Original Architect: Bernard Maybeck

Original Year Built: 1905

Renovation Designer: Miranda Abrams

Renovation Year: 2012

Footprint: 5,508 Square Feet (5 Bed, 4.5 Bath)

Lot Size: 1.24 Acres

From the Agent: "This Bernard Maybeck Estate, built in 1906 and restored and expanded in 2012, presents a generational opportunity for the most discerning buyer. The home—known as Grayoaks—features a luxurious primary suite with its own spa bathroom, four bedrooms and three bathrooms on the main level, and another full auxiliary suite. The living level features a living room with restored paneling, a woodburning fireplace, and two sets of Dutch doors that open to the yard and deck, offering expansive Ross Valley views. The kitchen is at center of the home, beautifully outfitted with a 10-foot Carrara island and a gracious family room. This home feels secluded, yet it’s a one-minute drive to the center of town. The estate grounds feature a pool, spa, stone fireplace, terraced garden beds, and areas to roam and explore until the last rays of the sun set over Bald Hill in the distance."

The interiors were reimagined by designer and former homeowner Miranda Abrams.
Photo by Open Homes Photography

See the full story on Dwell.com: Bernard Maybeck’s First Home in This Bay Area Enclave Just Hit the Market for $13M
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Burnished Aluminum Sheeting Covers the Entire Ground Floor of This Renovated 1893 Lisbon Home

The material and the ultramarine color covering the exterior hint to the building’s past in an industrial part of town.

Houses We Love: Every day we feature a remarkable space submitted by our community of architects, designers, builders, and homeowners. Have one to share? Post it here.

Project Details:

Location: Lisbon, Portugal

Architect: Extrastudio / @extrastudio

Footprint: 2,701 square feet

Builder: Vassalo & Sousa

Structural Engineer: Pedro Viegas

Civil Engineer: Blueorizon

Landscape Design: Oficina dos Jardins

Photographer: Mikael Olsson

From the Architect: "This project is the first in a series of three residences we named Casas Poveras. Shaped in a time of uncertainty, these houses were stripped down to the essentials, acquiring an unexpected, raw, and intense character. Once a landscape of estates and farmland, Marvila became Lisbon's main industrial district in the 20th century. Bounded by the Tagus River and its railway lines, the area is defined by a distinct typology of warehouses for industries reflected in street names like Rua do Açúcar and Rua da Fábrica do Material de Guerra. After decades of neglect, these same warehouses are now repopulated with studios and galleries, making Marvila the city's most vibrant creative district today.

"The project renovates and extends a single-story house built in 1893, fully preserving the existing structure. The existing house was treated as an artifact, its features retained. The new extension alters only the exterior form and a side passage that provides access to the garden. Likewise, architectural elements from the existing facades were removed, restored, and incorporated into the new facades. Old and new were finished in the same way. The different time periods are legible only in the building’s silhouette and the texture of materials. Our clients had two requests for the house: a generous, open, loft-like character and a garage to be seamlessly integrated into the living room, so that it would be possible to work on cars or motorbikes without being separated from the family’s daily life.

"Two gestures define the house. A full-width cut to the front, facing the street, creates a two-story high courtyard, providing shade and privacy for the bedrooms, and, as a counterpart, a triple-height interior space faces the garden, revealing the building’s full vertical scale. Despite the lack of grandeur of the existing house, the project embraces its modesty and imperfections as a register of the past that might otherwise have been lost.

"Punctuated by windows, the back facade is cut at one corner by a vertical strip of light, the result of a legal constraint we chose to embrace, which slices the back facade diagonally. As in Utzon’s Can Lis, for a few minutes at the end of the day, a ray of light slowly enters the space and revolves around enigmatically. Once the design concept was defined, all decisions concerning finishes, textures, and colors were intentionally left open to be made on site with the craftsmen and clients. Their knowledge and decisions were made visible, giving the building a handmade and tactile expression—both rough and refined. Serendipity allowed us to cover the entire ground floor with aluminum sheeting, which was hand-brushed to perfection by one of the craftsmen. Its surface resembles leather: natural, soft, and luminous.

"The inside walls were left bare, covered only with a gray plaster scratch coat, Jannis Kounelli’s color of our time. We discovered this gray plaster on-site, an economical solution that unified all the elements, while also discreetly linking the house to Marvila’s past. Ultramarine blue, a historical, artificial color that defines the house, was found in the existing building. A pigmented lime plaster unifies the entire volume. Blue being an unstable pigment, each facade had to be finished in a single day, without seams or repairs, a Sisyphean act. This blue layer gives the house an ambiguous appearance, more old than new, yet used in a way that anchors it to the present."

See the full story on Dwell.com: Burnished Aluminum Sheeting Covers the Entire Ground Floor of This Renovated 1893 Lisbon Home

A Scarpa-Inspired Venice Retreat Lists for $14.9M

Artistic sensibility radiates from this coastal oasis just half a block from Abbot Kinney.

746 Milwood Avenue in Venice, California, is currently listed at $14,950,000 by Layla Bodet at Sotheby’s International Realty - Pacific Palisades Brokerage.

Effortlessly balancing sophistication and soul, this Venice Beach estate is an inspired setting for both everyday living and gatherings. Set on a rare and expansive double-lot along one of the most sought-after streets in Venice, this newly constructed 6,459-square-foot residence, completed in 2022, is an exquisite expression of design and elevated coastal living.

Encompassing five bedrooms and seven bathrooms, including the one-bedroom, one-bath second residence and pool house, on an approximately 10,810-square-foot lot, the property offers both scale and intimacy. It’s a quiet sanctuary, yet only a block and half to Abbot Kinney and all of the very best that the local community and culture has to offer from dining and shopping, to arts and entertainment.

Every element of the home, from the architecture to the furnishings, has been custom designed and curated by AML STUDIO. The result is a cohesive, museum-quality residence where craftsmanship and intention are evident at every turn. Custom doors, windows, and built-ins create a seamless visual language echoing the home’s warm modernism, materiality and sculptural wood construction.

Interiors are grounded by Scarpa-inspired high-aggregate polished concrete floors with hand-laid brass inlay, with radiant floor heating that brings a layer of everyday luxury and comfort underfoot. Expansive walls of glass, juxtaposed with custom tinted board-formed concrete, frame landscape and invite natural light to move fluidly through the home, blurring the line between indoors and out.

Designed with both comfort and entertaining in mind, a bespoke media room offers an intimate cinematic experience, wrapped in rich walnut paneling that provides warmth and acoustic refinement. A sophisticated, fully appointed bar anchors the space, ideal for hosting elegant evenings or relaxed family gatherings.

Designed with wellness at its core, the primary suite is a private sanctuary, featuring a Boffi soaking tub, brass fixtures by Vola, and a serene, spa-like atmosphere. Some bathrooms are adorned with floor tiles by Commune Design, offering an artisanal richness.

The home is equipped with an energy efficient multi-zone VRF system, delivering precise climate control throughout while maintaining exceptional efficiency and quiet performance. A fully integrated Lutron lighting system orchestrates light and mood, enhancing the home’s tranquil, restorative environment from sunrise to evening.

Outdoors, the double-lot unfolds into a private resort-like setting, ideal for both intimate family living and grand-scale entertaining. A pool clad in Ann Sacks Zellige tile is surrounded by multiple beautiful and distinctive areas for lounging and dining, and impeccable landscaping by internationally renowned Stefan Hammerschmidt.

Listing Details

Bedrooms: 5

Baths: 5 full, 2 partial

Year Built: 2022

Square Feet: 6,459

Plot Size: 0.25 acres

Courtesy of Sotheby's International Realty - Pacific Palisades Brokerage

See the full story on Dwell.com: A Scarpa-Inspired Venice Retreat Lists for $14.9M
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This Crisp Cluster of Gables in Transylvania Started With Prefab Modules

The holiday home combines innovative materials like compressed hay insulation with the rural language of the Romanian countryside.

Houses We Love: Every day we feature a remarkable space submitted by our community of architects, designers, builders, and homeowners. Have one to share? Post it here.

Project Details:

Location: Moldovenești, Romania

Architect: MVAA / @mvaa_studio

Footprint: 750 square feet

Builder: PAECO

Structural Engineer: Moebius Engineering

Civil Engineer: HSC Instal

Photographer: Viewcatchers / @vwcatchers

From the Architect: "Located in Moldovenești, a village in Cluj County, this project sits within the cultural and natural landscape of the hills of Transylvania. The site is framed by nearby landmarks such as the dramatic Cheile Turzii gorge, the limestone peak of Piatra Secuiului, and the historic fabric of Rimetea. Within Moldovenești itself, the silhouette of the 16th-century Jósika Castle and the village’s churches provide immediate reference points. Against this backdrop, the design positions itself as a contemporary continuation of the region’s rural identity—rooted in tradition, yet responsive to the needs of contemporary living.

"The project arose from the client’s request for three interconnected components: a new holiday home, a smaller guesthouse for occasional visitors, and the restoration of an old barn to accommodate social activities and remote work. Rather than condensing these functions into a single volume, the design draws inspiration from the traditional household organization of the area, where multiple annexes are scattered around a courtyard. The new ensemble embraces this fragmented composition, integrating itself naturally into the orchard landscape.

"Placed at the highest point of the site, the main house enjoys open views toward the surrounding hills and establishes a visual axis with Jósika Castle. Modest in size, it is carefully divided into three volumes: a ‘day’ wing with living and kitchen areas, a ‘night’ wing with bedrooms and bathroom, and a technical corpus that includes technical spaces and a covered grill area. The living room rises in part to a double height, a gesture that compensates for the home’s compact footprint by offering a sense of spatial generosity and openness. Between the day and technical wings, a shaded terrace forms a cool, sheltered extension of the living room, overlooking the courtyard with its playground and shed. On the opposite side, facing the landscape and castle, a sunny open terrace with a Jacuzzi provides a complementary space of openness and leisure. The placement of windows and openings was designed so that each interior space maintains a direct relationship either with the courtyard or with the panoramic views beyond.

"Materially, the houses combine contemporary techniques with sustainable and locally resonant choices. A concrete foundation supports prefabricated modular wooden structures, insulated with compressed hay, a relatively new but promising technology in Romania. The pedestal is covered with reused local limestone, grounding the buildings visually while recycling durable materials from the area. The facades are clad in thermo-treated pine, echoing the wooden annexes typical of rural households and maintaining the appearance of secondary structures in deference to the older houses aligned along the street. Roofs are covered with ceramic tiles in traditional scale-like patterns."

See the full story on Dwell.com: This Crisp Cluster of Gables in Transylvania Started With Prefab Modules
Related stories:

Another Norman Jaffe Gem Gets Bulldozed—and Everything Else You Need to Know About This Week

A Mirrored Kitchen Makes This Very Narrow Sydney Terrace Home Feel Much Larger Than It Is

Project Details:

From the Archive: A Closer Look at Artist Jim Isermann’s Pattern Happy Universe

Your work has a very strong effect on its audience. I see it more in the tradition of installation and site-specific art than design, which further complicates what you do.

Where do you situate yourself on the modernist map?

You mentioned that you visited artist Donald Judd’s home and that, in your view, he really was an interior decorator. He made furniture and was obsessive about placement. Do you identify with the term "interior decorator"?

The art critic Dave Hickey has referred to your work as having a "utopian optimism" that is "essentially domestic" and of the moment. Can you address the idea of utopia?

Bernard Maybeck’s First Home in This Bay Area Enclave Just Hit the Market for $13M

Burnished Aluminum Sheeting Covers the Entire Ground Floor of This Renovated 1893 Lisbon Home

Project Details:

A Scarpa-Inspired Venice Retreat Lists for $14.9M

Listing Details

This Crisp Cluster of Gables in Transylvania Started With Prefab Modules

Project Details:

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