Mike and Nina Marco talk with “Mr. Modernism” George Smart HAIA of US Modernist Radio about their Paul Rudolph designed preservation project in Delray Beach, Florida. The interview gives a detailed account of the challenging journey the Marcos have experienced with this unique property.

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US Modernist Interview with George Smart: Mike and Nina Marco live in Delray Beach, Florida. They work on residential projects in South Florida and the Bahamas. In 2018, they were recognized by AIA Palm Beach with a Design and Honor Award for preserving and rehabilitating historic structures in Delray Beach. They bought the Paul Rudolph-designed Biggs House and set about to bring it back to its original glory. They filed the forms, got the approvals, started the work, and then things went awry. Here’s George talking about that with Mike and Nina Marco.

GS:  Hi, Mike. Welcome to the show.

MM:  Good, George. Thanks for having me.

GS:  You and your wife, Nina, have been working in development for quite some time, and understand you won an award from AIA Palm Beach at one point.

MM:  We did win an award back in 2018 and ironically it was for another historic house that we totally reconstructed. It was what you’d call a Florida vernacular wood frame house built in the 1930s that we basically restored all the original design, and it ended up being a beautiful project. We got an award for it and like I said ironically because the same things we did on that house as far as replacing glass, siding, roof, some of the stud walls. And we got an award for it on the current project we’re doing, which is the reconstruction of a Paul Rudolph house. Doing the exact same steps, they issued a stop construction order because they didn’t understand how it applied to the Paul Rudolph house.

GS:  Well, let’s step through that. Let’s start with, when was it that which is the property there?

MM:  Well, the property, I think, as you know, was designed by Paul Rudolph back in 1955, was built in 1955, ’56, was a classic example of his tropical modernism style that he really was at the forefront of in the 1950s. So, it’s a modern house, a true modern house, not a fake modern house, like you see a lot of the architects designed nowadays. It was designated historic by the city of Delray Beach in 2005, and we bought it in 2018 at the point where no one really had lived in the house for a number of years, so it was kind of a dilapidated condition back in 2018.

GS:  And what was the next step? I assume there were some procedures or commissions or forms or something you had to go through.

MM:  Right. In 2018, we bought the house, the procedure in Delray Beaches, when it’s locally designated historic, you go to the City of Delray Beach Historic Preservation Board, you give them an application, which is called a certificate of appropriateness, which details what you’re going to do with the house. They review it, it’s presented at a meeting of a board, a seven-member board, which happened in May 2019, about a year after we bought the house, our plans were approved. When the Historic Preservation Board approves your plans, then you take those plans to the local building department, the local building department reviews it, sends it back to the historic department to make sure what you’re submitting for a building department matches what Historic Preservation Board approved. Went through the whole procedure. they issued a building permit to us and approved our building permit in early 2020.

GS:  And so at that point, what happened? Did you start tearing away the additions on the house?

MM:  Well, the additions, the non-historic additions, which were made back in 1980 and in 2007, we had already got a demolition permit to remove those ’cause they weren’t part of the historic house.

MM:  So they were gone already. They were gone. So what we’re left with is basically the remnants of the original house, which is a steel supported steel structure, basically an elevated box on this steel structure. But like I said, it was in dilapidated, very poor condition. So our plans called for putting an all new impact glass, replacing the louvers that were on top of the glass. There were some rotten a very small amount of rotten siding and replacing the roof. And those plans were approved. And we took them to the building department. We got a building permit. We started the work in March, 2020.

GS:  And so at this point, everything’s cool with the city. You’re proceeding as planned, no problem.

MM:  Or so we thought at the time. So the first thing that happened is, again, when you go into these historic houses, I’m sure you know there’s a lot of things.

GS:  You always find something. Yeah. You don’t know what you don’t know.

MM:  So almost immediately, within a matter of days, again, in the building permit, you know, we’re we’re raring to go and we start we start clearing away debris from the base of the house. And we find that the steel columns, which are sitting on pilings, the pile cap plates and the base, the steel columns are completely corroded to the point where our structural engineer said you can’t build with those columns in that condition you have to cut out the corroded steel you have to weld back in replacement steel before you proceed. So this is March 2020. It’s right when the pandemic hit you know. Who knows, we don’t even know when what’s going to happen in the world tomorrow, the next day, but we call in a crew that to lift and support the house So we can cut out the steel at the base of the columns, replace it with new steel, so we can go to the next step in our construction.

GS:  And how many columns are we talking about here that hold the house up?

MM:  There’s basically four columns. So if you can imagine four columns sticking up of the house and then the actual elevated structures on top of those four columns, basic steel column and steel beam structure. There’s no other structure to the house. So when we lift up the house and we want to reset the elevation of the house to the exact same point where it was, we see that the elevation of the house is not where we thought. We thought the elevation of the house was six feet and elevation is very important Florida. This is a coastal area, approximately one block from the beach, a matter of a few feet from the Intracoastal or right between the ocean and the Intracoastal. It’s very susceptible to coastal flooding, rising sea levels, and all that. So elevation’s very important, but we wanted to keep the house at the existing, what we thought was the existing six feet. We didn’t want to have to start cutting out steel and lifting the house, but it turns out we did have to cut the steel. So the next step is we find out the house is not at six feet, it’s actually a five and a half feet. Five and a half feet is really a dangerously low elevation in that part of coastal Florida. It’s below the FEMA base flood elevation, which is six feet. It’s below the building code. The building code is six feet plus a foot, which is seven feet. So we said, okay, we can’t leave the house at five and a half feet. Let’s go to the code for new construction, which is seven feet.

GS:  Yeah.

MM:  So basically we cut out all the damage corroded steel at the base of the column. we weld in new steel, that’s a foot and a half higher, and we raise the house to seven feet. We had to make this decision at real time, literally while the house is up in the air. If we don’t make that decision right then and there, we don’t know when these workers are gonna come back. If they’re gonna come back, we don’t know what’s gonna happen at that point. So we make a decision at real time, and we figured we could justify it later because we had information from the building department saying we should be building at seven feet. They wanted us to build at seven feet. So we said, okay, let’s build at seven feet. So we did that, we raised at the seven feet, we can put in our pilings, our concrete foundation.

GS:  Now at this point, is the house still intact? It’s not down to the beams, it’s still basically together?

MM:  That’s correct. Well, the structure is still there. I mean, I asked my engineer, what’s holding this house up, because like I said, it was in terrible conditioning. And he said gravity. As my contractor, the engineers tell me gravity is holding this house up. Is that right? He goes, No, what’s holding this house up is termites holding hands. So between gravity and termites holding hands, that’s what’s holding this house up.

GS:  So I have a hard time, Mike, putting up one of those pop up tents that has four legs. And I’m trying to, you know, put it together by myself. So how do you raise a house a foot and a half? Is it one corner at a time? Do you raise the whole thing? How does it work?

MM:  There’s specialized companies who do this. They call it cribbing. I’m not sure if you’re familiar with cribbing is, but basically they take these pieces of wood and they lay layer on almost like you would do, uh, like one of those. What do they call that kids game? Jango or something? Jenga. Jenga. Yeah. So they basically have these Jango piles of wood crisscrossing at all four corners of the house. And then they use these hydraulic pumps, I guess, or motors to raise the house up as they raise it. They slide more wood underneath it till they get to the point where the house has been raised about 18 inches. Once the house, well, before they do this, they slice off the steel at the bottom because you can’t lift the house while it’s attached to steel, obviously, right. So they put the steel at the base at the pile caps. They lift the house with these hydraulic pumps and the wood cribbing. The house is literally sitting up in the air. And like I said, that’s when we discovered, okay, this house is not at six feet. It’s barely safe at six feet. It’s definitely not safe at five and a half feet. We got to go to seven feet and we have to decide this while the house is literally up in the air. There’s nobody to call. There’s nobody. This is March, 2020. There’s nobody in any city offices. There’s nobody working. There’s nobody you can talk to. So I follow the advice of my architect, my engineer, my contractor, the chief building official at the building department, the plan reviewer at the building department, all of them said you have to go to seven feet.

GS:  Right, ‘Cause that was the requirement of the building code.

MM:  Right.

GS:  So now you have a house in the air, a foot and a half taller than it was before, right?

MM:  That’s right.

GS:  And what happens next?

MM:  So all those people agreed and we should do seven feet. Unfortunately, the historic preservation staff, we did not tell them in advance ’cause we didn’t know in advance. We didn’t apply in advance to change the elevation from what we thought was six to seven. So they weren’t aware where we’re doing it until after we did it. We weren’t hiding it. We went over it with the city, we filed all our paperwork with the city, but the historic preservation board wasn’t aware. So they didn’t actually get involved in the elevation issue till months later. What’s important is when we raise the house. The important thing is we’re also gonna raised the grade because we want to keep all the original proportions, dimensions, ceilings, heights, all the spatial relationships of the original house. We didn’t want to just lift this thing up a foot in the air and have something different than what was there than what Paul Rudolph designed. I think you’ve seen a lot of these historic houses, I’ve seen articles like in Charleston, South Carolina, for instance, or many other areas. They just lift the whole house up two feet, three feet, four feet, and it’s sitting there and it just doesn’t look right. It’s not the original design. So what we did is in order to maintain the original design of building on grade, we were stepping up the grade all around the house so the house would still appear to be on grade and all the dimensions, proportions would be the same as Paul Rudolph designed it.

GS:  So when does the city start to get upset about all this?

MM:  Okay, so what happened next is we proceeded, this is in March, 2020, we got all the way till July, 2022, we got to the point where, okay, all our foundation is in, we had to put 121 pilings in this property to support this house in coastal Florida, you have to do all this. So there’s a lot of pilings, there’s concrete work, the slab is in, everything’s done. So the next thing is, okay, we got to start constructing this house. So in our plans, it called for all new glass. It called for new louvers on top of the glass. What a lot of people don’t understand is in this house Paul Rudolph designed, it’s basically a glass house. Almost all of the walls are glass. So when you, we had to take out the old glass to put it in the new glass. Same thing with the siding, small sections of siding that were rotten. You have to take out the siding to put a new siding. We have to take out the old roof to put in a new roof. But what people don’t understand is when all those things are removed, when you remove the glass, when you remove the siding, when you remove the louvers, you remove the roof, there’s nothing left. You’re looking right through the house. Basically, there are no structural walls on this house. The whole rear of the house is glass. You take out the old glass, there’s no wall left. There’s nothing. The glass is not set in walls. The front of the house, the majority of that was glass. And by the way, the previous owner had changed the design of that glass from the original change, the louvers changed the siding. So it was not the original design. It had to be removed anyway to put in the new glass. So again, I’m sure you’re familiar with the Philip Johnson glass house. Oh, sure. The Mies van der Rohe, a farm’s workhouse. These are glass houses. And these are museum pieces. Nobody lives in them. But imagine if you had to take out the glass, because somebody wants to live in that house and put in new impact glass to code. The code is very strict and very specific in Florida. You have to have impact glass. You cannot rebuild the house with the original glass from 60 or 70 years ago. you have to put a new glass. So imagine those glass houses, you take out the old glass and someone stops you before you put the new glass. What are you going to see? Nothing. There’s nothing there. So what happened is in July we took out all these old materials and that’s when the historic preservation department evidently some people complained who weren’t familiar with the project they complained. And I think as you know also when you when you start dealing with multiple city agencies, a historic preservation board, a building department, and then you have people from the public outside that don’t know what they’re looking at. They said, okay, you demolish the house, you demolish the house, and you didn’t have a permit to demolish the house, and we’re gonna issue a stop construction order. So that happened in August of 2020.

GS:  Okay, so here we are in August of 2021. What’s happening in this last year to move this forward?

MM:  Well, if you told me in August of 2020, I’d still be here in August 2021 waiting for something to happen. I’d say you’re crazy, but here we are. We’re actually right almost exactly a year later. What happened is after going back and forth with the historic preservation board, their position is I didn’t make my plans clear that I was going to demolish the house. I said, I didn’t demolish the house. I took out the materials that in my plan, it called for new materials and you approved my plan. They said that wasn’t clear to them. And I take them at their word. I’m not finding fault. I don’t believe it was clear to them. I don’t think anybody visualized. I mean, in hindsight, it’s obvious, but I don’t think anybody visualized at the time that if you take out the glass, you take out the siding, you take out the louvres, you take out the roof, there’s nothing left but the steel structure. It’s just not something that we talked about or communicated, although in hindsight, it’s pretty obvious. Well, once that’s explained, it would seem like reasonable people would go, oh, so you’re going to put it back the way it was just with better materials. Right. Now, our attention always was and still is and always will be restore the original Paul Rudolph design. But what was there was not the original Paul Rudolph design. It was some altered version of that. And our plans, you know, I’m not an architect. I’m not an engineer. I’m not a builder. But my architect, my engineer, my builder, and another architect that I retained just to review my plans all said, yes, it’s in your plan. They approved your plan. But like I said, it wasn’t clear to them. So here we are a year later, what’s happened is I had to resubmit my plans and the city authorized a third party outside expert architect.

GS:  Okay.

MM:  It’s RJ Heisenbottle Architects in Carl Gables, Florida. They’re very well known, very well regarded expert historic architects.

GS:  Yeah.

MM:  They are actually reviewing my plans now as we speak, basically to make sure what I did was justified. So I had to give them a justification for the demolition, justification for the elevation change, a justification for the reconstruction, all according to very strict standards, you know, the secretary of the interior standards to do all these things. And I believe we comply with it. So I’m expecting and I’m hoping and I’m optimistic that the outside architect will approve our plans. At that point, it’s going to go back to the City Historic Preservation Board, I’m hoping we can go back. They meet once a month, I’m hoping we can get back for the September meeting and they’ll approve my plan and then I can proceed. But there’s a lot of uncertainty, I don’t know.

GS:  Does the Historic Preservation Board at this point, Did they understand now that there’s no malice here, that you’re not gonna be building a Wendy’s on the spot? I mean, it’s not some crazy scheme to destroy the Paul Rudolf legacy.

MM:  I think that they know everything I did was justified. I think what their position is, is that I didn’t communicate it to them adequately. And they weren’t aware that when we removed all these materials, it really happened within a matter of hours because there was nothing holding together. There was no structure except for the steel. So when something happens overnight like that and there’s a house there one day and the next day it looks like I demolished the house, they probably got a lot of outside pressure.

GS:  How did you allow that to happen from people who aren’t familiar with the project?

MM:  I think they know I’m not trying to do anything. I didn’t intentionally try to do anything behind anybody’s back. I was following the plan. If you give the R set of approved plans to any contractor, the same thing would happen.

GS:  Sure.

MM:  There’s no other way to do it. There’s no other way to restore the original design without reconstructing the house. To reconstruct the house, you got to take it apart first. So I think they know that their complaint is the way, the process, the way I did it. And that’s what I was saying. Okay, resubmit your plans to get an approval for this after the fact. In other words, almost making believe I didn’t do what I did, but to get approval for it ahead of time, but it’s already done. I don’t think their issue was that. Their issue was I didn’t do it through them with their advanced knowledge and they weren’t clear. Of course, my answer is, well, I didn’t know you weren’t clear. I submitted plans. I say, if you weren’t clear, call me in, you know, before you give me the, the okay to go, and then we can explain it.

GS:  So if you can start construction again this fall, how long do you think it’ll take to bring it back to its full glory?

MM:  I’m hoping from the time I start, I can finish it nine to 12 months.

GS:  The renderings that you have posted about this look fantastic.

MM:  I mean, we really put a lot of effort into making as close as possible to the original design. The architect who I have, Jeffrey Silberstein, actually has a link back to Paul Rudolph in the sense that Paul Rudolph’s partner in Sarasota, Florida originally was Ralph Twitchell.

GS:  Sure. Ralph Twitchell and Paul Rudolph were the forerunners of the Sarasota School of Architecture and Jeffrey Silberstein had some relationship with Ralph Twitchell, who was a contemporary and associate of Paul Rudolph.

MM:  So we’ve really done a tremendous amount of research and work and expense into making these plans as close as possible to the original design. I’ve spent a tremendous amount of time and money preserving the most important part of the existing structure, which is the steel structure. The steel structure was in terrible shape also, but we did a lot of repair work, welding work, in priming, painting, so that the steel structure is safe. I mean, that’s the most important thing in my mind here. We wanna bring back the original design, but we also wanna build a house that’s safe. We’re planning on living this house. It’s gonna be a family home. It’s not a development project to sell. It’s not a museum piece that nobody lives in. We’re trying to build it so we can live in the house. It’s built to code, it’s safe. You know, There are a lot of environmental challenges in Florida with the salt there, the humidity, the hurricanes, the coastal flooding, rise in sea levels. There’s a lot of challenges. There’s a lot of people out there that say, “Wait, you shouldn’t have done anything. You shouldn’t have changed it. You shouldn’t have touched it.” But I don’t think that’s realistic. Some people say you really can’t reconstruct these historic houses because if you reconstruct them, you have to do them to code. And if you do them the code, it’s no longer historic. And I don’t agree with that. I think that if there’s any future for historic preservation, people have to be able to build a house to code, that they feel safe in, it’s habitable, and people actually live in it. There’s other Paul Rudolf houses in Sarasota that are beautifully restored and reconstructed. I think you’re familiar with the umbrella house.

GS:  Yes.

MM:  The cocoon house beautifully restored and reconstructed, but nobody lives there, they’re museum pieces. So to me, that’s not historic preservation.

GS:  Mike, you and Nina, I assume that you’re taking lots of photos and videos of this.

MM:  Yes.

GS:  And didn’t you all get close to being in one of the HGTV shows at one point? This sounds like a good story for them.

MM:  Once I put this project, it was just something we were pursuing just based on our, But I call our normal projects. The historic projects are not normal projects. You know, they’re really a labor of love. They are, so, yeah.

GS:  You’re passionate about it.

MM:  And you have to be passionate about the architect, about design, to go through, you know, the time, the money, the stress to do these historic houses. That’s something we underestimated. Even though we’ve done them before, but this particular one, it’ll probably be about five years from the time we purchase the house to the time, hopefully, when we can complete it.

GS:  So that’s a long time. That voice you hear in the background is Mike’s wife, Nina. Say hi, Nina.

NM:  Hello, how are you?

GS:  Hi, good. What has it been like from your perspective of going through this journey of historic renovation?

NM:  Difficult. Yeah? Only because we do work a lot in historic. But this is a personal project for us. It’s a family home. So it’s been hard. And, you know, our whole intention was for us to create this beautiful home of Paul Rudolph, bring it back to its original integrity. And I just feel like we’ve been left and right, you know, people just not understanding exactly what we’re doing, because what was there was not the original home. All the siding had been replaced, the roof had been replaced, the louvres were replaced. It was given historic designation, but I don’t know how that happened. So what we, all we were trying to do because we’re so passionate about this house and Paul Rudolph, let’s just bring it back to look exactly like he intended it to look like. We actually found plans in the home of the add -on of the glass from Paul Rudolph. We have his original draft.

GS:  Oh, that’s great.

NM:  We have a lot of that. So we actually took that and said to Jeffrey Silberstein look what we found Mr. Rudolph had planned on doing this for the original owner Let’s do this and that’s why the glass you do see the glass in the new construction that we’re doing Mike and I are passionate about this. You know, this is we’re not giving up

GS:  Well, I’m very glad to hear that because besides being a labor of love It’s a lot of hard work and a lot of expense to turn these houses around. It’s a lot easier, to be honest, to just mow ’em down and do something else. But I just want to thank the two of you for keeping the Rudolph spirit alive down there in Delray Beach.

NM:  Thank you.

MM:  Actually, by the time this airs, we’re putting together website, 212seabreeze.com, S-E-A-B-R-E-E-Z-E, 212seabreeze.com. That’ll have the whole story and all the original photographs. We have photographs from 1956 all the way through present documenting everything. It’s really an extremely interesting story. If anybody wants to see it, we’ll have it up online.

NM:  We actually have his original plans also, so it’s interesting.

GS:  Nina Mike, thanks so much for joining us.

MM:  Thank you.

NM:  Thank you.

That was George Smart talking with Mike and Nina Marco.