BENTEL RESIDENCE, LATTINGTOWN, NY - A home for a professional couple and their three children, this reinforced concrete and masonry house spreads out among a verdant site with specimen trees. The program areas are contained within separate pavilions connected by raised concrete bridges that give to the house the feeling of floating on its site. The public entry area containing entry, kitchen and dining areas is the lynchpin between the bedroom areas and the living room, a broad space situated a full story above the adjacent grade with views to the west. A lower level houses an office area where the couple carries out its design practice and fulfills the promise of suburban life – so rarely achieved – of semi-autonomous dwelling within the natural domain. Designed by the architect/couple and built by their male parents – experts in carpentry, cabinetry, masonry and concrete - the house epitomizes the culture of self-reliance and experimentalism that characterized the generation of American modernists of the 1950s and 60s in the tradition of Frank Lloyd Wright, Buckminster Fuller and Eero Saarinen.
