In the Triangle alone there are at least 800 Modernist homes, according to George Smart, CEO of US Modernist, most designed by NC State architects. That\u2019s in part because Kamphoefner hired internationally known architects to be part of the founding faculty, and he insisted that his professors build as well as teach. This was a school where the practice of architecture mattered. Besides, how better to preach the doctrine of Modernism than to build it?<\/p>\n\n\n\nKamphoefner was offered the position of dean\u2009\u2014\u2009and a salary of $9,000\u2009\u2014\u2009by Chancellor J.W. Harrelson in 1947. At the time he was acting head of the School of Architecture at the University of Oklahoma. When he arrived in Raleigh to meet Harrelson, he was armed with four non-negotiable conditions: The current department head had to return to teaching, replaced by \u201ca man of national reputation.\u201d One tenured professor must resign. Five non-tenured instructors were to be terminated and replaced by six others. And there had to be a space on campus dedicated to the new school.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The chancellor agreed to all. Classes at the new School of Design commenced in the fall of 1948. Kamphoefner brought with him four widely known Modernists and set about to making Raleigh a center of the movement. He enlisted Lewis Mumford, architecture critic at The New Yorker,<\/em> to come and help shape the curriculum. Buckminster Fuller, who developed the geodesic dome, was a visiting lecturer who worked hands-on with students. And Frank Lloyd Wright came to deliver a lecture at Reynolds Coliseum in 1950, attracting a crowd of 5,000.<\/p>\n\n\n\nFrank Harmon<\/strong><\/p><\/div><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n\n\n\u201cHe was brilliant,\u201d says Raleigh author, professor and architect Frank Harmon, noting that Kamphoefner brought well-known practitioners \u201cto this little red-dirt town of 50,000 people.\u201d At that time, he says, Raleigh \u201cwas the center of the architecture world.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
It was Mumford who encouraged Kamphoefner to hire Polish architect Matthew Nowicki as head of the architecture department. And after Kamphoefner asked him to build as well as teach, Nowicki designed the groundbreaking Dorton Arena in 1948. When the arena opened in 1952, with its distinctive saddle-shaped roof supported by torqued steel cables, it was hailed as the greatest building of its time. Architectural Record <\/em>named it one of the most significant of the last century. (Nowicki would not live to see it built; he was killed in a 1950 plane crash, and the arena was completed by Raleigh architect William Deitrick.)<\/p>\n\n\n\nWhile Dorton was under construction, German-born Modernist Mies van der Rohe, regarded as one of the pioneers of Modernism, came to see it from Chicago, where he was director of the department of architecture at the Illinois Institute of Technology. In a visit with students at a second-story Hillsborough Street apartment, legend has it that he imbibed so much that when he left, he fell down a series of steps. Worried that they\u2019d killed the architectural titan, the students breathed a sigh of relief when he stood up and walked away.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In the 1950s, Harmon says, \u201cevery critic knew about the place.\u201d One reason was that the faculty was building some of the nation\u2019s most innovative residences. James Fitzgibbon designed what was known as the Paschal House in Raleigh in 1950, using stone walls, deep overhangs and glass expanses. (Despite efforts to preserve it, the house was torn down in 2013.) After Argentine expat Eduardo Catalano, then teaching at London\u2019s Architectural Association, came to NC State, he designed the eye-popping Catalano House. A 1,700-square-foot glass box, it was sheltered by a 3,600-square-foot hyperbolic paraboloid roof. It was named \u201cHouse of the Decade\u201d by House and Home<\/em> magazine. (The house was torn down in 2001.)<\/p>\n\n\n\nThe same year, George Matsumoto, another founding faculty member, created his own Raleigh home. Designed around four-by-eight-foot modules of Masonite panels, it was one of 20 he built here, many of which are still standing. \u201cThey\u2019re as modern and Avant Garde today as when they were built in the 1950s,\u201d says Turan Duda \u201976, partner in the Durham firm that bears his name.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Kamphoefner, who retired in 1972, lived in a house that he and Matsumoto designed, where he frequently hosted well-known architects. When he arrived with Shawcroft and his wife\u2009in 1960, he showed the couple two rooms, each with a single bed. He pointed to one, saying that Frank Lloyd Wright had slept there. Mies had slept in the other. \u201cYou have to choose,\u201d he told Shawcroft.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The British-born Shawcroft\u2009\u2014\u2009who would go on to design nearly two dozen Modernist houses in the Raleigh area in coming decades\u2009\u2014\u2009chose Wright. His wife would sleep where Mies once had.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
J. Michael Welton is an architecture writer and the author of<\/em> Drawing from Practice: Architects and the Meaning of Freehand.<\/p>\n\n\n\n