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Die Dunenmodern: Wo Architekten urlauben, werben Cottage-Traume real: Dreißig Jarhre lang setze die US-Gestalterlite kuhne Sommerhauser in den Sand von Cape Cod.
(Dune Modernism: Where architects on vacation made dream-cottages real: 30 years of elite US designers setting bold summer houses in the sands of Cape Cod )
By Nora Sobich
German Translation by Lee Desrosiers (lee.desrosiers@yahoo.com)
ARCHITECTURAL DIGEST GERMANY
MAY 2009
For such large pot holes one must be thankful for four wheel drive. One-track roads wind away near the small town of Wellfleet. Pines reminiscent of fairy tales line the bumpy paths throughout the wild growth of the protected forests of Cape Cod. Although the Ocean is nowhere in sight, its salty taste still lingers about 2 kilometers from the coast. The name “Saarinen” is written in oil paint on a piece of drift-wood nailed to a tree. There is a summer house situated on a slope, ideally located on isolated Herring Pond, one of the many ponds strung like pearls through the landscape. Olav Hammarstrom who worked in the architecture office of Finnish-American, Eero Saarinen, built this house for Saarinen's first wife Lily. No bigger than a cottage it has two flat roofed pavilions bound together by a long wooden deck. Until recently the property has been family-owned. Now it is up for sale for three million dollars. Just a few minutes down the pine needle laden road there is another name written on a sign: “Breuer” it reads this time, however the driveway is blocked by a thick rope, and the view of the property is obstructed by trees.
Hidden within the dune forests of Massachusetts are the works of the prominent architects of modernism. Also immersed in the woods is the next sign that reads “Chermayeff,” a long time partner of Erich Mendelsohn. On a Wellfleet pond-access road, he erected three summer houses in the mid 40’s along Black Pond Road. Further construction in the area followed. Shining forth from afar, through the needled forest are flat-roofed boxes with white framed façades in a colored, triangle composition.
Caption (a) Marcel Breuer built his house on stilts in order to keep the landscape pristine. In the seclusion of the Outer Cape he and his wife Constance and son Thomas look at home in exile.
Caption (b) Serge Chermayeff built the prototype of his dune houses (see sketch) on a property in Wellfleet. The Cape Cod Modern House Trust works for the preservation of these houses.
For over a century, Cape Cod has not only attracted summer vacationers, but also many writers and artists like Eugene O’Neill, John Dos Passos and Edward Hopper. And for about three decades it was an under-the-radar playground for modern architects. A two hour car ride from Wellfleet brings you to Cambridge, where Walter Gropius and Marcel Breuer taught at Harvard and MIT. Being European immigrants in the 40’s, they were proponents of the modern European style of the late 30’s. They seized the unique opportunity to erect these bungalows. And so it became the traditional vacation spot for Bostonians and an idyllic experimental forest for modern architects.
No one really needs a tour guide to find innovative vacation homes around here. Emerging from the forested seaside of the Outer Cape in the fishing towns Wellfleet, Truro and Provincetown are numerous, functional Shoe-box houses that have been holding up for a good century or more. The Bauhaus-oriented modern summer houses stand out among the innumerable weather beaten, cedar shingled cottages and motels. The new residences were not luxurious villas or monumental vacation homes, but rather Spartan-style huts that stood on stilts in the sandy soil, keeping a good foundation intact and disturbing nature as little as possible.
The landscape of the Outer Cape allowed many architects to gather openly in an artist colony like no other. They began by traveling there only in the summer months. Some would soon stay for the whole year, like Serge Chermayeff, who later died in Wellfleet. Hammarstrom was also a year-round resident of the dunes, where he designed many houses until his death. Marcel Breuer came to Cape Cod because of an invitation from his friend Chermayeff, and found there something like a home in exile. In the 40’s, Breuer erected four buildings in Wellfleet, one for him and his wife. He would always return here until his death in 1981. Not far from his residence on Herring Pond lies his grave, marked by a stone that he brought home with him from Japan.
Caption (c) Jack Hall built this minimalist, site specific work of art for the publisher Robert Hatch, whose widow still spends her vacations here. The eccentric designer was nick-named the “Squire of Bound Brook”.
Caption (d) Charles Zehnder following his studies moved to Wellfleet where he designed over 40 Frank Lloyd Wright inspired houses in between the dunes, salt ponds and beaches. His “Kugel/Gips” house is now undergoing restoration.
Wellfleet, as opposed to the bustling Provincetown of today had a quieter cultural significance on the Outer Cape, and it was stirring in a bungalow colony on a hill overlooking the coast. In 1949 the Boston architects Nathaniel Saltonstall and Oliver Morton put up a dozen pavilions and called the ensemble the “Mayo Hill Colony Club”. Paul Newman, Faye Dunaway and the publisher Alfred A. Knopf Jr. had spent a summer here. Something began to take effect in the little colony where many prosperous art collectors would rented space and discovered the charm of life on Cape Cod. They would soon seek out Saltonstall and Morton to design their own cottages. Like Paul Krueger, a graduate of Harvard who worked with the Le-Corbusier-Alumni Josep Lluis Sert and Jerzy Soltan, who became an innovator (Auftraege) of avante-garde architecture in the 60’s and 70’s on the Outer Cape. The “Mark House” in Truro with its trapezoidal structure, won many prizes thanks to a panoramic view from the south side, you can enjoy a spectacular view out of three floors. It is still enjoyed today by the original owners.
Caption (e) Nathaniel Saltonstall and Oliver Morton founded the “Mayo Hill Colony Club”, an artists’ colony, for whom the bungalows were designed.
Caption (f) Paul Krueger a Harvard graduate was commissioned for numerous houses on the Cape. His bold “Mark House” from 1966, earned him many awards. It is a simple barn-like structure.
The apparent urban style work of the Cape Cod Moderns originates from the Walter Gropius firm, The Architects Cooperative, (TAC). In 1959 a glass, flat-roofed-palace was erected for the psychologist and publisher Carl Murchison. It sits at the tip of Provincetown on a three and a half acre property with a view of the marsh where herons stand, seagulls circle, and there is light even when there are clouds or when the day has passed, and swank parties, with the likes of Frank Sinatra and the painter Hans Hoffman, brought a big city glamour to the laid-back natural surroundings.
The family was in residence there until this last year, now it is up for sale. Many worried that it would be torn down and built up with gigantic mansions. Yet the fears were premature: to have the property demolished would cost six million dollars.
Gropius offered his advice in the beginning of the 60’s to the newly founded “Cape Cod National Seashore”. The buildings for the new National Park had to developed with a certain architectural identity. The rustic-american-style with sedate block houses fit little with the soft landscape. So Walter Gropius advised them to take a modern focus. And so it arose – in complete contrast to the complaisant (gefaelligen) Cape-Cod-Cliché. With a design focus on light and function, a regional style was created. From today’s perspective it is possible to call the man who came up with the idea back then down-right revolutionary. The “Salt Pond Visitor Center” built in 1965, has a winter garden window panorama arranged so visitors get an immediate experience of the adjacent salt pond. To secure its preservation it was declared a historic monument in 2000.
Since that time the administration has been busy with the modern summer houses of Cape Cod that are rapidly deteriorating, standing up to the harsh weather on the dunes. 2006 marked the Provincetown Art Association and Museum’s first exhibit of the nearly forgotten modern houses. Soon after the exhibit, the “Cape Cod Modern House Trust” was organized with the goal of documenting this architecture movement and interpret its meaning for the laymen. The annual gathering arranged by the Trust (the next is to be held in August) is attracting wide interest. Soon a select number of houses will be restored and made accessible to the public. Five houses are owned by the Cape Cod National Seashore and will be renovated by the Trust. The first project is devoted to the “Kugel/Gips” house, built in 1970 by Charles Zehnder. In the spirit of Frank Lloyd Wright, the living space embraces its landscape and surroundings. “As soon as we are finished, this will be the jewel of our tours and exhibitions”, explained Peter McMahon, the chairman of the Trust.
Similar action will be taken with the other four houses. “We would like to invite some artists to live there for a few months”, says McMahon. He started the organization in 2007, after he co-curated the exhibit of the Cape Cod Moderns in Provincetown, which brought the astonishing multiplicity and diversity of these structures into focus for the first time. McMahon grew up in one of these modern houses. “When I was a child I would spend the summer on the Cape, and when I was ten, my parents hired Charles Zehnder as the architect for our summer place. We watched the construction process and one time even spent the night in the unfinished house. In my youthful wanderings through the woods I discovered other experimental summer houses. Naturally I couldn’t imagine then, how unusual they were.”
One of McMahon’s favorites, the “Hatch Cottage”, one of the five buildings owned by the Seashore, with its overdrawn, Balkan-style patio, is by the architect and designer Jack Hall. Hall, an artist, used to drive an old Rolls Royce and was ironically called the “Squire of Bound Brook”. He worked with Charles and Ray Eames and George Nelson. In 1960, this impressive retreat was erected on the outer reaches of a sand bank (Bound Brook Island) for Robert Hatch, the publisher of a left oriented magazine “the Nation”.
Off of a windy road surrounded by woods between South Truro and Wellfleet we turned onto a single lane dirt road lined with gnarly pitch pines. It was just after our breakfast at a Band B in Provincetown, the drizzle coated the tree branches like a summer rain. It was fresh and even spring like. The winding path brought us closer to the ocean, pot hole after pot hole, until eventually we came upon a weathered wooden sign that read “Hatch”. The panorama of the Hatch Cottage is a simply stunning view of the coast, practically sweeping the viewer out to sea. Skeletal like a carcass, it sits on the hillside facing Cape Cod Bay, less like a modern shoebox than a geometric-minimalist landscape-sculpture. Upon approaching one notices the boarded up windows all grey and silver-green, with moss growing on the wood showing signs of decay. It looks like the property has been empty for years, but of course the widow of Robert Hall still spends her summers here. I even notice in these early morning hours, fresh tire tracks in front of the house left by someone else. In spite of its isolation – and the however many other experiments in the sand dunes – its not so secret anymore, rather, it is becoming the new attraction next to lobsters, lighthouses, and landscape for the urban vintage-set.
The drizzle let up, a rainbow stretched across the radiant blue sky. And after years of tourism on Cape Cod, in many cases it still remains a paradise. Breuer and Co. sure picked the right spot.