Connecticut Trust for Historic Preservation Wants To Stop The Destruction of the Paul Rudolph House in Westport

[Read 'Modern,' our new modern house blog, here.]

The Connecticut Trust for Historic Preservation is going to court today to get an injunction preventing a developer from demolishing the Paul Rudolph House in Westport. Here’s a report from WestportNow.

The new “owners” (a developer named David Waldman and his wife) have already done a fair amount of damage. WestportNow says “an outside wall has been knocked down,” and it’s been reported that the roof and windows have been destroyed as well.

I put the word “owners” in quotation marks because one of the people involved in preservation efforts told me yesterday that although the Waldmans have a contract to buy, they haven’t closed on the property yet. He also told me that the sellers, a family named Micheel who hired Rudolph to design the house for them, was shocked when they learned of the damage. I’m amazed that someone would begin work on a property before the closing, mainly because until you close, you don’t own the property. But maybe the contract of sale allowed them to start ahead of time.

[For more on the issue, see The Destruction of Paul Rudolph's Micheels House in the right hand column.]