Back to the Future With North Carolina’s Modernist Design Advocates

Once upon a time, America fell in love with a house. Built by Argentine architect Eduardo Fernando Catalano in 1954, it had the fundamentals of many other homes across the country: a foundation, floor, walls. What set it apart was its roof, a hulking hyperbolic paraboloid that swooped across the house’s 1,700-square-foot frame.  

Around Raleigh, people called it the Potato Chip House.

Located off Ridge Road, the structure was crowned “House of the Decade” by House and Home magazine in 1956, earning a glamorous, Hollywood-like spread. The usually reticent Frank Lloyd Wright praised the design as “imaginatively and skillfully treated.” The roof, which had more than twice the square footage of the actual house, was a dramatic beacon of mid-century optimism, poised amid suburban pines as if ready to take flight.   

But by the time the house was demolished in 2001, Catalano’s crown jewel had passed between hands for decades, eventually succumbing to squatters, rot, and age. 

“Even a good dog has to die,” Betty Howard, the wife of famed local engineer T.C. Howard, remarked at the time.  

Or maybe they don’t. Just ask George Smart.  

Smart, 64, a Raleigh native and son of an architect, has become North Carolina’s biggest ambassador for structures like the Potato Chip House. He lives in a modernist house. He hosts a weekly podcast on the topic and drives a red Mini Cooper with a license plate that spells out the word. And as the CEO and founder of the nonprofits NCModernist and USModernist, he’s made preservation and appreciation of this design trend his life’s mission. 

The obsession began two decades ago when Smart, a management consultant, was preparing to build his own home in Durham. While researching architecture one night, he stumbled on photos of the Catalano house. He was intrigued but continued scrolling, then went to bed.  

“At one in the morning, I wake up and go, ‘I’ve been at this house. My dad took me there when I was 6,’” Smart said. “All that repressed architecture memory [came] back.”

The fate of Catalano’s home proved a preservation catalyst. Smart got up, took out a legal pad, and began making a list of similar houses. 

“My dad had passed away by then, [but] I started visiting some of his 80-year-old buddies. They said, ‘If you just come pick me up, I’ll show you where they all are.’” He spent the next few months driving them around with a camera and taking notes. “Eventually, I get to, like, 50 or 60, and then somebody says, ‘Well, you know, you should get one of those free websites.’”  

Smart ended up making two websites: NCModernist in 2007, followed by USModernist in 2015. On these websites, aided by a staff of four and a group of volunteers, Smart has built what he says is the largest open digital archive of mid-century modernist homes in the world. With a weekly newsletter mailing list of 92,000, it’s fair to say that he’s not alone in his appreciation for a style often associated with Mad Men, estate sales, and the opulent lairs of action-movie villains.  

For most modernist devotees, though, appreciation extends beyond aesthetics to the principles behind it: Attention to the natural world, a refusal to rely on the past, vernacular fidelity to place and material, and an emphasis on fluid common areas that bring people together. In North Carolina, the height of modernism’s popularity, mid-century, represents a particularly pioneering, progressive chapter—one mostly, but not entirely, bygone. 

Here, one of NCModernist’s taglines may be most instructive: “You can’t save something if you don’t know where it is or why it’s important.”

A Historical Confluence

When Catalano arrived in Raleigh for his new job at North Carolina State University’s School of Design in 1951, he was initially taken aback.   

“I was shocked when I saw the shack [at] the railroad station, especially after coming from England with their beautiful structures of steel and glass,” Catalano recounted in the book School of Design. No one could fault him for finding it surprising that this, of all places, had become a center of gravity for postwar design visionaries. 

Part of the reason, alongside a legacy of nimble Southern craft and the state’s academic prowess, was historical confluence. In the early 1930s, as the Nazi Party gained power, it began to target German cultural institutions—including Bauhaus, the famed neosocialist school where students were taught to design for a better world and embody the adage “form follows function.” In 1933, the school shuttered under pressure from the regime. Scholars and artists fled.  

Several key figures ended up at Black Mountain College, a new, experimental arts school outside of Asheville, founded on the same forward-thinking principles. The school closed in 1957, but not before churning out a who’s who of mid-century artists, like choreographer Merce Cunningham, writer Robert Creeley, musician John Cage, and sculptor Ruth Asawa. Many of them filtered out across the state, shaping how we think, teach, and create to this day.  

In 1948, architect Henry Kamphoefner became dean of N.C. State’s newly formed School of Design, a merger of its architectural engineering and landscape architecture programs. 

Kamphoefner, a devout modernist, arrived from the University of Oklahoma a passionate, polarizing figure who quickly upended the school’s faculty and curriculum. Two years into the job, he brought in Frank Lloyd Wright, then in his 80s, to deliver a lecture. A flyer for the event touts Wright as a pioneer in organic design who championed “man’s divine potential.” The lecture reportedly drew 5,000—one of the largest audiences that Wright ever addressed (Raleigh’s population at the time, for comparison, was around 65,000). A roster of international design stars would continue to have a presence in the program.

The school’s prominence was on an upward trajectory. In 1952, Polish architect Matthew Nowicki, a faculty member, designed the J.S. Dorton Arena at the State Fairgrounds. The building boasted the world’s first cable-supported roof system, transforming something as ineffably North Carolina as a livestock pavilion into a modernist marvel.  

Frank Harmon, a Greensboro-born architect who studied at the school during that period, remembers it as an era of advancement for both the region and the principle of socially responsive design.  

“In the 1950s, the North Carolina Museum of Art was founded—the first state-supported art museum in the country,” said Harmon. “The Research Triangle Park was founded, the university system was consolidated under William Friday, and things like the J.S. Dorton Arena were designed by Matthew. It was a very progressive time.”  

Even Catalano was won over by the Southern spirit, writing of his students (with a whiff of paternalism): “The majority were from North Carolina, state of farms, of healthy life, of purity of soul. No one had the intellectual pretense of people from large cities, only ears to listen and willing hearts and hands to do hard work.”  

Faculty, meanwhile, were encouraged to maintain their architecture practices, boosting the state’s housing stock. Smart estimates that there are 800 modernist homes in the Triangle today, and as many as 5,000 across the state—the largest concentration outside of California and Florida. Because modernist design is meant to reflect regional nuance, and because North Carolina’s geography itself is so dynamic, a dive into the NCModernist archives highlights a range of designs. 

“More traditional classical architecture is the same, no matter where you build it,” Harmon said. “One of the principles of modern architecture was an appreciation of where it is—the landscape, the type of materials that are in that region.” 

If modernist architecture enjoyed a heyday, it also experienced a fall. Quality decreased as the style struggled to scale mass postwar housing needs, and as subsequent decades saw increasing social turmoil, optimism faded. When the Pruitt-Igoe public housing complex in St. Louis was demolished in 1972, it was widely considered the symbolic end of modernism. Plenty who felt the style was cold and impersonal were happy to see it go.  

Headwinds were shifting in North Carolina, too. The state took a conservative turn with the gubernatorial elections of James E. Holshouser Jr. in 1972 and the U.S. Senate election of Jesse Helms in 1973. Kamphoefner himself retired as dean that year, though he continued teaching throughout the decade. He didn’t love the direction things had gone: The NCModernist website quotes him griping about contemporary design shortly before his death, “Form follows money.” 

Postmodernism was in full swing, and the future had turned out to look a bit different than movement founders had envisioned. 

“You know,” Smart said, standing in his South Durham kitchen with a cup of coffee, “Star Trek is the world we want, and Star Wars is the world we have.”  

A Modernist Rebirth 

In late December 2025, Melinda and Andrew Knowles opened the doors of their new Raleigh house for a tour. More than 400 people showed up. 

The home, designed by George Matsumoto and built in 1954, came into the Knowles’ lives as an 11th-hour preservation act after they learned it had been sold for $1.8 million and slated for demolition. The Knowleses were fans of the distinctive split-level, located on a nearly 1-acre lot near North Hills, a coveted neighborhood. 

“We saw the neighborhood, in the 20 years that we’ve lived here, go from this eclectic collection of interesting houses interspersed with more traditional houses to ‘Oh, now they’ve torn down another one and put up a giant mansion,’” Melinda Knowles said in a soft twang.  

The couple contacted the buyers, who agreed to deed the structure over for free, though the cost of moving and restoring the home quickly added up. With help from the city, which contributed $275,000 from its Preservation Loan Fund, they began to cart the house 7 miles down the road, chunk by chunk.  With the colorful jewelbox-like structure now restored, the Knowleses plan to rent the home out as an Airbnb. 

“I do think it’s something North Carolina should be really proud of,” Melinda Knowles continued. “I’ve been in the South my whole life. People think of it being conservative and traditional, so to have this movement in Raleigh, North Carolina, seems unexpected.” 

Hosted by NCModernist as a fundraiser, the ticketed tour was typical of the events the organization puts on. USModernist itself has, over the last two decades, won 20 preservation awards and documented more than 25,700 houses. It regularly alerts followers to houses that are endangered or up for sale; those properties run a wide gamut from several hundred thousand to the millions. Smart also hosts regional house tours, a monthly movie night, and cocktail hours. Such social enthusiasm speaks to his affable charisma.  

“George has been huge,” said Harmon. “He’s brought attention to the fact that North Carolina, second only to Los Angeles or possibly Chicago, was a center of modern design in the 1950s and ’60s.”  

Durham architect Ellen Cassilly echoed the praise.  

“George is a force of nature. He’s a jovial, likable guy, and people like to be around him,” said Cassilly. “He has created a wonderful community.”   

Modernist architecture might not get the Hollywood treatment that Catalano’s home did 70 years ago, but Smart’s archival work proves there’s still plenty around the state to celebrate. NCModernist also advocates for contemporary designs, dodging an irony inherent to modernist preservation—that a design style conceived as a rejection of nostalgia is now the object of nostalgia.

To that point, the 2020 book Triangle Modern Architecture, which includes an epilogue by Smart, indexes just as many contemporary designs as it does those of the past, highlighting spaces for the people, like the Raleigh Convention Center and the Durham County Main Library. Smart’s own modernist home, after all, was built in 2010. And he points to Cassilhaus, the Chapel Hill home designed by Cassilly and her husband, Frank Konhaus, in 2008, as a regional lodestar. 

“This house is what you call the realization of a vision, because Ellen and Frank see themselves as curators,” Smart said. “So they built a house. It’s also a museum.” 

Built seven years after Catalano’s home was demolished, Cassilhaus’s elegant trapezoidal structure seems to almost hang off the Duke Forest hillside. Its clean lines and interplay between inside and outside are classic modernist features, but as a hybrid home and community arts space, its most definitive quality is that its form truly does follow function. It’s the kind of house people fall in love with.   

Several times a year, Cassily and Konhaus welcome visitors for an open house; recent exhibitions include one on African American quilting traditions, another on Malian artist Malick Sidibé. Guests take in lectures and mingle as the family cats cavort around the space. Modernist architecture may not have always succeeded at its big-swing ideals, but this home is a testament to what those ideals can look and feel like.  

“I think people are interested in modern houses,” said Harmon, “because they see it as a better way to live.”

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