Abrams House

Betty and Irving Abrams commissioned Denise Scott Brown and Robert Venturi to build their dream retirement home on Woodland Road in the affluent Pittsburgh neighbourhood Squirrel Hill in 1979, after acquiring the back end of a subdivided parcel of land. As a younger woman, Betty Abrams had visited another Squirrel Hill house, Walter Gropius and Marcel Breuer’s Frank House (1942) and been inspired to one day build her own modern home with open floor plan. Completed in 1982, the resulting house is a highly personal and eccentric postmodern expression of the Abrams’ desires and needs.

Money acquired from the Abrams’ land sale helped Frank A. Giovannitti finance the building of a Richard Meier-designed house on the remaining parcel of land in 1983. Meier and Venturi are/were leading post-modern architects, which lends a certain compatibility to the two houses in terms of style and status. The Abrams house on its own does of course have unique design features, in no small part to because of the collaborative input of Betty Abrams. However, what is truly interesting is the larger surrounding situation on Woodland Road which includes not only the Meier structure, but also the Frank House and an A. James Speyer-designed house from 1953. Essentially there is a modern pair of houses on one end and as a counterpoint, a post-modern pair on the other. That Robert Venturi was an outspoken critic of Modernism adds a richness to the history of the place as a whole. The loss of any of the four structures would alter that narrative.