The Bluegrass and Beyond

The old building doesn’t look like much, standing across East Third Street from a demolition site and the King Cobras motorcycle club. A small sign in a window behind a steel-bar security door says: LOT Parrish Rash.

Since early this year, it has been the Land of Tomorrow, an occasional gallery, and the workshop of Parrish Rash & van Dissel, a small company with big ambitions.

PR&vD hopes to encourage artists and industrial designers around the world to innovate by creating new and more profitable ways for them to produce and market their work.

At the company’s workshop last week, there were three projects under way: A high-design chaise being made of Styrofoam and urethane for a Vienna art museum; a stage set for The xx, a British rock band; and another UK professor’s project that involves creating a LED lighting system for a large model of a planned community in China that will be exhibited in Germany.

Upcoming work includes a piece for a show at the Pompidou Centre in Paris and two pieces for a show at the Art Institute of Chicago.

Later this month, LOT will bring collectors from across the country together with an international group of designers represented by the NOUS Gallery of London, England. The event will include a mixed-media show called Boys and Their Toys, which will be on display from Oct. 30 to Nov. 8. The opening reception Oct. 30 at 7 p.m. is open to the public.

Why would these collectors and designers travel thousands of miles for an event in Lexington?

“High-end collectors are looking for new places to discover work,” said LOT founder Drura Parrish. The event will include a dinner, an afternoon at Keeneland and plenty of bourbon. “You sell the destination, not the art.”

It also didn’t hurt that one of the British gallery’s principals, designer Melissa Woolford, is originally from Evansville, Ind., across the Ohio River from Parrish’s hometown of Henderson.

Good connections and a “why not?” attitude have enabled Parrish and his business partner, Rives Rash, to build an international reputation over the past six years by working with contemporary artists and architects to produce their designs. Their work has appeared at such venues as New York’s Museum of Modern Art, Vienna’s MAK Center and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

Parrish and Rash are faculty members at the University of Kentucky’s College of Design. They’re also workshop wizards who never outgrew playing with sticks and glue.

“The reputation got out there that if you wanted to do something crazy, there’s these guys from Virginia and Kentucky who will help you do something crazy,” said Parrish, who, like Rash, earned a graduate degree from the Southern California Institute of Architecture.

During the past 15 years, technology has revolutionized architecture and design. Parrish, 33, and Rash, 30, have created a niche by exploring the possibilities of new design geometries and materials.

The company’s newest partner, Bart van Dissel, 55, a former Harvard Business School professor and McKinsey & Co. consultant, sees an opportunity for PR&vD to change the economics of design by connecting designers, manufacturers and customers.

That means working with designers to build prototypes and figure out manufacturing processes and costs. PR&vD would do some manufacturing itself and outsource some work to other Kentucky manufacturers.

In addition to fine art, PR&vD is interested in making furniture and household items — really, any object that might be improved by innovative design.

“There needs to be a democratization of design,” Parrish said. “People used to not give a damn about design because they couldn’t afford it.” That is changing as high-design items show up on the shelves of such retailers as IKEA and Target.

Designers haven’t been well-served by traditional retail models, where mass production and big sales volume are necessary and retailers get as much as 60 percent of the price. It gives designers little incentive to innovate or take risks.

For that reason, PR&vD also is interested in exploring new retail models, from online sales to distribution through museum stores.

“The key point is to shift the way the designers do business,” Parrish said. “Our paradigm is simple: Put designers first, and they become the brand.”

PR&vD has begun making several products for sale on www.etsy.com, an arts and crafts site. They include flatware, lamps, chairs and decorative items made from a mix of urethane and tree limbs salvaged from last winter’s ice storm.

There are limits to what can be made in PR&vD’s rented workshop, which also must accommodate the building owner’s bass boat. It is moved around the room as space is needed.

“It adds soul to the workshop,” Parrish said of the bass boat.

“And it reminds us that we don’t go fishing enough,” van Dissel added.

Parrish thinks Kentucky is an ideal place for the kind of creative, specialized manufacturing that PR&vD has in mind. The state has a wealth of aluminum and plastics fabricators who located here for the auto industry but could use more work.

“Kentucky, more than any place I know, is tied to making and doing,” he said. “If we don’t do it as a profession, we often do it as a hobby. It’s just what we do.”

After all, look what PR&vD has done so far with limited equipment in an old building on East Third Street. In the land of tomorrow, what’s important are ideas — and people with the knowledge and connections to make them work.

FRANKFORT —Frank Lloyd Wright was hired in 1910 to design a Frankfort home for a Presbyterian minister he met during a trip to Europe. But it would be nearly four decades before the architect would visit his creation.

Wright was speaking in Louisville and Lexington, and he asked to be taken by the house. When the man who then lived there answered the door, the story goes, Wright walked in as if he owned the place.

During the visit, the man asked Wright, then 80, what he had in mind when he designed the display case around the top of the living room fireplace. It is the only one like it in any of the hundreds of homes Wright designed.

After a few moments, Wright replied that he couldn’t remember what he was thinking at the time, “But I’m sure it was very advanced.”

Ed Stodola, who has owned the Rev. Jesse Zeigler house at 509 Shelby Street for nine years, smiles when he tells the story. Wright was almost as famous for his outsize ego as for his innovative architecture, so Stodola thinks the story of that 1948 visit just might be true.

One thing is for sure: Of the more than 1,000 structures Wright designed during his 70-year career as perhaps America’s greatest architect, only one was built in Kentucky.

Wright is getting a lot of attention this year, the 50th anniversary his death in 1959 at age 91. It also is the 50th anniversary of Wright’s last great building, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York City. The art museum on Fifth Avenue marked the occasion with a retrospective of Wright’s work.

Wright is best known for his “prairie” style buildings that blend into the natural landscape. His most famous creations might be the Guggenheim and Fallingwater, a house built over a waterfall in rural Pennsylvania.

Wright’s ideas about architecture had a profound influence on 20th-century home design, from the bungalows of the 1920s to the ranch-style homes of the 1950s. He pioneered and popularized open floor plans, built-in cabinets and carports. He experimented with pre-fabrication and even designed furniture and fixtures for his houses.

Stodola and his wife, Sue, are Wisconsin natives who were taught in school about native son Frank Lloyd Wright the way Kentucky children are taught about Abraham Lincoln.

Stodola, a psychologist, was living in Lexington in 2001 but doing most of his work in Frankfort. He vowed he would move to Frankfort if the Zeigler house ever came up for sale. Driving by one day, he noticed a “for sale” sign in the yard. He soon bought the house, which is on the National Register of Historic Places.

The four-bedroom Zeigler house, which like most Wright houses is of modest size and distinguished by strong horizontal lines, was built by a Frankfort contractor. The leaded-glass windows and Roman brick on the fireplace came from Wright’s studio in Chicago, Stodola said.

Zeigler, who had a wife and three children, economized in a few places: the upstairs floors are heart pine, rather than oak, and plain glass was used in rear, upstairs windows.

All but one room open to an outside terrace or deck. That and the windows help accomplish Wright’s goal of “organic” architecture that visually brings the outside environment inside.

There are many small design touches, such as the pink dogwood blooms painted on the shades of wall-mounted light fixtures in the master bedroom, echoing the pink dogwood tree that has always been in the front yard.

Although Wright’s designs are an architect’s dream, they can be a structural engineer’s nightmare. Fallingwater has been jokingly called “Fallingdown” because it has required costly repairs over the years.

Luckily for the Stodolas and the four previous owners, the Zeigler house hasn’t had many such problems. One reason could be that its roof is more steeply pitched than those of many Wright houses. It also has a basement, a rarity in a Wright house.

“This home is very livable,” Sue Stodola said. “I never feel crowded in the rooms, because they feel bigger than they really are.”

Light shines through the wavy, leaded-glass windows and reflects off the oak woodwork differently depending on the weather and season. Ed Stodola loves sitting on the back, upstairs terrace with a glass of wine during a summer rain; the drops make an interesting sound on the roof overhang.

“There’s this ongoing discovery with the house,” he said.

The Zeigler house also has another claim to fame: Woodrow Wilson slept here.

Soon after the house was built, and three years before Wilson became president, he was Zeigler’s guest while attending a National Governors Association meeting in Louisville. Wilson was then president of Princeton University and had just been elected governor of New Jersey. The two men had known each other at Princeton.

The Zeigler house has had a state historical marker out front for many years. The Stodolas added a small “private home” sign after more than a few curious sightseers knocked on their door or looked in their windows, thinking the house was a museum.

One woman came to the door and explained that she was a schoolteacher visiting Wright houses as part of a cross-country trip. As it turned out, she was from Denmark, Wis., Stodola’s tiny hometown. After a few minutes of conversation, they discovered that his mother had been her fourth-grade teacher and she now taught in her old classroom.

The Stodolas have come to accept that the occasional stranger at the door is the price you pay for living in a Frank Lloyd Wright house. His designs are so iconic, his influence on architecture so great, that it feels natural for some people to want to walk right in as if they owned the place.

Will this be another downtown survey that is filed away and forgotten?

Or will Lexington follow through and take steps to leverage what’s left of its rich architectural past for a more prosperous future?

The city historic preservation division last week unveiled a survey of every building on 34 downtown blocks. It graded each pre-1965 structure’s historic and architectural merit as “outstanding,” “significant,” “contributing” or “non-contributing.”

Mayor Jim Newberry ordered the survey after controversy erupted last summer over developer Dudley Webb’s demolition of a block of buildings dating to 1826 to make way for the CentrePointe tower he has yet to begin building.

Preservationists were outraged, but Webb claimed the old buildings were insignificant and too dilapidated to reuse.

Newberry said a comprehensive survey was needed as “a reference point from which our conversation can begin” about which downtown buildings are worth renovating and reusing.

“That will be a substantial step in the right direction so our discussions can be more productive than they have been in the past,” Newberry said last week. “I think it’s healthy for us to have a community discussion of those values now rather than in the heat of the battle.”

Newberry also ordered code enforcement officers to sweep downtown to make sure old buildings aren’t suffering “demolition by neglect” as many of those on the CentrePointe block had.

The mayor’s strategy makes sense. The survey, which will be posted for public comment on www.lexingtonky.gov beginning Monday, is a useful first step.

But it is at least the third first step Lexington has taken in the past three decades.

After an earlier downtown demolition controversy, then-Mayor Pam Miller commissioned a similar survey in 1993. Several of that survey’s “significant” buildings have since been demolished.

Most of the buildings on the CentrePointe block, which is now an empty mud hole, were rated “significant,” except for the 1826 building that housed Joe Rosenberg’s jewelry store, which was rated “outstanding.”

The 1994 survey recommended that the city prevent demolition of those buildings. It also recommended that the city “encourage property owners, through code enforcement, to provide continued maintenance for buildings in the area.”

The Kentucky Heritage Council has other downtown surveys, most done in 1979 and 1980 by architectural historian Walter Langsam. They describe in detail the architectural and historic merit of many of the now-demolished buildings on the CentrePointe block.

Do you see a pattern here? Many of the more than 50 people who came to a meeting last week to see the latest downtown survey did, too. They asked about next steps. Where do we go from here?

Lexington has done and continues to do a lot of good historic preservation, thanks to the Blue Grass Trust, other organizations and many dedicated individuals and businesses. Among them: Bank of the Bluegrass, Ben Kaufmann, Gray Construction, Thomas & King, Peter Armato, Holly Wiedemann.

And just west of downtown, visionary developers Barry McNees and Rob McGoodwin are working separately to redevelop industrial complexes built for two of Lexington’s former signature industries, bourbon and tobacco, into assets for the new economy.

But historic preservation has always been a struggle in Lexington, because too many people have the wrong idea about it. They see preservation as an economic drag instead of an economic engine.

Preservation is rarely about recreating the past to make a museum piece. Instead, it’s about mixing the best of the past and present to create interesting, useful buildings for the future that speak to Lexington’s unique heritage and culture.

It’s really not so much preservation as recycling.

Look carefully around Lexington and in other cities around the country and world and you will see fine old commercial buildings being given new life. And they’re usually a lot more special than the new, generic towers built by cost-conscious developers.

Downtown revitalization isn’t an accomplishment, it’s an ongoing process that requires vision, leadership and citizen engagement.

It’s not about creating laws for everything, because laws and process can do as much to prevent great development as bad development. The key is creating sensible, flexible laws that allow leaders, under the watchful eyes of citizens, to help a city achieve its potential.

During the next few weeks, as citizens comment on the latest downtown building survey, Urban County Council members should adopt the Downtown Master Plan and proposed new zoning laws. They, business leaders and interested citizens also should look at strategies other cities are using to protect their historic assets and recycle them for the future.

Creating a successful downtown Lexington isn’t a destination, it’s a journey. But we’ll never get very far if all we ever take are first steps.

This 1826 building, one of the first Greek Revival structures built in Lexington during the mid-1800s, was demolished for CentrePointe. Photo by Tom Eblen

The “AU” in AU Associates stands for “Adaptive Use.”

But if you remember the periodic table of elements from science class, Au also is the symbol for gold.

Holly Wiedemann has created gold for her Lexington development company — and golden opportunities for several Kentucky communities — through a complex alchemy of historic preservation, architectural innovation and creative finance.

AU Associates specializes in restoring once-beautiful old buildings by adapting them for new, economically sustainable uses. Most were once schools, rich in architecture and memories, and are now affordable apartments that put abandoned buildings to good use — and onto the tax rolls.

Wiedemann is working with First Presbyterian Church and Central Bank in downtown Lexington to restore a run-down Market Street apartment building from the 1800s into 10 attractive apartments that will rent for $300 to $600 a month. Old woodwork and fireplaces are being reused, architectural details restored.

“The proportions are comfortable to be in, and out each window you can see church steeples and gardens” of neighboring historic homes, she said.

That project is one of several now under way, Wiedemann said, representing $8.6 million in investment and providing 150 jobs.

“They have the right angle on the historic-preservation argument: It is first and foremost an urban-redevelopment argument,” Michael Speaks, dean of the University of Kentucky’s College of Design, which includes the architecture school, said of Wiedemann’s company.

“Her firm is one of the few that is taking historic properties and using creative financing to give them new life and make communities better,” Speaks said.

Wiedemann, 53, comes naturally to her love of history and old buildings.

A great-great grandfather, George Wiedemann, started Wiedemann brewery in Newport. A great-grandfather, J.D. Purcell, started Purcell Department Store, which was in a grand old building on Lexington’s Main Street that was demolished in 1978 to make way for the Radisson hotel. “Boy, that would be a great building to have now,” she said.

Wiedemann grew up on the family farm in Scott County called The Hollys, for which she was named. The farmhouse, built in 1789, gave her an appreciation for the beauty and durability of old buildings.

After earning a degree in landscape architecture and urban planning at the University of Georgia, she worked for a major developer in Tulsa, Okla. She realized she would need to learn more about real estate finance to do the kinds of projects she wanted to do.

That led her to Duke University in North Carolina, where she earned a master’s in business administration and met her husband, Bart van Dissel, then a doctoral student. They moved to Boston, where he taught at Harvard Business School and she worked for Winn Development, a pioneer in adaptive reuse of historic buildings.

“That, for me, was the Ph.D. level education” in historic tax credits and unconventional finance, she said. It also sparked her interest in building affordable housing.

Through consulting work, Wiedemann raised the money to start AU Associates after she and her husband moved to Lexington in 1992. The firm’s first major project was remodeling the old Midway School into 24 apartments for seniors.

The Irvine mayor’s wife saw the project and got Wiedemann to do a similar one in the Estill County town. Since then, AU Associates has done other school-to-apartment renovations, with more planned in Glasgow, Winchester, Beattyville and Buffalo in LaRue County.

“These old schools are often beautiful buildings that were built to last and are located in lovely residential areas,” Wiedemann said. “Many of the people who live there now taught or went to school there and have wonderful memories.”

The firm converted an ornate former YMCA built in 1913 in downtown Louisville into 58 market-priced apartments and St. Francis High School. And it is turning a former tuberculosis hospital in Ashland into 34 apartments for domestic abuse victims.

AU Associates’ projects often are complex because they use historic tax credits, partnerships and creative financial arrangements. “We cobble together multiple funding sources to make these projects work,” Wiedemann said. “That’s why a lot of people don’t do this work.”

But the projects work, and there’s a lot of demand for them.

“The growth potential is amazing,” said Johan Graham, who along with Martha Dryden makes up Wiedemann’s core staff. “We really have as much work as we can handle just from the business coming through the door.”

The firm’s offices are on Georgetown Street in a formerly derelict pre-1800 house that AU Associates restored with a contemporary addition. Behind it is the firm’s first start-from-scratch project — ARTEK lofts, which was developed in partnership with neighbors in the Western Suburb Historic District on a formerly blighted lot.

Wiedemann and her husband live at ARTEK, which has impressive views of the downtown skyline and the Henry Clay monument in Lexington Cemetery. Unfortunately, ARTEK came on the market during the recent downtown condo boom and right before the current economic bust. Wiedemann said about half of the 38 units, priced from the low $170,000s to the low $280,000s, remain unsold.

The project’s unique contemporary architecture by Christopher Fuller of K. Norman Berry & Associates in Louisville uses a lot of concrete, steel and brick. Like the historic structures Wiedemann’s firm usually works with, it is built to last.

“In 50 years, it will be qualifying for historic-preservation restoration grants,” Wiedemann said with a smile. “It’s not going anywhere.”

Click on each photo below to enlarge it.

Bjarke Ingels of Denmark, considered one of the world’s best young architects, gave a dazzling presentation at the Idea Festival.

In discussing project after project that his Copenhagen-based firm has done, he impressed the audience with not only his creativity and artistry, but with how he used architecture to solve each project’s “problems” and make it something special.

That isn’t easy, because many developers “are more interested in the bottom line than the skyline,” he said Friday.

“Functionalism liberated architecture from style” in the 20th century,” he said dryly. The result “was a lot of big boring boxes.”

Ingels works all over the world, and some of his most stunning projects are under way in China and the Middle East. But one of my favorites was the Mountain Dwellings apartment complex, which now dominates the view out Ingels’ own apartment window in Copenhagen.

The developer started out wanting to build two big boxes on the property: One for apartments, one for parking. Instead, Ingels’ and his co-workers created a stunning — and stunningly practical — solution to the developer’s needs that has become a design landmark. The interior parking garage is no less impressive than the living space.

The inspiration for some of Ingels’ ideas comes from the place-specific architecture of the past. There are reasons, he noted, that certain styles evolved in certain places hundreds and thousands of years before there were professional architects. Climate — and social climate — play important roles in a building’s design.  A glass tower might work fine for New York, but it makes no sense in an Arabian desert, he noted.

“We end up reinventing traditional forms and shapes, not as style, but as a new vernacular,” he said.

Ingels urged architects to become more pro-active in suggesting urban development, rather than waiting for politicians, developers and financiers to bring ideas forward.

Environmental sustainability is an important consideration in Ingels’ work. But, looking at it from the perspective of an Idea Festival, it was remarkable to see how he recycles and refines his ideas. An idea he pitched as a project in Sweden was rejected, but after much refinement, it turned out to be a perfect fit for a building for Shanghai.

It reinforced the notion that many Idea Festival many speakers stressed. They said ideas and creativity don’t come so much as flashes of genius, but from kernels of inspiration and a lot of hard work and persistence.

You can see more of Ingels’ work at his firm’s Web site.

There is no shortage of international  prizes honoring flashy, provocative, beautiful or breathtaking architecture and design.

The new $100,000 Curry Stone Design Prize, administered by the University of Kentucky’s College of Design, is different.

The first Curry Stone Design Prize was awarded Thursday at the Idea Festival in Louisville to a South African architecture firm that, working without pay, designed and is building 10 houses for poor people in Capetown. The houses are made of timbers of wood and steel and bags filled with sand. They cost less than $7,000 each and can be built by their owners.

Beautiful? Provocative?  Not in the world of architecture. But for a world where it is estimated that 1 billion people — about 15 percent of the population — live in shanties, projects like this have the ability to reshape the way much of humanity lives.

That was the idea when Clifford Curry and his wife, H. Delight Stone, of Oregon decided to create the prize as part of a $5.5 million gift to UK. Curry had been a successful architect, pioneering the design of housing for elderly people. Curry, a UK architecture graduate, wanted to honor breakthrough design ideas that improve the human spirit, increase awareness of the environment or responde to areas of human need.

Like the famous MacArthur “genius” grants, the Curry Stone Prize comes with no strings attached.

“The concept is they can do whatever they darn well please” with the money, Curry said. “These are motivated people. I want them to figure that out.”

MMA Architects principal Luyanda Mpahlwa, 49, was unable to get a U.S. visa to attend the ceremony because of his anti-Apartheid work in South Africa years ago. But in a telephone interview, Mpahlwa said he expects to use some of the money to continue this sort of work, as well to expand a scholarship program for architects he has started in South Africa.

“There is a lot of need for these projects,” he said. “I am starting to look at what other materials combinations and types we could use. We want to take part in a body of knowledge that contributes to local housing situations.”

MMA was chosen from among five finalists; the others attended the ceremony and received $10,000 cash awards. Thirty anonymous nominators around the world suggested candidates, and a panel of judges met in New York in July to choose four finalists and a winner.

David Mohney, a College of Design faculty member, former dean and secretary of the prize, said MMA was chosen because it is an example of using conventional architecture in an unconventional way to promote social good. But all of the finalists had amazing stories to tell.

Wes Janz, 55, an associate professor of architecture at Ball State University in Indiana, helps people in third-world slums build well-designed housing from scavenged materials. Marjetica Potrc, 55, an artist and architect from Slovenia, works in impoverished communities. One project she discussed was a toilet that doesn’t need water that has been used in shanty communities in Guatemala. Antonio Scarponi, 34, an architect based in Venice, Italy, uses architecture and multimedia arts to illustrate social and political lines that unite and divide people.

The most unconventional finalist was Shawn Frayne, 27, an inventor in Hawaii, who has invented the first non-turbine wind-powered generator. It is small and looks like a violin bow. It uses wind to create very cheap electricity that can replace batteries. It can be used to power lamps, run small refrigerators and charge cell phones.

“Harder problems make for better inventions,” said Frayne, who created the generator after visiting Haiti and thinking that poor people there needed cheaper and safer sources of light than kerosene lanterns. “The problems in emerging countries are no longer isolated, but are showing up everywhere in the world.”

Emiliano Gandolfi, an Italian architect who led a panel discussion of the finalists at the Idea Festival, said the Curry Stone Design Prize recognizes a new sensibility among architects and designers, especially young ones like him, that design is about more than creating beautiful things. It can be about improving the human experience at all levels.

“What we are discovering is a new sensibility,” he said.

Michael Speaks, dean of the UK College of Design, said he’s glad to see the university on the forefront of that movement.

“Many people understand design to be the engine of innovation,” he said. “This prize recognizes social innovation and not just commercial innovation.”

A South African architecture firm that has pioneered simple, affordable housing that poor Capetown families can largely build themselves has won the first $100,000 Curry Stone Design Prize.

The new prize, administered by the University of Kentucky’s College of Design, is intended to recognize breakthrough work being done around the world that uses design to accomplish humanitarian goals.

MMA Architects of Capetown is headed by Luyanda Mpahlwa, 49, and Mphethi Morojele, 45. It came up with a design for a house made of timber supports and sandbags that a family or community can construct for less than $7,000.  The firm is helping a Capetown neighborhood build 10 of the structures.

MMA Architects was one of five finalists for the award, and the only one not able to attend the announcement today at the Idea Festival in Louisville. Because of post-911 security, Mpahlwa was unable to get a U.S. visa because he had been imprisoned years ago when blacks were resisting white rule in South Africa.

The other finalists, who will receive $10,000 prizes, are Shawn Frayne, inventor of the world’s first non-turbine wind-powered generator; Wes Janz, architect and associate professor of architecture at Ball State University in Indiana; artist and architect Marjetica Potre; and Antonio Scarponi, an Italian architect and multimedia artist.  All have used design to help solve health and housing problems in poor, developing parts of the world.

Click here to view videos of each finalist’s work.

Clifford Curry, co-founder of the prize, said there are no restrictions on how the winners use the prize money.

“The concept is they can do whatever they darn well please,” he said. “These are motivated people. I want them to figure that out.”

The late Clay Lancaster, the Lexington-born architectural historian, is well known in Kentucky for his books about antebellum architecture in the state. During the middle years of the 20th Century, he mapped, surveyed and photographed the pre-Civil War structures that remained in Fayette County.

But he had another life and career that many Kentuckians aren’t aware of — in New York City. This piece in Sunday’s New York Times tells some of the story.

In its latest issue, the Southern literary and culture magazine Oxford American focuses on our homes. It’s not exactly the Southern Living view of things, which makes it all the more interesting. One of the best articles profiles 11 modern masterpiece homes in the South, as chosen by contemporary architects, including the Miller House in Lexington.

French architect José Oubrerie designed the house, completed in 1992, for Bob and Penny Miller. After Bob Miller’s death, the land was sold for development and the empty house was vandalized.

Michael Speaks, the new dean of the University of Kentucky’s College of Design, writes a short, perceptive essay about the boxy, concrete house, which many Lexingtonians have found difficult to appreciate.

“The story of the Miller House is emblematic of the struggle in Kentucky, and indeed throughout the South, between the soul of modernism — note how the Miller House is both a specific place and yet universal — and the rapacious logic of suburbanization, which produces the stamp of the universal on specific places,” he writes.

A few articles from the Oxford American’s special “Home Sweet Home” issue can be read on the magazine’s Web site, although you’ll have to buy the magazine ($4.95) to see the “Beyond Nostalgia” feature that includes the Miller House. It’s worth a look.