The Eduardo Catalano House was built in 1954 in
Raleigh
Raleigh (; ) is the capital city of the state of North Carolina and the seat of Wake County in the United States. It is the second-most populous city in North Carolina, after Charlotte. Raleigh is the tenth-most populous city in the Southeas ...
,
North Carolina
North Carolina () is a state in the Southeastern region of the United States. The state is the 28th largest and 9th-most populous of the United States. It is bordered by Virginia to the north, the Atlantic Ocean to the east, Georgia and ...
by
Eduardo Catalano
Eduardo Fernando Catalano (December 19, 1917 – January 28, 2010) was an Argentine architect.
Life and career
Born in Buenos Aires, Catalano went to the United States on a scholarship to the University of Pennsylvania and Harvard Graduate ...
, a young
Argentinian
Argentines (mistakenly translated Argentineans in the past; in Spanish ( masculine) or ( feminine)) are people identified with the country of Argentina. This connection may be residential, legal, historical or cultural. For most Argentines, ...
architect
An architect is a person who plans, designs and oversees the construction of buildings. To practice architecture means to provide services in connection with the design of buildings and the space within the site surrounding the buildings that h ...
. The Catalano house design was highly publicized as the "House of the Decade" by
House and Home Magazine in the 1950s and was noted for its
modern architecture
Modern architecture, or modernist architecture, was an architectural movement or architectural style based upon new and innovative technologies of construction, particularly the use of glass, steel, and reinforced concrete; the idea that for ...
, later becoming an icon of
American mid-century optimism and praised by the rarely praising architect
Frank Lloyd Wright
Frank Lloyd Wright (June 8, 1867 – April 9, 1959) was an American architect, designer, writer, and educator. He designed more than 1,000 structures over a creative period of 70 years. Wright played a key role in the architectural movements o ...
.
The three-bedroom house featured a roof which was a
hyperbolic paraboloid, built of wood 2.5" thick. The roof was warped into two structural
curve
In mathematics, a curve (also called a curved line in older texts) is an object similar to a line, but that does not have to be straight.
Intuitively, a curve may be thought of as the trace left by a moving point. This is the definition that ...
s (similar to the shape of a
shoehorn
A shoehorn or shoe horn (sometimes called a shoespooner, shoe spoon, shoe schlipp, or shoe tongue) is a tool with a short handle that flares into a longer spoon-like head meant to be held against the inside back of a snug-fitting shoe so that a ...
), with two corners of the roof firmly
anchor
An anchor is a device, normally made of metal , used to secure a vessel to the bed of a body of water to prevent the craft from drifting due to wind or current. The word derives from Latin ''ancora'', which itself comes from the Greek ἄΠ...
ed to the ground and two corners soaring high into the air. Sheltered beneath the double-twisted roof is a square interior enclosed entirely in glass. The undulation of the roof provided openness in some areas and privacy and seclusion in others.
As with most modernist houses in Raleigh, it was built by Frank Walser. The Catalano House was sometimes referred to as the "Potato Chip" house because of the swooping hyperbolic paraboloid roof.
Catalano sold it to engineer Ezra Meir and his wife Violet in September 1957. The Meirs sold it to William and Betsy Hinnant in December 1966. The Hinnants sold it to Raleigh attorney Arch E. Lynch, Jr. in May 1978. Lynch lived there until approximately 1996. From 1996 to 2001, the house was unoccupied. Vandals, storms, lack of heat, and neglect made the house rapidly deteriorate. The roof rotted in sections over time. It would have taken several hundred thousand dollars to repair if repair were even possible. Eventually the damage was too extensive to repair.
Preservation North Carolina bought an option on the house and tried unsuccessfully to sell it for $360,000 to anyone who would rebuild the same design. Lynch eventually sold it to JBar Associates in March 2001. The house was destroyed later that month. JBar later built two large houses on the property.
Shortly after its destruction, Catalano unsuccessfully lobbied the NC Museum of Art to have just the roof rebuilt on their grounds in Raleigh. In early 2005, he proposed North Carolina State University with a gift of $1.5M to rebuild the roof as part of a Central Campus Pavilion plan
Central Campus Pavilion plan
/ref> but strong faculty opposition caused him to withdraw, despite the fact NCSU hired an architectural firm to evaluate seven other alternative sites.
References
{{reflist
External links
* ttp://usmodernist.org/catalano US Modernist Houses - Eduardo Catalano
Guide to The Peter C. Sugar Drawings of the Potential Reconstruction of a Modified Version of the Raleigh House 2009
Houses in Raleigh, North Carolina