Gropius (and Breuer!) on the South Shore

This is a bit old now, but worth posting here. The rarity of modernism on the New England waterfront, except perhaps in the Wellfleet/Truro area, makes this Gropius/Breuer house in Cohasset of particular interest. Read the article here, in Dwell.

19 Demar Rd. in Lexington -- Techbuilt Classic

Designed by Carl Koch, the "Grandfather of Prefab" (Progressive Architecture, 1994), this Techbuilt classic, a three-bedroom, two-and-a-half bath 2615 s.f. home is a fine example of the pioneering modernism that Koch applied to mid-century homebuilding as returning GIs and a surge in Boston-area technology firms created more demand for housing young families. Bill Janovitz and John Tse are thrilled to offer this property for the listing price of $639,000. It will have an open house 1-3 on Sunday 10/17/20. Please contact me with any questions or to set up a private showing: bjanovitz@hammondre.com.


The House

Set on a wooded 3/4 acre, the siting takes full advantage of the natural beauty of Lexington's Middle Ridge/Turning Mill neighborhood. Vast expanses of glass open up the living area in the rear to meet the large, level, and private backyard. The open floor plan offers a natural flow. From the foyer (an addition consistent with the modernist aesthetic), one is drawn down the stairs of the split entry toward the views from the windows in the main living area. You will be forgiven for being distracted by the view and failing to immediately notice the newly refinished hardwood floors. The flexible first floor layout consists of a dining area, an airy, open main area, and a cozy nook formed in part by the fireplace and exposed chimney. It is easy for one to picture him or herself curled up with a book, perhaps a rare edition of Koch's own At Home with Tomorrow. **







Adjacent to the main living area is a room currently used as a 24X25 family room and spa, also an addition to the original structure. A hot tub is in one corner. One could easily see this room as an office large enough to house a home business, a home gym, a playroom, or as it is currently used. Sliders open up the back wall to a patio.




Flanking the living area in the other direction is a huge (20X16) eat-in kitchen with an island. From the walls of windows, watch family, pets, and/or wild turkeys gamboling (as the "wild" variety of turkeys are wont to do) in the backyard while you prepare dinner or wash the dishes at the sink (no need to actually wash, though; of course there is a dishwasher.)




A large half bathroom and laundry room complete the main living area.

Back up through the foyer, a few steps lead you to the main hallway, which in turn opens to three bedrooms and a full bath. A second full bath is included en suite for the master bedroom. All bedrooms feature the cathedral ceilings afforded by the post-and-beam construction. And one of the bedrooms opens up via sliders to use the top of the family room as a deck of sorts. In fact, the seller informs us that the construction of the below structure was designed to support a future deck (as with all such features, a buyer would be responsible for performing his/her own due diligence to verify).





The house had a new roof put on in 2009. There is a two-car garage with plenty of storage. But if you are a pack rat and still can't find enough room for your "I'll get to it someday" restoration project of broken Eames chairs, or your collections of moldy Dwell magazines, there is an additional storage shed.

(click any image to enlarge, if your browser allows)







The Neighborhood

Most people in Lexington know the area as Turning Mill, but it started out being referred to as Middle Ridge. Though it is now a large area of eight or nine streets, it started down here around Demar, with Techbuilt houses designed by Carl Koch, before growing further north and west and incorporating other modern designs, most notably, the Peacock Farm-style house plan designed by Dan Compton and Walter Pierce, who founded Lexington's Peacock Farm neighborhood on the other side of town. There have also been some Deck Houses built. The expanded part of the area is now referred to as "Upper Turning Mill."

Residents love the area due to its proximity to Estabrook Elementary school (adjacent) and because it offers membership in the Paint Rock swimming pool. It also borders the vast Paint Mine conservation area, with beautiful walking trails. The Lexpress bus runs through. And a quick zip takes you down backroads to Whole Foods, Staples, Super Stop & Shop, Marshalls, and so on in Bedford, or back the other way into the center of Lexington. And it is not far from Route 128.


The Architect


There is an understandable reluctance on the part of everyman to
build his counsel of nuts, bolts, and chromium. The industrial
revolution will help us realize our dreams if we can handle it, but we
haven't handled it too well so far. Although it is pathetic to think
we can escape the pressure of competitive business, the battle of
home-office transportation, and a compulsion to drive ourselves too
far, too fast, too much, by escaping into fantasy in the shape of an
eighteenth-century farmhouse, it is understandable that we try.
______

In our general progression of skills, building somehow lags far behind. Not 50 years behind, perhaps -- but not much less, at that. It goes still by hammer and handsaw -- agonizingly slow, inefficient, and more wasteful of money and people than we can any longer afford. The greatest irony of all is that it is so set about by habit, prejudice, false enthusiasm, and obsolete local constrictions that in a land of free enterprise the look of our urban landscapes is as comfortless, imitative, and repetitive, often, as any dictator could wish.

Carl Koch, preface to At Home With Tomorrow, 1958

Middle Ridge was originally "conceived and designed in 1955 by architect Koch as a neighborhood of Techbuilt homes." Koch had already had successfully designed the first modernist development in the Boston area, Belmont's Snake Hill (1941), Concord's first housing development, Conantum (1951), Weston's Kendal Common (1950).*

Koch came to the region when he attended Harvard School of Design, during "the confusing period between Beaux-Arts Eclectic and all-out Modern."*** It was a period (circa 1937) that overlapped with Gropius' time at the school, but for the most part, it seems Koch regarded his "contemporaries" the school as "leaderless or rudderless." More significant in the development of his own professional philosophy and style was a six-month tenure he spent in Sweden with Sven Markelius (1940-41), "which left him with an enduring admiration for the Scandinavian approach to life, democracy, and architecture."*** Certainly one can easily observe the themes of what is typically regarded as the Scandinavian aesthetic -- simple, clean, and functional design.

The eight-house neighborhood of Snake Hill, it seems, was an experiment in creating inexpensive housing for his own family. It is set on winding road high on a hillside off of Route 60 in Belmont.




A lovely Ezra Stoller shot of a Snake Hill home


In 1947, he designed the Acorn House (later merged with Deck House). His aim was to create well-designed and stylish housing for a good value (i.e. inexpensively) for middle classes by producing a modular construction system, manufactured in a factory controlled environment, which could be transported to a building site and assembled in a few days. However, the Acorn house was met with "resistance from local governments" and building code problems. **** More on Acorn history, by Lloyd Alter here.

(By the way, it seems Mr Alter's piece on the demise of Acorn/Deck/Empyrean (sourced liberally from the Boston Globe article linked at bottom) might have been, well not premature, but new life has been given to the first two brands, with a newly resuscitated Deck/Acorn.)

Far more successful were the Techbuilt houses, which, while certainly progressive architecturally, were more in line with prevailing trends and tastes. According to the National Trust for Historic Preservation, over 3000 of these houses were built, utilizing six different models. At least three were built in New Canaan, Ct., that other hotbed of Northeastern modernism, but it seems as though Lexington and Concord have the highest concentration and the highest amount of Techbuilt homes still preserved today.



Sources include:

*Lexington's Historic Survey of neighborhoods and housing stock

**Modernism 101

***McCallum, Ian (1959), Architecture U. S. A., New York: Reinhold Pub. Corp., pp. 170–174 via Hathi Trust

****PreservationNation.org


Treehugger

Boston Globe, "Prefab Pioneer Folds" Ted Seifer, December 24 2008

Hugh Stubbins-Designed House in Lincoln

We are proud to be representing the owners of this modernist home, The Baggs House in Lincoln, MA.


The House

A rare offering of a Hugh Stubbins-designed three-bedroom private residence, a mid-century modernist classic thoughtfully sited on a private two-acre lot in a neighborhood of multi-million-dollar estates. Open-concept main floor offers abundant natural light and great flexible flow. Two bedrooms and a studio/office on the main level; newer master suite with fireplace; a recently updated kitchen. Very fun studio/playhouse tower greets visitors. Have you longed to be the artist in a garret?

The Baggs House was commissioned in 1952 by Arthur Baggs, an engineer for Polaroid and his wife. The young architect, Hugh Stubbins, had done some work for the company and that is apparently where he met Baggs.

Mrs. Baggs was an artist. The space currently used as a family room was her studio, and the north-facing skylight, windows and perforated overhang were designed to provide plenty of indirect light for the space. She also did not like direct lighting of interior spaces; visitors will notice that almost all the lighting in house is in coves and soffits, and reflects off the ceilings.








Master Bedroom



The Architect



Despite regular predictions of its imminent demise -- or survival only as an anachronism -- the private house has remained at the core of the American Dream of the good life. Shelter magazines sell more copies than ever and there is probably no building type closer to the architect's heart...

...Houses have frequently been thought of as the architects' design research laboratory, but this approach should be adopted only with caution, lest the clients' needs and desires get lost in search for a new form...

...When I started into practice, I was fortunate. The American house was going through a kind of evolution. Glass walls, open planning, and exposed structural materials all reflected new construction techniques and an increasingly informal lifestyle that has remained with us. Some of my early houses thus still seem, I think, quite contemporary today.


-- Hugh Stubbins, 1976


Hugh Stubbins was a 23 year-old young man from Birmingham, Alabama, newly graduated from Harvard's School of Design, when he was hired by Royal Barry Wills to help provide a modern counterpart to Wills' seminal Cape Cod-style plans. Though the small house plan was hugely popular, Wills' felt pressured by young architects influenced by a more International Style of modernism, specifically, Richard Neutra's 1935 competition winner. The resulting structures took the same philosophy that Wills implemented in his affordable and small, but well-designed, Cape Cods and applied them to more forward-leaning, lighter-weight structures with open-floor plans and cleaner lines. Perhaps the most important architectural element that was continued from the traditional New England structures was the post-and-beam construction of barns, This allows ultimate flexibility in interior wall placement and, subsequently, adaptable and expandable floor plans. Unrestrained from the constrictions of outer load-bearing walls, Stubbins was free to use walls of glass and other modern design techniques. The economy of the modest Royal Barry Wills Cape would now be translated into homes more in tune with their surroundings, with outer garden walls continuing into interior living areas, and the idea of the chimney extending out through the roof, so literally central to the Royal Barry Wills Cape, was taken even further, with fireplaces themselves as part of a wall that could extend beyond the exterior walls.



The first Stubbins/Wills house, Needham, MA

Stubbins' tenure with Wills was brief (three years) but fruitful. He eventually went on to form a short-lived partnership with Marc Peter. Walter Gropius invited him to take a faculty position at Harvard in 1940. He formed friendships with the Bauhaus master, as well as highly notable pioneers like Alvar Aalto and Marcel Breuer. After Gropius' resignation, Stubbins became Chairman of the Department of Architecture at the Harvard School of Design. In 1946, Stubbins built his own modernist house in Lexington, and the town soon became a hotbed for Bauhaus-inspired modernist developments Six Moon Hill and Five Fields -- neighborhoods developed by The Architects Collaborative -- and Peacock Farm, started by young MIT architects, Walter Pierce and Dan Compton. Stubbins started his own firm from a small office in his own house, which saw the likes of some of his former students, then employees, like I.M Pei,and Robert Geddes. Other notable students of his include Philip Johnson, Sarah and Chip Harkness (also Lexingtonians, on Moon Hill), and Paul Rudolph. The firm grew from mostly private residential commissions in the outer-metro suburban rings of Boston and other metropolitan areas, into institutional buildings for the booming world of academia, and eventually designing monumental skyscrapers and urban landmarks like the Citicorp Center in New York City, the Federal Reserve Bank in Boston, and Congress Hall in Berlin. This University of Massachusetts alum is proud to have once lived in a dormitory there in the Southwest residential area designed by Hugh Stubbins and Associates.



Stubbins' family house in Lexington, MA


The Land




When the Baggs bought it, the property was roughly 12 acres, and a farmhouse formerly sat on the original building site. The farmhouse burned down in the '40s. The stone garden walls behind the current house were rebuilt on the farmhouse foundations. The route around the site to the garage is actually an old farm road that led from the back of the old farmhouse to a barn that was on Winter St. (the stone foundation of which, remained until the mid-1990's.) The Baggs' donated four or five acres of wetlands (off Winter St.) to conservation, and sold the roughly two acres (the lot to the north with the house on the rock) to a landscape architect who lived there until about 2000. That left roughly six acres that they lived on and sold eventually.

There was a "no subdivision" covenant on the property when it was sold, which the current owner believes would have expired in the early 2000s. Mrs. Baggs passed away in the mid-90's, the covenant was removed soon after and the property was subdivided into three lots by right. The Stubbins/Baggs house sat only a couple of feet from the new property line, and the lot was being marketed as raw land, assuming that the house would be torn down (because of it proximity to the property line, it became illegal as a result of the subdivision).


The current owners moved the house forward about 100 feet on the site, and maintained its original orientation. The move was a little tricky in that the house had to be raised up high enough so that the front entrance landing and the steel supporting it had to pass over the stone wall. The reason it had to go over the stone wall was because it also had to go around(and under) the locust tree. Pulleys were rigged up in the high branches and weights used to lift up the lower branches. The fireplace in the master bedroom was constructed while the house was in the air, and the original fireplace was lowered down onto it.


Notable Features of 149 Old County Road


*Designed by renowned international architect, Hugh Stubbins
*Post and beam construction
*Moved to current site (on same land) by current owners 1998#
*Recently (2005) built master suite with:
*Walk-in tiled/glass shower
*Double sink vanity
*Walk-in closet with custom-cabinetry
Fireplace
*Hardwood floors
*Artist studio for alternate use as family room or office
*Two additional bedrooms with custom built-ins and lofts
*Full shared bath
*Living room with hardwood floors, cathedral ceilings; plentiful natural light; balcony
*Dining room continues open floor plan from living room
*Renovated (2005) kitchen with ceramic tile; granite counters; stainless steel appliances; Bosch dishwasher
*Lower level storage and additional basement
*Two-car garage with green roof, uses original house foundation
*Separate outbuilding: studio/playroom tower (completed 2005)
*Thoughtfully sited on two-acre lot with great outdoor space, multiple decks and patios
*Seasonal views of Cambridge Reservoir

# all dates approximate


Price $799,000

Available for showings beginning 9/18/10

Contact via email for more info



Sources:


1. Hugh Stubbins and his Associates: The First Fifty Years; Diane M. Ludman, 1986 The Stubbins Associates Inc.


2. Hugh Stubbins: Architecture, The Design Experience; Edited by Susan Braybrooke; 1976 John Wiley & Sons Inc.

3. Current owner.

10 Moon Hill - The Sills House For Sale

(SOLD July/2010)

In the June 1950 issue of Architectural Forum magazine profile on the homes of Six Moon Hill, the Sills House, 10 Moon Hill Road, is described as, "designed for one of Six Moon Hill's few non-academic couples, this carefully detailed house has reserve space to provide for future family growth... A slate floor throughout the central area contrasts pleasantly with chimney brick and natural plywood panels and ties this space in with the flagstone terrace... Separated from the living area by only a two-way fireplace and a low storage cabinet for records, the dining space may be used for general entertaining."

Click to enlarge:





Well, the cabinet is gone, but then -- perhaps unfortunately -- so are many peoples' record collections. But now the floor plan is even more dazzlingly open, with an updated kitchen flowing into the dining area and, beyond the two-sided fireplace, the living room, which itself seems to flow naturally into the landscape outside the walls of glass. Oral history passed down through the three sets of owners has it that none other than Walter Gropius himself stood in the kitchen admiring this fireplace.





Scroll to see additional 2009 photos of the house below.


Stats for 10 Moon Hill Road

Price: $1,048,888, showings to begin March 10, 2010.

8 rooms

4 bedrooms

2.5 baths

2319 s.f. of living area

2 zones of radiant heat

Oil + propane

Discreet ductless mini-split air conditioning

2007 renovated Master suite with large Duravit soaking tub; multi-jet tiled shower with glass doors; large vanity/dressing area and closets; laundry room; private patio overlooking Japanese-style gardens

Flooring: hardwood; slate; stained concrete with radiant heat.

Finished, above-grade, walk-out lower-level family room, bedroom, and half bath.

Modern, recently (2008) renovated kitchen with stone countertops, 2008 appliances, flooring, and lighting.

Carport with enclosed storage.

Built 1948

26,136 square foot lot, professionally landscaped

Neighborhood association, common land, and swimming pool ($510/year without pool use; $950/year with pool use, approximately)

Prior owners: Sills 48-56; Marion Sheehan 56-02

Additions: Carport (TAC, 1956); Master bedroom suite (Dick Morehouse, 1980)

Floor plans (click):




Town appraisal card

Lexington GIS viewer




The Architects Collaborative partners

Robert McMillan designed the 10 Moon Hill Road house for the Sills family. He later headed the Rome office of TAC before leaving TAC and starting his own firm, remaining in Rome.

The house has been brought up to today's standards of simple luxury. An early renovation designed by TAC created the ground floor living room and a carport with storage. The master bedroom wing, designed by TAC partner Dick Moorhouse, was added in the 1980's.

The entire house has been completely upgraded in the last three years, while scrupulously maintaining the original architectural character of the home. Recent renovations include:

• MBR: Complete gut renovation 2007

• Other Bedrooms, bath: Complete gut renovation 2008

• Kitchen: Complete gut renovation 2008 with all new cabinets, utilities and appliances.

• Lower level family room, bedroom, bath: Complete gut renovation 2009

• Alarm system: New system installed 2008

• Roof membrane: resealed 2007

• Electrical system: almost entire house is brand new.

• House exterior painted 2008.





The original kitchen of 10 Moon Hill Rd. as featured in a 1950s home magazine:









About Moon Hill and TAC

In 1947, one young group of forward-thinking architects, The Architects Collaborative (TAC), founded by Bauhaus pioneer, Walter Gropius -- who had fled Germany and joined Harvard University Graduate School of Design -- purchased 20 acres of land on the east-central side of Lexington and formed a non-profit corporation for the community they named Six Moon Hill.

According to personal interviews with some of the partners and residents conducted by Aram Demirjian, the land had been owned since 1908 by a retired automobile dealer, described as "a stubborn and slightly intimidating man... suspicious of TAC's motives for their desire to purchase his land," which was a wooded hill and on the east side of town, and thus convenient to the TAC office in Harvard Square. Ultimately a deal was struck with the former auto dealer, who had held on to six 1920s-era Moon cars in a barn on the property. Appropriately, the development was named Six Moon Hill.

Laid out on a cul-de-sac, they set aside common land to leave as open space, including an area with a swimming pool. They built about 26 houses in the International modernist style: walls of glass, open floor plans, flat or slant roofs, simple and inexpensive materials, austere lines, nestled thoughtfully into the landscape. Though they at first might have seemed out of place—European modernist statements plopped down in the middle of wooded Lexington and adjacent to farms—they actually reflected the old clichés regarding New England Yankee frugality, sensibility, and working with materials at hand. As an article in the Boston Globe pointed out not too long ago, the houses of Moon Hill “remain remarkably unpretentious and livable.” And, when one stops to think about it, what would have been more out of place than Grecian columns on a farmhouse in the middle of a New England field when those originally started appearing? The Moon Hill houses were as unassuming, if not more so, than the good old white-clapboarded colonials dotting the town. Unlike reproductions of that familiar style, the modernist architects saw no need to busy up the facades of their homes with fake shutters, mullioned windows, cupolas and the like. And the use of rubber, tar and gravel, and other new building materials and techniques did away with the need for steeply gabled roofs to dump away the snow, rain and other byproducts of the New England climate.

More photos and information about TAC, Moon Hill, Five Fields, Peacock Farm and more, found here at our Modernism in Massachusetts site.

Six Moon Hill on Wikipedia

Our New Peacock Farm Listing

We are pleased to present this new listing, coming on the market via MLS on February 24. Contact Bill at 781-856-0992 or bjanovitz@hammondre.com to arrange a showing. Price $748,988.

It is an expanded and updated five-bedroom Peacock Farm house. The original Walter Pierce design of this now-modern-classic style has been expanded in the front, on the side, and in the rear. The kitchen in particular, benefits with the bump-out and feels much larger than most Peacock Farm kitchens. And the front addition adds a foyer. As the viewer steps into the living room, the eye is carried through the open-concept living and dining area, flowing through to the outside via walls of sliding glass doors. The viewer is drawn out to an expansive 30-foot deck overlooking the large level lot.












The house has 2203 square feet of living area on three split levels. There are two full baths and five bedrooms, three of which are on the uppermost floor. If a buyer wanted a large open family room on the lower level, one could open up the two bedrooms on the walk-out, above-grade lower level.

The kitchen has been bumped out with an addition and has Staron (like Corian) counters and a large stainless steel range.

One of the great features of 52 Peacock Farm Rd. is that the original windows have been replaced by Pella insulated windows.

There is a two-car carport designed by Walter Pierce in 1994.

Neighborhood swimming pool.

Floor plans (click for larger):




Original layout of Peacock Farm:



From our web site, Modernmass.com:

One of three important planned modernist developments, “Peacock Farm” was just a stone's throw across Pleasant Street from the swimming pool of Six Moon Hill. This community was founded not by an architect associated with Harvard, as TAC was, but by Walter Pierce, from Harvard’s Cambridge rival, MIT. As Laurie Atwater began her article in Lexington’s Colonial Times newspaper,

The cover of the Sunday edition of the New York Times for September 13, 1959 announced: Russians Fire Rocket to the Moon, Expected to Hit Target Today….

Inside the pages, a story from Lexington, Massachusetts: Colony of Contemporary Homes Will Be Repeated Near Boston.

Pierce started his own architecture firm with Danforth Compton after studying at MIT with (amongst others) Carl Koch, a former student of Walter Gropius and a founding father of modern prefab housing in America as the founder of Techbuilt and Acorn Homes (we will recall the House by Mail Craftsman homes from Sears and Roebuck in the early-1900s). Compton and Pierce noticed a "for sale" sign off of Route 2, Peacock Farm Road, a turn off of Watertown Street in Lexington. There was a 45-acre farm filled with wetlands, ledge, and woods. The two architects set out to become the developers of the site, with a plan they referred to as the “Program.” The concept was to build modern, aesthetically progressive homes that would be from a stock design yet looked as if they were custom built for the land.

After initially designing one-floor houses and building a handful of them, Compton suddenly and unexpectedly passed away and Pierce went on to design what is now known as the Peacock Farm House, a modern split-level home that, as Atwater notes in her article, “allowed the home to be ‘of the hill,’ as Frank Lloyd Wright” espoused. The shape of this house style was flexible enough that it could adapt to flat or sloping lots. With some subtle variations, the typical Peacock Farm House had an entrance in the center of the broad side of the structure, a few steps up to a second floor consisting of three bedrooms and a bath or a bath and a half. There is the main floor with a kitchen, dining area and living room with a fireplace and exposed brick chimney. The structure was a basic post-and-beam system with few if any interior load-bearing walls, allowing for great flexibility in the floor plans, and many large windows unobstructed by sashes, mullions, or any unnecessary architectural features. A few steps to a lower level set in various depths of the grading of the site and sometimes a second lower level basement, depending on how much of a slope was present.

The Compton-Pierce team challenged the traditional notion of a house needing to be facing more or less square to the street. Free from this principal, they oriented the homes to be complimentary to the sites, taking advantage of the views and offering the sites the appearance of more space in between the houses. This was also counter to the trends of most modern developments, which seemed to operate from a scorched earth policy, clearing the land and plopping down cookie-cutter houses one after another and then possibly going back to plant saplings after the fact.

Many of these homes have been renovated and expanded over the years, much like those on Moon Hill and Five Fields. They seem very adaptable to such modifications. And most homeowners in these communities have adhered to the mild covenants that the original developers put into place to keep the communities aesthetically consistent. Note that I did not write, “homogeneous.” Modern, that is to say “present day” builders and developers should take note that a mish-mash neighborhood of new neo-colonial-Georgian-Victorians gussied up with various frills and flourishes is a less effective way of distinguishing a group of new houses from each other than the simple approach demonstrated by these forward-looking architects of the mid-century, using one or two plans and adapting them to the contours of the existing land with as little disturbance as possible to the existing conditions of the environment. Though these houses were not, as originally built, the most energy efficient by today’s standards, due to outdated heating systems, relatively little insulation, and large single-paned windows, they are easily retrofitted with updates for all of those components. They were, however, “green” from the get-go in their approach to land use, both in the conserving of the existing flora, with few having traditional lawns even today, minimizing impermeable surfaces (gravel driveways, e.g.), and reasonable lot sizes with larger amounts of common land for all to enjoy.

Which brings us to the socio-political philosophy that underlies these communities’ origins. Not only were these houses extraordinarily “new” in their styles, standing in stark contrast to the traditional New England vernacular via a contemporary European artistic aesthetic, but the founders of these developments also brought an egalitarian approach with attention to developing a community ideal that contrasted the largely politically and socially conservative post-war suburbs. Levittown was about conforming to the new neat and largely homogeneous suburban idea of the American Dream, trimmed lawns hemmed in by squared fences. These Lexington modernist developments tended to encourage responsibility and cooperation in the neighborhood as a whole, with partnerships in the non-profit corporations formed to watch over the common areas and the upholding of the benign covenants.

The layout of the communities has allowed for a natural sort of privacy yet a community spirit was fostered and has continued to flourish in all of them. Peacock Farm celebrated its 50th anniversary in 2008. (See more about this and other modernist communities at www.Modernmass.com)

Chamberlain Cottage

Here is a link to more information on the Marcel Breuer/Walter Gropius Chamberlain Cottage in Wayland, MA