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Confidently
Confidently

Deferential
Deferential

Improving on the Work

of a Modern Master

by G. Martin Moeller, Jr., Assoc. AIA

The renovated Gibson Island house, with front entrance at middle right.

Gibson Island is a private community just off the western shore of Corporation. Occupying a wooded, inland lot at the island’s highest
the Chesapeake Bay, between Annapolis and Baltimore. Initially point, it was designed by the late German-American architect Ulrich
developed in the 1920s by Baltimore judge and businessman Stuart Franzen. Franzen, who worked for I.M. Pei before establishing his
Symington as a summer playground for the well-heeled, the own firm, was best known for his Alley Theatre in Houston, a
enclave soon earned a reputation as “the Newport of the South.” blocky concrete structure completed in 1968, and other brawny
Olmsted Brothers, the prominent landscape architecture firm run commercial and institutional buildings. The Gibson Island house
by Frederick Law Olmsted’s sons, devised the original layout of is one of several comparatively warm and even delicate residential
streets and lots, and the island’s earliest houses included several projects that belie Franzen’s reputation as a Brutalist.
designed by some of the foremost American residential architects The house is conceptually quite simple. It is defined by a thin,
of the era. flat roof supported by just eight columns made of purposefully
Houses built on the island over the ensuing decades generally weathering steel (provided by the original client’s own company,
hewed to the traditional styles of their predecessors. One exception of course). Thanks to this robust frame, the house is free of load-
is a house built in 1962 for an executive with the Bethlehem Steel bearing exterior or interior walls. Franzen exploited that opportunity

28 CONFIDENTLY DEFERENTIAL