Eduardo Catalano, architect at NCSU

Eduardo Catalano, an Argentina-born architect who taught at N.C. State University during its modernist heyday in the early 1950s, died last week in Massachusetts. He was 92.

Catalano's death was reported by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he taught from 1956 to 1977.

Catalano designed numerous buildings around the world but may be remembered best locally for a house built off Ridge Road on the west side of Raleigh in 1954.

The home had glass walls and was dominated by an 87-foot-wide hyperbolic paraboloid roof that from the side looked like a giant saddle or a hang glider at rest. The house won praise from Frank Lloyd Wright and was named "House of the Decade" by House and Home magazine in 1956.

Catalano lived in the home for about a year before leaving Raleigh for MIT. The house changed hands over the years and eventually fell into disrepair, its celebrated roof rotting and collapsed in places.

The group Preservation North Carolina held an option to buy the property and looked for someone willing to buy and rebuild the house, at an estimated cost of more than $1 million, but found no takers. The home was demolished in 2001.

Five years ago, Catalano offered to design and pay for an outdoor pavilion on the NCSU campus that would have echoed the dramatic roofline of his famous house.

The pavilion would have sat on one side of the Court of North Carolina, a large grassy quadrangle lined by some of the university's oldest buildings. The location drew protests from people who considered the pavilion an unwanted intrusion on the court, and Catalano withdrew the offer.

Catalano taught at NCSU for five years. His later designs included the U.S. embassies in Buenos Aires, Argentina, and Pretoria, South Africa; the Guilford County Courthouse in Greensboro and the Juilliard School of Music at Lincoln Center in New York.