When one thinks of epicenters of American modernist movement in the immediate post-WWII era, Southern California, with its Los Angeles Case Study homes and Palm Springs vacation pads, is top of mind. But in that same era, another influential enclave was being developed in a far less hospitable environment: the far end of Cape Cod, on Massachusettsâs Atlantic Coast. And this year marks the 75th anniversary of one of the earliest and most significant of these local structures, a lakeside house in Wellfleet built in 1949 by famed Bauhaus designer Marcel Breuer.
In 1937, Bauhaus founder Walter Gropiusâin exile in England after fleeing the Nazi regimeâwas recruited by Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, to found its graduate school of design. Settling around Boston, he was joined by a group of Bauhaus protégés and professors. These included the aforementioned Breuer, graphic designer Herbert Bayer, theater designer Xanti Schawinsky, and artist László Moholy-Nagy. They all spent the summer together on Cape Cod. âIn the â30s and â40s, before the highway was built, it really took all day to get out here from Boston on the little roads, and the Outer Cape really was a backwater and at times very depopulated, so land was super cheap,â says Peter McMahon, founder of the not-for-profit preservation group Cape Cod Modern House Trust, and author of the pioneering book Cape Cod Modern.
The group was taken with the landscape and the remote lifestyle it afforded. âThey were all nature lovers and really into the backwoods, where they could swim nude and have peace and quiet and hang out with their friends,â McMahon says. Originally intending to construct a community of homes for himself and his peers, Breuer purchased a wooded 24-acre site a five-minute walk from the Atlantic. He was the first of the group to build his own home in the area, selecting a hilltop site overlooking three ponds. âIt was really all about finding the best view and the best breezes,â McMahon says.
Breuer designed and built his house in accordance with Bauhaus principles, joining handcrafting with industrially produced prefabricated materials like pressed paperboard (Homasote) and striated fir plywood (Weldtex). The structure, which he called the Long House, was influenced in part by local construction. âBreuer was very interested in New England vernacular, but not so much the houses. He was interested in the mercantile and maritime vernacular of boats and docks and covered bridges,â McMahon says. âSo this house is kind of like a little pier, with this porch hanging off it via an unusual structure thatâs kind of like a hanging truss.â
Breuer used the house as a sort of workshop for experimentation in architecture, design, materials, and housewares, decorating and furnishing it, and adding to the structure several times over the decades. âBreuer was obsessed with extreme lightnessâalmost to the point of evaporationâand incredible heaviness. And the juxtaposition of those,â McMahon says. âSo for instance, on the hanging porch, there is this 700-pound table made of this enormous piece of slate on a column made of cement blocks. And then his wicker and metal-tube Cesca chairs are around it and weigh like 16 ounces. You can pick them up with one finger.â
The house became a social locus, where writers, artists, and designers who built or refurbished or rented houses nearby mixed over decades, much of it documented by Breuerâs son Tamás in hundreds of rolls of film. Breuer built three other houses on the Cape, and other modern architects followed suit. These included Olav Hammarström (who trained with Alvar Aalto), Serge Chermayeff (who taught architecture at MIT, Harvard, and Yale), Paul Weidlinger (who also taught at Harvard and MIT), and the prolific Charlie Zehnder (who studied under Frank Lloyd Wright).
But modernism was suspect to the locals in the postwar eraâas it was thought to be dangerously European and thus tinged with Communismâso the coterie kept to itself. âIt was invisible even to the people in town. I mean, they knew there were some artists, Europeans, back in the woods but the houses were small and inconspicuous,â McMahon says. âThey were content to be under the radar.â
The Breuer house and all of its contentsâincluding original artwork, furnishings, books, and design drawingsâremained in the Breuer family but fell into disrepair. McMahonâs organization, Cape Cod Modern House Trust, leases, restores, offers residencies in, and rents out a number of modernist homes on the Outer Cape, and he began conversations with Tamás Breuer to take on care of the house. After negotiations, CCMHT arranged to purchase the house and property for $2 million, protecting the buildings and four-acre site from future demolition and/or development. With the financial assistance of supporters, board members, and local government, the organization closed on the house this summer, just in time for the diamond anniversary of its construction.
The organizationâs plan is to archive the houseâs contents, sensitively restore the structures, and then begin to provide public rentals within. âOur renters are mostly architects, enthusiasts, academics, historians,â McMahon says. Most importantly, CCMHT will provide residencies to artists on-site. âDespite its artistic past, the Cape is in danger of becoming a former art colony, because if you donât have artists, if they canât afford to be here, you have a former art colony,â McMahon says. âReal estate values and all those things sort of destroy beautiful places. So residencies are super important because itâs actually one of the only ways that young artists can survive out here,â he says. âThe nature is still here, and the vibe is still here. Weâre trying to help keep the vibe alive.â