A highly unusual panel discussion was held in New York last winter to analyze the Museum of Modern Art’s decision to raze the former home of the critically revered American Folk Art Museum building, designed by Tod Williams and Billie Tsien, to make way for a MoMA expansion. At the much buzzed-about meeting, organized by the Architectural League of New York, the Municipal Art Society, and the local chapter of the American Institute of Architects, MoMA director Glenn Lowry made his position clear. “Architecture is different from painting and sculpture,” he reportedly told the captivated audience. “We don’t collect buildings and we don’t collect them for a reason.”

The Bachman Wilson House, designed by Frank Lloyd Wright and built in 1954 in Millstone, New Jersey.
The Bachman Wilson House, designed by Frank Lloyd Wright and built in 1954 in Millstone, New Jersey.

….

As more art collectors set their sights on major works of 20th-century architecture, auctioneers have followed suit. Important homes designed by prestige architects are now occasionally sold by auction houses better known for their fine art and high-design sales, such as Sotheby’s, Christie’s, and Wright of Chicago and New York. These architectural lots are strikingly different from the foreclosed houses put up for auction at bargain prices, notes Richard Wright, founder and president of Wright.

“I think that auction houses, my own included, are very good at celebrating the historical qualities and the historical value of these properties and helping to generate, in some cases, international interest for the bidding,” says Wright. Although the higher fees associated with auctions mean this route is viable only for the most significant properties, “elevating them into the art market,” explains Wright, sends a signal “that there are signature works of architecture that should trade beyond their local value.” Moreover, the higher profile of an auction sale draws a wider audience—and preservation-minded buyers. Wright’s own experience selling Pierre Koenig’s Case Study House #21, one of the architect’s famed Minimalist steel-and-glass boxes perfectly perched in the hills overlooking the Los Angeles city vista, offers a case in point. Preserved by the owner and revered in the public eye, the home and all its contents sold to a South Korean art collector in December 2008 for $3,185,600, the second-highest price ever achieved for a work of modernist architecture at auction.