Today I had the pleasure of meeting the architect Victor Bruno and his lovely wife Jeanne Bruno at their Fontainebleau home. Mr. Bruno designed and built the house in 1993. He was a classmate and colleague of William Calongne, Nathaniel Curtis, Arthur Q. Davis, John Desmond, James Lamantia and Albert C. Ledner at the Tulane School of Architecture. After receiving his BArch in 1943 he was drafted by the Army. He returned to Tulane for his Master's degree and graduated in 1947. As a keen admirer of the work of Frank Lloyd Wright and son of a master cabinet maker, Bruno took craftsmanship and the art of building seriously. While apprenticeships were not required at the time, Bruno decided he needed to know how to build. Before opening his architectural office, he worked for the contractor Lionel Favret on the construction of the Blue Plate Building designed by August Perez.

Saturday's Inside Out included a feature on the "Breaux Mart" house in Vista Park which has been recently restored by designer Marie Taylor.

Natural light shows off eclectic interior elements in Vista Park mid-century modern home  By Karen Taylor Gist

Thursday's letter to the editor from Lynne Breaux identifies the architect as Victor Bruno.  I've contacted him and we will be meeting later this week.

from the Times-Picayune

By Letters to the Editor

May 20, 2010, 1:29AM

Re: "Light show," InsideOut, May 15.

"They call it the Breaux Mart house because someone who owned the store used to live there..."

That someone was my father, Prosper Paul Breaux, founder of Breaux Mart, who, along with his wife, Adrienne Gaudin Breaux, and eight children lived in the Lake Vista home.

It was -- and now is again -- quite a house and was featured in The Times-Picayune when it was first built in 1960.

Thank you to Marie Taylor for her evocative modernization in keeping with the original vision and spirit of Victor Bruno, the architect, and my father.

Thank you to Karen Taylor Gist for capturing the specialness of our home.

Her article with its lovely photos and descriptions does much to ease the bleak memories of my last poignant post-Katrina view of the house.

To see it in its current reincarnation is a joy.

Lynne Breaux

Washington

Upon its completion in October 1958, the Union Tank Car Dome, located north of Baton Rouge, Louisiana, was the largest clear-span structure in the world. Based on the engineering principles of the visionary design scientist and philosopher Buckminster Fuller, this geodesic dome was, at 384 feet in diameter, the first large scale example of this building type. A Necessary Ruin relates the powerful, compelling narrative of the dome’s history via interviews with architects, engineers, preservationists, media, and artists; animated sequences demonstrating the operation of the facility; and hundreds of rare photographs and video segments taken during the dome’s construction, decline, and demolition. (Evan Mather, U.S.A., 2009, 29:54)

John H. Stubbs, Vice President for Field Projects, joined the World Monuments Fund as Director of Programs in 1990, and was named Vice President in 1996. He is a graduate of Columbia University’s master’s program in Historic Preservation and was a UNESCO Fellow at ICCROM’s Architectural Conservation course in Rome. In addition to his work at WMF, Mr. Stubbs is Adjunct Associate Professor of Historic Preservation at Columbia University. Prior to joining WMF, Mr. Stubbs served for ten years as Assistant Director of Historic Preservation Projects at Beyer Blinder Belle, Architects and Planners, and worked as a historical architect for the U.S. Department of the Interior. He is chairman of the James Marston Fitch Foundation and, until winter 2007, served for six years as a trustee of the Archaeological Institute of America. 

http://www.wmf.org/content/staff