ANDERSON TODD, 1921-2018 
Tucked back on a corner lot a block north of Rice is one of the courtyard houses Anderson Todd designed and lived in during his nearly 70 years in Houston. It’s shown above in all its flat-roofed glory. Like many of the buildings Todd dreamed up around town, the house rests on principles he took from German architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, his teacher at Princeton and mentor thereafter. Upon joining Rice’s then-not-so-modern architecture department in 1949, Todd set about implanting Miesian concepts in his students’ brains for the next 4 decades. He also found time to convince Mies himself to design 2 successive additions to the MFAH: Cullinan Hall and the Brown Pavilion, notes the Chronicle‘s Jasper Scherer. Todd retired from his professorial duties in 1992, and, last Friday, passed away at the age of 97. [Houston Chronicle] Photo: Swamplox inbox
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Tag: Modern Architecture
Everything is operational now at the Transart Foundation for Art and Anthropology‘s hulking white headquarters north of the Menil — which took the place of a house earlier this year. The organization’s mission is to study the role of art in everyday life by supporting “experimental work at the intersection of art and anthropology.” It’s one door down from the intersection of W. Alabama and Yupon St., next to the Neon Gallery bungalow partly visible in the photo above.
Inside, a first floor gallery is divided by a central stairway that climbs up to a roof deck and garden:
Transart Foundation
WESTBURY MOD SELLERS DROP PRICE, VIDEO OF SPACE AGE 3-BEDROOM OFF W. BELLFORT Brubeck plays in the background as this new clip from the sellers of 5702 Warm Springs Rd. pans around the 1959 single-story just off W. Bellfort, showing off some of its era-appropriate renovations like laminate kitchen countertops, cork floors, a mosaic-patterned wall by the entrance, and Formica surfaces throughout. $10k fell off the asking price yesterday, bringing the house [a previous Swamplot sponsor] down to $379,000. [Oscar Fine Properties; listing] Video: Oscar Fine Properties
Paperwork filed recently with the city’s Historical Commission reveals the extent of flood damage at the 1960 Frame-Harper house on Westminster Dr. and what Stern & Bucek has planned for the home’s second redo in 11 years. The Houston architecture firm’s first renovation of Harwood Taylor’s original design smoothed out the rough edges of its previous additions and restored its ’50s swagger. Floodwaters from Harvey filled the home’s Buffalo Bayou–facing living room, pictured above after the 2007 redo, to nearly half its height.
This interior view shows how the structure chaperones you down towards the living room and the bayou:
Wash and Wear
The dramatic remake of a 1941 single-story is winding down on the corner of McHenry and Carothers streets, and one plastic couple has now stripped down completely and headed inside the building. From the glass picture window upstairs, you can see an unclothed male figure (shown in the closeup) on the left, who bears a striking resemblance to one member of the mannequin construction team that had been at work (and arranged in various tableaus) in the house’s yard over the past few years.
His apparent female partner — on second glance — appears not entirely nude after all:
Model Home
COMMENT OF THE DAY: A QUICKER END TO MEMORIAL BEND’S MOD ERA 
“The Memorial Bend neighborhood (which includes the featured Faust Lane home) was impacted hard by Harvey. It has/had some of the best collections of mid-century modern homes in Houston. Due to escalating land values, their numbers were already dwindling annually before the storm and I’m afraid this will only reduce their numbers faster. At least, we’ll have historic Google street view as a reference.” [Native Houstonian, commenting on Daily Demolition Report: The Faust and the Furious] Photo of 442 Faust Ln.: Griffin Vance
From the street, the bits of the facade of this 1970 home in Piney Point visible through the swath of greenery are mostly covered over in stone — but the sides and remainder of the house features numerous floor-to-ceiling windows and glass walls (not only separating the mirrored bath chamber above from the master suite, but separating a fully indoor pool from the dining room and living room areas). The 3-bedroom home went on the market originally for around $2.4 million, but the asking price dropped to $1,995,000 late last fall. Other conspicuous features include what the home’s listing describes as 20-pound sheets of copper wallpaper employed in the master bedroom, extensive mirroring around the house, and the dense swirl of fantastical beasts wallpapered onto the kitchen ceiling:
Low Profile off Tynewood
The 5 master suites in this 6-bedroom home in Hunters Creek Village are tucked out of sight of the pool-surveying viewpoint above, on the second of 4 floors (plus or minus some splitting of levels). The listing for the 1980 home popped up yesterday sporting a $4.496-million asking price and no exterior photographs of the13,963-sq.-ft. structure, which sits on 1.3 acres of well-treed lot backed up against the Houston Racquet Club’s land to the east.
The downstairs wet bar is within easy striking range of the hot tub partitioned away from the main pool:
High But Not Dry
Don’t fret: The dangling fireplace in this 2-story 1976 home on the eastern shore of Lake Conroe is chained securely in place in the center of the living room’s linoleum-lined couch pit. The 3-bedroom main house is planted right next to a freestanding 1-bedroom guesthouse; the 1.3-acre Willis lot also contains a no-bedroom boathouse and an insert-your-own-bedroom RV-ready metal shed. The house has been floating around on the market since July of 2015, though the price took a $54,000 dip in May.
The upturned corners of the guesthouse’s roof and toppers are visible from Joann St.:
A 3-Bedroom Tour
The double-lot-straddling 2008 Lesem House at 2115 Wroxton is back on the market yet again, this time sporting about a 40 percent discount from the price listed earlier this year (after some gradual price declines since 2013 culminated in a sharp upward jump to $4.5 million last December). Following the increase, the 5-bedroom 2-kitchen home was pulled off the market around the end of May (having crept back down to $3.5 million); the new listing —with its markedly more modest price tag of $2.75 million — showed up last Friday.
This most recent listing seems to have retreated back to some the shots used in older sales attempts, as opposed to the edgier portraits that showed up in December:
Mod Markdown
Hitting the market late last week in the neighborhoods of Meyerland and of $425,000: a groovy 1970s home a few doors down Lymbar Dr. from soon-to-be-renamed Johnston Middle School, northeast of the intersection of Willowbend Blvd. with Chimney Rock Dr. The living room of the 2,362-sq.-ft. house features a round concrete fireplace amid wood paneling and sealed brick floors; a shower-side planter setup makes appearances in the master suite’s bathroom.
Here’s the cantilevered porch and striped front door a the top of the home’s circular driveway:
Meyerland Mod
