Tell your spouse. Email your friends. Mark your calendar!
Join NCModernist friends, architects, and house lovers from across the Triangle on Thursday night for our holiday party at The Durham Hotel, downtown Durham’s Modernist landmark.
Come for the cocktails. Stay for the door prizes, the amazing architecture, and if you wish, a little dancing. Signature cocktails, hors d’oeuvres, and live music by Peter Lamb and the Wolves, in a hotel beautifully dressed for the holidays.
Raise a glass to 20 years of documenting, preserving, and promoting Modernist houses, inside a 1968 savings and loan that Durham decided was too good to lose.
Since 2007
20 Years of Modernist Documentation and Preservation
NCModernist started in 2007 as a local website listing about 60 Triangle houses, but it grew because a community formed around it. Homeowners sent in photos and histories. Architects’ children shared drawings and stories. Neighbors identified the “strange house” down the street. Fans who had never thought of themselves as preservationists began showing up for home tours, lectures and open houses. That grassroots energy carried the project from Raleigh, Durham and Chapel Hill to statewide in 2013.
The organization argued that the biggest threat to modernist houses was not developers but vacancy. A house nobody wanted would sit empty, decay and eventually be torn down. By building a large audience of admirers and prospective buyers, NCModernist helped make sure these homes found people who would care for them. Over 20 local, state, and national awards credited that advocacy with saving dozens of threatened homes from demolition.
Over two decades, the group has given architecture fans so many ways to take part: tours, the Matsumoto Prize for residential design, US Modernist Radio podcast, and a huge digital library of architecture magazines. Together, these turned scattered enthusiasts into a lasting statewide network of connected advocates for livable modern design, past and present.
