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September-October 2007
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< previous | 1 | 1 | 2 | 3 Mulligan sees the efficient use of space, modest footprint, and the opening to natural light and garden views—in essence using the natural world as extended outdoor rooms—as definitive lessons for homeowners living in today’s climate crisis. “A 1,200-square-foot midcentury modern house is the opposite of today’s 5,000-square-foot McMansion in terms of how space is valued and used,” he says. “It’s important for us as a society to keep these smaller modern houses, because they move us away from the culture of consumption. What makes them work is the cleverness of design and the number of built-ins.” One of the best examples of these ideas is Gropius’s own home; Mulligan sends everyone he knows to see it. “The archetypal New England house is a painted, wooden, boxy structure,” he says. “Gropius absorbed the New England characteristics [wood, brick, fieldstone] but did something new with them. He used cedar-clapboard siding, but he uses it vertically on the interior. He is an historic figure and the house is a time capsule. Going out there also gets visitors into the forests and pastures around the house—all these things we think of as New England’s natural heritage.” Six Moon Hill in Lexington still runs, as originally planned, as a consensus-based community with membership dues and some communal property, including a swimming pool and meeting grounds. “It’s remarkable that the community has maintained the same spirit as long as it has,” says founding TAC architect John “Chip” Harkness ’38, M.Arch. ’41. “It’s more than just a typical suburb, it is a group of people who meet together and do more than be next-door neighbors who never speak to each other.” (He now lives in Maine, but his first wife, another TAC architect, Sarah Pillsbury Harkness, still lives at Six Moon Hill along with some other founding families.) Lexington also boasts five other subdivisions of modern homes from the 1950s and 1960s, including Five Fields, Turning Mill Road, and Peacock Farm. In Concord, Massachusetts, Carl Koch, a longtime MIT professor, produced the 1950s Conantum community, designed as convenient, affordable housing for university academics back when Concord was a 22-minute drive to MIT, notes Sally Zimmerman, of Historic New England, citing original promotional materials for the development. Few would question preserving the Gropius house, or even those that comprise Six Moon Hill. But whether all modern houses should be saved as a matter of course is not always clear. “There is no canonical definition of what’s historically relevant or important,” Mulligan says. Market forces are hugely influential, as are potentially expensive problems related to restoration and maintenance, which, he explains, often require specially trained contractors and hard-to-find authentic materials. “A lot of mid-century houses are small and glassy and their new buyers value the land and location over the architect’s vision,” he says. In July, for example, after long negotiations, a deal to save a flat-roofed 1956 Paul Rudolph house on a bluff in Watch Hill, Rhode Island, fell through over issues of timing and liability, according to a New York Times article. The owners had wanted the “Cerrito house,” as it was known, removed so they could build a larger vacation home, and two designers had hoped to move the dwelling to land upstate; instead, the structure was demolished in June. The “Micheels House,” a 1972 Rudolph dwelling on the waterfront in Westport, Connecticut, was demolished last January despite public controversy and legal action over its importance. “Things are changing so quickly [in the construction landscape] now that we cannot evaluate the significance of many modern houses before they are gone,” explains Sally Zimmerman. “We don’t have the luxury we do with an old Revolutionary-era home to determine how important it is to history.” But opinions can vary within the architectural and design community. “There is an element, even among the surviving designers of these houses, that says, ‘No, they should not be preserved. The style is obsolete,’” Zimmerman adds. “There is such a rational philosophy behind modernism that some of the designers themselves say, ‘Go ahead, tear it down. If it’s not working now, then build something new.’” The emphasis does not have to be on traditional restoration or preservation, Fixler believes, but on sensitively adapting or enlarging these modern homes—as virtually all of the Six Moon Hill homes have been. Chip Harkness weighs in: “I think it’s very nice to preserve—maybe not the specifics—but the spirit of the original thing and, to the extent possible, preserve the building and not tear things down and build new ones. I’d rather adapt structures than see them torn down. But then, I’m an old man and I like to preserve what I can.” The Trustees of Reservations faced an interesting problem when the organization inherited Field Farm and The Folly in 1984. “The owners [Lawrence and Eleanore Bloedel] themselves did not see the home as ‘historic,’ but they did consider The Folly to be important” from an architectural point of view, says Garrison, Trustees’ historic-resources manager. “So we treat the main house as an enterprise, but are sympathetic to its history.” The Folly, which was used by the Bloedels as a guesthouse, is a curving shingled structure resembling a pinwheel.It’s set gracefully beside a spring-fed pond and a fringe of trees overlooking fields and woodlands with public walking trails. It also served as a gallery for some of the Bloedels’ considerable modern-art collection (which was largely divided between the Whitney Museum of Art and the Williams College Museum of Art after Lawrence Bloedel died in 1976). For Franzen, the architect, the environment dictated the design. “There’s a view of Mount Greylock from the large living room, a different view of the pond—on which the Bloedels held skating parties in the winter—from the kitchen, and other views of the fields and trees from the bedrooms,” says Franzen, who is now retired and living in New Mexico. “Larry Bloedel loved that guesthouse. It was meant to be a counterpoint to his rather prosaic modernist house, a plain old Jane” (a reference to the main house, designed by Goodell). When asked whether The Folly was meant to last forever, to be preserved in perpetuity, Franzen replies: “Of course. Any work of architecture with some merit and skill and artistry deserves to stand as long as it can. And that house, The Folly, has that, for sure. I’m glad that it is sort of an historic building now.” He pauses, then adds: “All architects have dreams of glory.” Nell Porter Brown is the assistant editor of this magazine.  
 
 
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