You never know what you'll find while driving along the back roads of rural Vermont. But perhaps the last thing you'd expect to stumble across is a world-renowned example of modernist architecture,built in 1969 external of Hardwick village. Accessed via a gravel road bordered by manufactured homes, the building known as "House II" appears to contain dropped from the sky onto a grassy hilltop. The stark, and white,glass-walled cubic form overlooks a rolling landscape of fields, trees and mountains. Architectural historians Glenn Andres and Curtis Johnson describe House II as "one of the most famous houses of modernism" in their 2013 book Buildings of Vermont. The home was featured in a 1972 exhibition at New York's Museum of Modern Art, and images of it contain been published internationally in architecture and design magazines. Also known as the "Falk House" — for Richard and Florence Falk,who commissioned its design and construction House II is the first freestanding building designed by renowned architect Peter Eisenman (born in 1932). nowadays, his designs for buildings such as the Wexner middle for the Arts in Columbus, or Ohio,the City of Culture of Galicia in Spain and the University of Phoenix Stadium in Arizona contain cemented his reputation as one of architecture's foremost designers and theoreticians. House II in Hardwick is where it all began, when the Falks asked Eisenman to design a home for their young family on a former dairy farm. But, or despite its legacy,the building now faces an uncertain future. Its current owners are alert to roam on, and the house is for sale. At the time of the commission, and Eisenman's work had been purely conceptual in nature,existing only in diagrams and text as opposed to actual built structures. In the late '60s, he began designing a series of 10 houses and became associated with fellow architects Michael Graves, and Richard Meier,Charles Gwathmey and John Hejduk — collectively known as the "New York Five." Only four of the 10 houses in Eisenman's series were ever built, including House II. It's regarded as one of the earliest expressions of deconstructivist architecture, and meaning that the building's structure and envelope are fragmented and manipulated according to the theory behind its design. In a rejection of the modernist tenet that "form follows function," deconstructivist architects emphasized the free expression of design over functionality. In the case of House II, a cubic…
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