In the summer of 1937, Walter Gropius, founder of the Bauhaus and a
professor at Harvard's new Graduate School of Design, rented a
house on Planting Island, near the base of Cape Cod. There, he and
his wife, Ise, hosted a festive reunion of Bauhaus masters and
students who had recently emigrated from Europe: Marcel Breuer,
Herbert Bayer, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, Xanti Schawinsky and others.
Together they feasted, swam and planned their futures on a new
continent, all sensing they were on the cusp of a momentous new
phase in their lives. Yet even as they moved on, the group never
lost its connection to the Cape Cod coast. Several members
returned, when they had the means, to travel farther up the
peninsula, rent cabins, buy land and design their ideal summer
homes. Thus began a chapter in the history of modern architecture
that has never been told--until now. The flow of talent onto the
Outer Cape continued and, within a few years, the area was a hotbed
of intellectual currents from New York, Boston, Cambridge and the
country's top schools of architecture and design. Avant-garde homes
began to appear in the woods and on the dunes; by the 1970s, there
were about 100 modern houses of interest here. In this story, we
meet, among others, the Boston Brahmins Jack Phillips and Nathaniel
Saltonstall; the self-taught architect, carpenter and painter Jack
Hall; the Finn Olav Hammarstrom, who had worked for Alvar Aalto;
and the prolific Charlie Zehnder, who brought the lessons of both
Frank Lloyd Wright and Brutalism to the Cape. Initially, these
designers had no clients; they built for themselves and their
families, or for friends sympathetic to their ideals. Their homes
were laboratories, places to work through ideas without spending
much money. The result of this ferment is a body of work unlike any
other, a regional modernism fusing the building traditions of Cape
Cod fishing towns with Bauhaus concepts and postwar
experimentation.
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