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Scarcity and Plenty, Experimentation and Nostalgia

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Scarcity and Plenty, Experimentation and Nostalgia RE Scarcity and Plenty, ctu Experimentation E T and Nostalgia I MID-TWENTIETH-CENTURY ARCHITECTURE ON CAPE COD ch By John R. DaSilva R A A TwENTY-FIRST-CENTURY ATTENTION TO MID-TWENTIETH-CENTURY MODERNISM R as an architectural style is confirmed nationally byDwell , a consumer magazine; Design Within ch Reach, a retail company selling mid-century modern furniture to the public; and several books focused on enclaves of houses from this era across the country. Preservation groups have been formed nationwide to save threatened Modernist neighborhoods and houses and to educate the public about them. Even traditionally conservative groups, such as the Society for the Pres- I ervation of New England Antiquities (today called Historic New England), now pay attention to T Modernism. The Gropius House of 1938 in Lincoln, Massachusetts, is the one twentieth-century E property in its thirty-six-house collection. Also, confirming popularity among design profes- sionals, most of the houses featured in the professional and academic architectural press over ctu the last twenty years have been inspired by Modernism. Cape Cod has a concentration of Modernist recently, Cape Cod Modern: Midcentury Architecture and houses, mostly in Wellfleet and Truro but with Community on the Outer Cape by Peter McMahon and important individual examples elsewhere. There Christine Cipriani (Metropolis Books, 2014). are also little-known planned Modernist neighbor- Cape Cod Modern follows McMahon’s important hoods in Wellfleet (Mayo Hill Colony Club, 1949), work establishing Cape Cod Modern House Trust, RE Yarmouth (Salt Box Association, 1938—artist George an organization devoted to saving and restoring Mod- Grosz’s early getaway), and Falmouth (Bywater Court, ernist houses on the Outer Cape. McMahon and Cip- 1940). Since the 2006 show at the Provincetown Art riani’s depth of coverage, the first of its kind, does a Association and Museum A Chain of Events: Marcel great service to the architectural history of the Cape. Breuer to Charles Jencks, Modernist Architecture on the They categorize Modernist houses in Wellfleet and Outer Cape (catalogue essay by Michael Hays), the Truro (with one exception each in Orleans and Dennis) region’s Modernist houses have been featured in the into three overlapping phases. The first started in the 2013 documentary Built on Narrow Land, and in books late 1930s with the introduction of Modernism to the such as Artists’ Handmade Houses by Michael Gotkin Outer Cape by a small group of bohemian “Boston (Abrams, 2011), Tomorrow’s Houses: New England Mod- Brahmins,” who were highly educated, artistic, and ernism by Alexander Gorlin (Rizzoli, 2011), and, most worldly. They were self-taught as designer-builders and 146 PROVINCETOWNARTS 2014 In contrast to its revolutionary avant-garde origins, Modernism has become since the 1970s a historical style open for nostalgia, revival, preser- vation, and historical interpretation like any other architectural genre. Professional and academic attention, however, has not affected the desires of the majority of homeowners. The public has never been sold on Modernism as a house style. Without the representation, metaphors, quota- tions, irony, and symbolism that serve to connect the present to the past—without the legibility that connects the built environment to ideas—many are alienated. Most homes built throughout the United States, including Cape Cod, are based on premodern house styles. Gorlin’s beautiful, and beautifully written, book celebrates regional Mod- ernism but rightly points out that Modernism as a house style was ultimately a failed experiment. McMahon and Cipriani focus on Cape Cod Modernism as evolved from a tradition of scarcity that produced the Cape Cod cottage house type as an honest solution to subsistence in the eighteenth century. There is, however, an alternate tradition of plenty that is equally prevalent in the region. Fre- quently, as soon as nineteenth-century owners of Capes could afford it, they transformed their sim- ple cottages with additions and renovations using Greek, Gothic, or other more elaborate revival ele- ments. Areas of wealth, such as Old Kings Highway on the Upper and Mid Cape, or Provincetown’s East and West Ends, produced houses in an array THE KEPES HOUSE BY MARCEL BREUER of wealth-displaying styles visually unrelated to the (WeLLFLEET, 1949) REPRESENTS THE SECOND PHASE OF MODERNISM ON Cape Cod cottage. Methodist campgrounds were THE CAPE, WHEN EUROPEAN EXPATS developed with lightly structured but elaborately CREATED INEXPENSIVE BUT ELEGANT ornamented cottages that were, like Jencks’s proj- AND idea-rich HIDEAWAYS (in THE ect, tectonically a part of the tradition of scarcity SPARTAN TRADITION OF SCARCITy) FOR ARTISTS AND INTELLECTUALS SUCH but with visual affectation implying the tradition AS GYORGY AND JULIET KEPES AND of plenty. Grand mansions and hotels were built in FOR THEMSELVES. THE FOUR HOUSES classical, Shingle Style, and even occasionally Med- BREUER BUIlt IN WELLFLEET SHARE iterranean styles. While Thoreau made it clear in THE SAME BASIC ELEMENTS: LONG, LOW FORMS; SHAllOW SHED ROOFS; Cape Cod that he hated revivalism, it is as important STUDIED PROPORTIONS; AND SIMPLE a determinant of the built environment on Cape BUT WARM MATERIALS SUCH AS THOSE Cod as any original architecture, either ancient IN THE KEPES LIVING ROOM. PHOTO © RAIMUND KOCH “Capes” or avant-garde “contemporaries.” COURTESY METROPOLIS BOOKS Today, those with Modernist bias sometimes display derision toward recent architectural trends in the region with phrases like “Shingle committed to a “do-it-yourself” mentality. They the “Brutalist” use of concrete as both structural Style mini-mansions” and “decades of conspic- also sought a Thoreau-like escape into experimen- and finish material. The final project featured in uous consumption,” referring to the period tal living close to nature and practiced Minimal- the book, Charles Jencks’s “Garagia Rotunda,” after Modernism. Yet one of the finest Mod- ist aesthetics based on knowledge of avant-garde shares its experimental stance, ad-hoc tectonics, ernist houses on the Cape, designed by Walter European Modernism. European intellectual and utopian get-away-in-nature location with the Gropius and his firm the Architects Collabora- architects who, beginning in the 1940s, summered earlier work, but not its intellectual or aesthetic tive, the Murchison House (1956) in Province- and built on the Cape after fleeing World War II– point of view, which are Post-Modernist. This proj- town, was, like nearby Land’s End (1904), large, era oppression and joining American universities, ect introduced representation—anathema in pure expensive, and on a highly visible hilltop—a characterize the second phase. This phase shared architectural Modernism but important in virtu- “mini-mansion” displaying the owner’s wealth many aspects with the first, including tectonics of ally all previous eras. It included ornament that and taste but in a Modernist rather than Shingle scarcity (lightweight construction, inexpensive/ referenced pre-Modernist historical architecture Style mode. Modernist architects were happy to recycled materials used in strictly honest ways), synthesized with De Stijl (early Modernist abstract design showplaces for clients willing and able to reductivist aesthetics, and abstraction. It largely compositional approach), creating a complex, mul- pay for them—happy to be a part of a conspicuous resulted, however, in work with more sophisticated tivalent whole. Jencks used materials in a represen- tradition of plenty, even though their own Cape formal, spatial, and landscape interaction qualities. tational rather than “honest” way—in one example, retreats were more likely to be spare, hidden, and The third phase, Late Modernism, occurred in wood was given the pattern and proportions of experimental personal utopias. They understood the 1960s and ’70s with disparate strains: a revival stone. Materials for Jencks did not have to be sim- what architectural historian and Harvard pro- of heroic 1920s European Modernism, the incor- ply beautiful unto themselves, but could also (or fessor Neil Levine wrote in Modern Architecture: poration of vernacular American forms, inspiration alternatively) be beautiful, or just interesting, as Representation and Reality: “The ‘show’ aspect has from Frank Lloyd Wright’s “Usonian” houses, and signs pointing to or standing in for something else. always been a significant feature of architectural PROVINCETOWNARTS.ORG 147 THE HATCH HOUSE BY JACK HALL (WeLLFLEET, 1962) IS PERHAPS THE MOST SOPHISTICATED WORK BY A DESIGNER WITH ORIGINS IN THE FIRST PHASE OF MODERNISM ON THE CAPE. HE CAME TO THE CAPE IN THE LATE 1930S AND BROUGHT HIS WORLDLY INTEREST IN MODERNISM WITH HIM. A CRISPLY EXECUTED Three-diMENSIONAL GRIDDED FRAMEWORK ORGANIZES THE ENTIRE HATCH HOUSE AND IMPLIES ENCLOSURE FOR CIRCULATION SPACE THAT IS OTHERWISE OPEN TO THE ELEMENTS. THIS ORGANIZING PRINCIPLE FOR INDOOR/OUTDOOR SPACE MAY BE IMPRACTICAL FOR DAILY LIVING BUT REPRESENTS A DISCIPLINED ARCHITECTURAL IDEA. PHOTOS © RAIMUND KOCH, COURTESY OF METROPOLIS BOOKS expression and, in most cultures and periods, has celebrated only the old-fashioned. Their work cre- living. When Edward Hopper bought his house in been what distinguishes architecture from mere ated a narrative fiction establishing a conservative Truro, he consulted with Wills on the renovation. building.” image for the built environment that suited those His wife, Jo, wrote letters (archived
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