Project

World Monuments Fund began preserving modern sites in the 1980s, when it helped restore seminal modern Mexican murals following a devastating earthquake. Later, it led the restoration of Brancusi’s Endless Column in Romania and the battle to save Edward Durell Stone’s A. Conger Goodyear House on Long Island.

World Monuments Fund began preserving modern sites in the 1980s, when it helped restore seminal modern Mexican murals following a devastating earthquake. Later, it led the restoration of Brancusi’s Endless Column in Romania and the battle to save Edward Durell Stone’s A. Conger Goodyear House on Long Island.

Since its launch in 1996, the World Monuments Watch program has included more than thirty modern buildings, including the Rusakov Club (Konstantin Melnikov), Viipuri Library (Alvar Aalto), Tugendhat Villa (Ludwig Mies van der Rohe), the International Fairground at Tripoli (Oscar Niemeyer), the Ennis-Brown House (Frank Lloyd Wright), Florida Southern College (Frank Lloyd Wright), Taliesin and Taliesin West (Frank Lloyd Wright), the Schindler Kings Road House (Rudolf Michael Schindler), Grosse Pointe Memorial Library (Marcel Breuer), New York State Pavilion (Philip Johnson and Richard Foster), Riverview High School (Paul Rudolph), and the Orange County Government Center (Paul Rudolph).

The launch of the WMF/Knoll Modernism Prize in 2008 has brought more attention to the program, and thus to the cause of preserving modern architecture. Every two years, when the prize is awarded, the buildings and the architects who preserved them demonstrate that the architecture of the recent past is important and worthy of preservation.