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EDUARDO
FERNANDO CATALANO Eduardo Fernando Catalano was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina and came to the United States on a scholarship to the Universities of Pennsylvania and Harvard. In 1945, after earning his second Master's Degree in architecture, Catalano taught at the Architectural Association in London until 1951, when he came back to the U.S. as a Professor of Architecture at the NCSU School of Design. In 1956 he moved to Boston and began teaching at MIT until 1977. He closed his practice in 1995 and now lives in Boston. Other buildings designed by Catalano include the US embassies in Buenos Aires, Argentina and in Pretoria, South Africa, the Juilliard School of Music at New York City's Lincoln Center, Guilford County Courthouse in Greensboro (below) and the Stratton Student Center at MIT in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
In 2002, Catalano came out of retirement to design the "Floralis Generica" sculpture in Buenos Aires, a gigantic metal flower with 6 motorized 20-meter-high petals that open and close.
After the untimely death of NCSU School of Design Professor Robert Burns, his former student and employee, Catalano donated $200,000 to the NCSU School of Design in his honor. Catalano also gave a second gift of $400,000 — the largest outright gift at the time it was given in 2007 — to establish the Eduardo Catalano Endowed Lecture/Seminar on Innovations in Contemporary Architecture. |
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1954 - The Eduardo Catalano House, 1467 Ridge Road, Raleigh, the coolest house ever designed in North Carolina and perhaps all of America. He refers to it as the "Raleigh House." The $40,000 house is also referred to as the Ezra Meir House and the Potato Chip house because of the swooping hyperbolic roof. Catalano drew this 1700-square-foot home for himself but only lived there a few years. The design was highly publicized as the "House of the Decade" by House and Home Magazine in 1956 and was praised by the rarely praising Frank Lloyd Wright. As with most modernist houses in Raleigh, it was built by Frank Walser. It is the only house Catalano designed in North Carolina. Aerial shot, below, taken in the 1990's. You can see the roof on the left side, at the end of the dirt road. Catalano sold his masterpiece to engineer Ezra Meir and his wife Violet in September 1957. The Meirs sold it to William and Bettie Hinnant in December of 1966 for $60,000.
The Hinnants moved out in 1976 and sold it to Raleigh attorney Arch E. Lynch, Jr. in May of 1978. Lynch commissioned Karl Gaskins to do an addition but it was never built. Lynch lived there until 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 hundreds of thousands of dollars to repair, if repair were even possible. Eventually the damage was too extensive.
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 at a cost of $640,000. Lynch sold to developer JBar Associates in March of 2001. The house was destroyed later that month. |
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The Catalano House in its heyday.
The years of decline. Photos from Jetset. Shortly after its destruction in 2001, Catalano unsuccessfully lobbied to have just the roof rebuilt on the grounds of the NC Museum of Art. In early 2005, he proposed a gift of $1.5M rebuild the roof as part of a central campus Pavilion plan. Alas, strong faculty opposition caused him to withdraw. NCSU hired an architectural firm to evaluate seven other alternative sites but the narrowmindedness of NCSU's faculty committee kept Catalano and his donation in Boston.
JBar Associates, owned by Andrew Rothschild and Jonathan Bluestone, has since built two large houses on the site, including this one:
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1980 - His own house in Cambridge MA. |
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