Tremaine Houses: One Family’s Patronage of Domestic Architecture in Midcentury America

This volume analyzes the extraordinary patronage of modern architecture that the Tremaine family sustained for nearly four decades in the mid-twentieth century.

From the late 1930s to the early 1970s, two brothers, Burton G. Tremaine and Warren D. Tremaine, and their respective wives, Emily Hall Tremaine and Katharine Williams Tremaine, commissioned approximately thirty architecture and design projects. Richard Neutra and Oscar Niemeyer designed the best-known Tremaine houses; Philip Johnson and Frank Lloyd Wright also created designs and buildings for the family that achieved iconic status in the modern movement.

Focusing on the Tremaines’ houses and other projects, such as a visitor center at the meteor crater in Arizona, this volume explores the Tremaines’ architectural patronage in terms of the family’s motivations and values, exposing patterns in what may appear as an eclectic collection of modern architecture. Architectural historian Volker M. Welter argues that the Tremaines’ patronage was not driven by any single factor; rather, it stemmed from a network of motives comprising the clients’ practical requirements, their private and public lives, and their ideas about architecture and art.