July 24, 2008 Issue                                       

©2007 The Chestnut Hill Local

Joel Levinson’s Arbor House part of architecture tour
by Pete Mazzaccaro

Joel Levinson designed the Arbor House , which is now part of an architecture tour of local work inspired by or in reaction to the work and teachings of Louis I. Kahn.

A local architecture tour for the Society of Architectural Historians that includes the work of renowned architects Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, Louis I. Kahn, Frank Furness and George Howe, will feature a home by local architect Joel Levinson.

Levinson, whose firm, Joel Levinson Associates, is located on W. Highland Avenue in Chestnut Hill said he is honored to be part of the tour, which will bring architecture historians to the area from around the country. The tour’s focus is the legacy of Kahn.

“Obviously, it’s quite an honor,” Levinson said. “It’s interesting how recognition comes to you. I wasn’t looking for it, but this house [the Arbor House] has resulted in a succession of honors.”

Levinson, a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania’s Design School, where Kahn taught, never was part of Kahn’s “Master Studio,” but the architect says he continues to be inspired by Kahn’s work and his teachings.

Levinson’s Arbor House was designed in 1969 for Mae and Herbert Kurtz who hired the architect to plan a home for a one-acre site in Latham Park, a gated community of large estate-like homes in Elkins Park, Cheltenham Township.

The home takes it’s name from the series of arbors that encircle the modern structure. The home was one of the first Levinson designed and the first modern home. Levinson said he had designed a few houses with “rustic materials” but that the Kurtz’s clearly wanted a modern home.

The idea for the trellises, or arbors, arose from the planned home’s small size and location on a piece of low, flat land between several large, mansion-like homes.

Joel Levinson

“The things going through my mind at the time were Quaker meeting houses, Japanese architecture and the work of Alvar Aalto (a Finnish architect known as the father of Scandinavian modernism),” Levinson said. “The project evolved as its own project and its own design … I’ve never designed anything to be au currant.”

The house won a National Design award from the Western Wood Products Association and the American Wood Council. It has been published in several national and international journals and was included in a 1983 national traveling exhibition called “Innovation and Tradition in American Architecture,” organized by the Buell Center for American Architecture at Columbia university.

In addition, the house appears in the 1977 Guide to Twentieth Century Contemporary Architecture and in the 1998 A View of Contemporary World Architects.