It is a twin obituary for a person and his home.
George Washington Varn II (1920-2021) was a solvent scion. “My grandfather and my nice uncle have been turpentine folks,” he advised Timber Processing journal, in a 2019 profile. His household owned pine timberland in southeast Georgia, from which they initially extracted resin to make turpentine. Varn graduated from Harvard, in 1942, and served in Naval intelligence through the Second World Battle. He then joined the household enterprise. In 1950, he and his spouse, Betty, moved to Jacksonville, Florida. Varn’s father gave them a plot of land in one of many toniest neighborhoods on the town, and some years later they employed a younger architect named Taylor Hardwick to design a home for them.
Hardwick, who grew up in Philadelphia, had moved to Jacksonville in 1949, and opened his personal apply there in 1952. Alongside along with his associate, W. Mayberry Lee, he started designing homes, colleges, and industrial buildings all through town. Hardwick was just a few years out of structure faculty and full of recent concepts. His designs have been progressive: his rooflines pitched and slanted; his buildings unfolded in segments; he used supplies akin to concrete and aluminum with out making an attempt to disguise them. He grew to become greatest identified for designing the butterfly-roofed, orange-and-white Skinners’ Dairy “milk house” stores, which grew to become a beloved and ubiquitous characteristic of the Jacksonville panorama. The Varn Home fee offered a specific problem. Varn made his fortune chopping down bushes—as soon as the marketplace for turpentine dried up, he reinvented the household enterprise as a timber firm—however he didn’t wish to clear any of the cedars and stay oaks on the property. The home needed to be slotted onto the lot with out disturbing them.
The home that Hardwick devised for the household was a collection of staggered concrete pavilions with partitions of glass, slate flooring, and three separate rooflines that gave it the looks of movement, nearly like ocean breakers shifting towards shore. Inside, there was shiny teak cabinetry, built-in planters, sliding glass doorways, angular clerestory home windows, and a large view of the St. Johns River. In distinction to the chunky, earthbound heaviness of the Tudor-revival properties round it, the Varn Home appeared extra like a floating assemblage of planes and features, flooded with gentle Florida gentle. The design was acclaimed, and Merrill Varn, one among George and Betty’s three kids, not too long ago advised Tim Gilmore, who writes a weblog about Jacksonville, jaxpsychogeo.com, that it was “among the finest locations to develop up in the entire world.”
The household lived in the home for greater than sixty years. As soon as the kids have been grown, George and Betty did quite a lot of travelling. Their favourite locations have been the Taj Mahal, which was accomplished in 1653 and has been preserved because the best instance of Mughal structure on earth; the restored ruins of Palenque, in southern Mexico, which have been accomplished by 799 A.D.; and the Temple of Poseidon at Sounion, in Greece, which dates to 440 B.C. You may conclude that architectural preservation was one among their passions. You may also conclude that Varn would have been of the thoughts to make it possible for the home he commissioned can be equally preserved. However his final needs inform one other story: he bequeathed the home to his three kids, with the specific request that they tear it down after his demise. Demolition started final month and is now full.
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In accordance with Peter Brown, a trusts-and-estates lawyer at Nutter McClennen & Fish L.L.P., legal guidelines pertaining to wills range from state to state, however “the overarching coverage in most states can be to honor the desires of the testator. Accordingly, a testator can impose circumstances on a bequest that the recipient may discover obnoxious and even outrageous—and people restrictions can be enforceable.” One thing said as “final needs” in a handwritten be aware (which was the case right here) may be much less sturdy, however Merrill Varn says that she and her siblings had no intention to not honor it.
Tearing down buildings occurs on a regular basis, whatever the pedigree of the construction, normally as a result of somebody desires to redevelop the land beneath them. Older trendy buildings have been significantly susceptible. Seventy-nine Frank Lloyd Wright constructions have been demolished or destroyed, together with Tokyo’s famed Imperial Hotel. Richard Neutra’s Maslon House, in Rancho Mirage, California, thought of one among his most necessary homes, was torn down by new homeowners in 2002. Bertrand Goldberg’s Prentice Women’s Hospital and Maternity Center, in Chicago, which opened in 1975 and was lauded by the eminent architect Frank Gehry, amongst others, was torn down in 2013; the land was used for a brand new medical-research middle. This previous January, Marcel Breuer’s well-known Geller House 1, on Lengthy Island, was destroyed and changed with a tennis courtroom. Hardwick’s most celebrated constructing in Jacksonville, the Haydon Burns Library, was slated for demolition some years in the past, however his fans rallied (“Save the Previous Library” bumper stickers have been plastered round city), and the constructing was spared, restored, and repurposed as a middle for nonprofit organizations.
Why would Varn need his cherished home to die with him? Was it some want to exert management over his property even from the grave? Or was it the final word enforcement of privateness? “They felt that it was a really private area,” Merrill Varn advised me, about her dad and mom. “They didn’t need anybody aside from household to ever stay in it. Sure, there was a component of prideful bravado, that nobody else ought to have it. However for them, it was a personal area.” Not one of the three kids thought of taking up the home, she famous, as a result of its multipart pitched roof leaked “like a sieve” and would have been exorbitant to restore. Varn is conscious that the demolition has distressed architectural preservationists. “It’s difficult,” she mentioned. “If one thing is non-public, is it public? This was a personal residence, a private area. They considered it as a house, not a bit of public artwork.” The home is gone, however there stays a slight hope that it may rise once more. Merrill Varn and her siblings have donated Hardwick’s drawings for the home to the Jacksonville Historic Society. Anybody can research the plans and use them for inspiration. I requested her if she had been on web site for the home’s demolition. “None of us have been,” she mentioned, sounding solemn. “No manner.”
