American Modern Home

American Modern Home: Jacobsen Architecture + Interiors
by Simon Jacobsen
Rizzoli, October 2022

Hardcover | 11 x 11 inches | 224 pages | English | ISBN: 9780847872053 | $75

PUBLISHER'S DESCRIPTION:

Hugh Newell Jacobsen, the legendary architect and late co-founder with his son, Simon, of Jacobsen Architecture, once said “the best house is polite to her neighbors and never shouts.” This statement is a key to the philosophy of the firm, whose houses are suffused with a kind of quiet sophistication that mingle elegant, subtle modernism, with respect for local vernacular traditions. Low-key on the outside, on the inside these houses offer dancing symphonies in white. Unmarked by moldings, walls and ceilings express simple volumetric forms composed of solid planes and voids, while, upon floors of burnished wood or travertine, furniture, much of it designed by the firm, allows for serene repose and practical, unfussy use. Featured here are exemplars of the firm, from Harbor Hill — a cluster of 12 small structures, appearing at first as a group of smallish shingled Nantucket cottages, that reveals itself as a single serene residence overlooking Nantucket Harbor — to Windsor, a Florida Colonial abstraction in Vero Beach. Featuring inviting interiors, exteriors, and gardens, the book is an expression of eloquent design.

Simon Jacobsen is a founding partner of Jacobsen Architecture. The recipient of many prestigious awards in architecture and design, he is an inductee of Architectural Digest’s AD100.

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REVIEW:

In March 2021, when Hugh Newell Jacobsen died just a week shy of his 92nd birthday, I picked up a copy of the first eponymous monograph on the DC architect, edited and designed by Massimo Vignelli and published in 1988, to help me write an obituary for World-Architects. I was familiar with the architecture of Jacobsen, but given that my architectural education happened when postmodern architecture was vehemently decried, I unknowingly and incorrectly lumped Jacobsen in with architects I disliked because he used historical forms in his houses, mainly gables. (Even his final resting place is a gabled volume — a mirrored one at that!) But Vignelli, in his foreword to the monograph that offered me a corrective of sorts, captures the appeal of Jacobsen's architecture as well as the confusion over categorizing it: "Even if his projects span from International Style to American vernacular or neo-Gothic to Greek Revivalism, Jacobsen should not be considered an eclectic since his projects are unmistakably Jacobsen in essence and form." "Unmistakably Jacobsen" is a perfect description, since it captures Jacobsen's unwillingness to be defined by terms like modern or postmodern, contemporary or historical; and it conveys how one recognizes a Jacobsen house at even the briefest glance. These traits continue with the firm Hugh established with his son, Simon, in 2009, and which finds expression in a new monograph published by Rizzoli.

Hugh Newell Jacobsen did not only design houses, but they are what he is known for. The Jacobsen Architecture website actually boasts that twenty houses have been featured in Architectural Record's annual Record Houses issue, a number probably higher than other architects. American Modern Home carries on the "tradition" of a strong but nonexclusive focus on residential architecture, presenting a dozen houses completed over the last decade or so. (I'm guessing on the time period covered by the book, given that it omits dates of design or completion.) "Almost all the work in this book was directed by Simon Jacobsen," writes Paul Goldberger in his introduction, "making it clear that while he has built on the direction set by his father, he has continually adapted it to new places, new programs and new clients." The book starts with Bird House in Napa, which Simon points out as "the last house Hugh was involved in," completed in 2012 per the firm's website. Pictured above and below in a couple spreads from the book, Napa House is "unmistakably Jacobsen," with its gabled volumes, prominent chimney, clean lines, and white exterior. 

Gracing the cover is another unmistakably Jacobsen design: Bray House, a 7,000-square-foot house in Kittery Point, Maine. Articulated as seven gabled pavilions, the house designed by Simon is very much in the lineage of Hugh, but not only for its Monopoly-hotel form and modern detailing. The house takes its name from the 1,800-sf house that was built by John Bray in the 1660s, added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1979, and which serves as the heart of the project. The original was stabilized and renovated, its later additions were removed, and new forms designed by Simon flank it, dwarfing it in size but elevating the importance of the original through the siting and size of the new volumes and by connecting the new to the old with minimal glazed corridors. The house illustrates two facets of the firm's output under both Hugh and Simon: the houses they design(ed) are large and clearly for the wealthy; and the firm is involved in historical preservation, but not necessarily in a way that entombs old buildings in the past.

Other instances of historical preservation in American Modern Home are found in Georgetown, the DC neighborhood that Hugh and his family called home. The book features Smith House (spreads above and below), a renovated Federal-style townhouse from the early 1800s, and "Chic Convenience," aka the Simon Jacobsen Residence, the combination of two 1863 houses into one four-bedroom residence. Each house retains its historic character on the street, is clean, minimal, and bright inside, and has a rear elevation that expresses how the interiors were opened up in line with contemporary living. This pair is aligned with other renovations by other architects in other historic districts, but the houses are still recognizable as Jacobsen designs, even as working within the confines of existing buildings means the firm's signature gabled volumes are nowhere to be found.

The new monograph was written by Simon Jacobsen in a manner that is descriptive but also highly revealing of the architect's motivations and intentions. His words are accompanied by the usual drawings and color photography that are par for the course in architectural monographs, though the latter are notable for being by Simon Jacobsen as well. Not all the photographs of the dozen houses were taken by Jacobsen, but only a few were taken by Hugh Newell Jacobsen's longtime photographer, Robert Lautman, who died in 2009. Lautman greatly defined Jacobsen's architecture in images, both in the early monographs listed below and in magazines, Record Houses and otherwise. Simon Jacobsen is skilled as a photographer but is no Lautman. Likewise, Beatriz Cifuentes, formerly at Vignelli Associates, is certainly a good graphic designer but is no Massimo Vignelli. As such, I found American Modern Home lacking visually compared to the earlier Jacobsen monographs. Perhaps I'm being unfair, though, as Simon embarks on a direction that is informed by his father — "The Great Man," he writes — but is also all his own.

FOR FURTHER READING:

• A Guide to the Architecture of Washington, D.C. edited by Hugh Newell Jacobsen (Frederick A. Praeger, 1965)
• Hugh Newell Jacobsen, Architect (AIA Press, 1988)
• Hugh Newell Jacobsen, Architect: Recent Work (AIA Press, 1994)
• Hugh Newell Jacobsen, Architect Works from 1993 to 2006 (Rizzoli, 2007)