Others
The following individuals played an important role in the development of Modern architecture on the Outer Cape, although they fall outside the central focus of this study for reasons of locality, chronology, philosophy or by quantity of projects in the area.
Carmi Bee
Carmi Bee received his architectural degrees from
the Cooper Union and Princeton in the late 1960s,
studying with Bernard Spring, Robert Geddes, Michael Graves and John
Hejduk. Bee’s own house in
Truro (built in 1983) was inspired by Heduk’s neo-cubist, Day-Night
House in Los Angeles, the sine
curved rooftop of the Centre Le Corbusier, vernacular New England shingled
houses, and by “singular
elements of the international style”. Carmi is a long-term
summer resident of Truro.
Alan Dodge
Alan P. Dodge trained as an undergraduate in archi-tecture
at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. He
later received a Bachelor of Fine Arts in painting at the Rhode Island
School of Design. His love of
painting originally drew Alan to Cape Cod, where he summered in a self-made
ferro cemento shell
structure in the Provincetown dunes. Pairing up with local architect
Charlie Zehnder between 1959 and
1961, Alan experimented in the design/build tradition that had established
itself in Wellfleet. Their time
was divided between the drafting room and the construction site. In 1970,
Dodge started his own firm in
Wellfleet, having previously worked as an engineer, draftsman, designer,
builder and architect in other
firms and places across the country. Dodge developed his ideas for modular
housing with room units
called "Carapods" which cluster in various octagonal
patterns to suit site and program. In 1999, Alan
formed a partnership with fellow architect Joy Cuming and created Architects
Studio, Ltd., which
focuses on residential architecture, building and interior design. Alan
spends much of his time on a
project in Middleboro, Massachusetts, where he is creating a cluster
of houses designed as variations
on a basic prototype.
Walter Gropius
Walter Gropius, founder of the Bauhaus and
partner of Breuer, visited his many friends and collaborators in Wellfleet
during the mid twentieth century. His firm, The Architects Collaborative,
designed the Murchison House in Provincetown in 1959. His daughter, Ati
Gropius, still summers in Wellfleet as she has since the 1940s with her
husband, architect John Johansen. Ati has, over the years, given workshops
at the library illustrating Bauhaus principles and teaching techniques.
Charles Gwathmey
Charles Gwathmey became famous in the 60s as one of ‘The New York
Five’. One of the best known
and respected architects of the following decades, Gwathmey taught at
Yale, Harvard, and The Pratt
Institute, among other schools. He has received many honors, including
serving as the President of the
Board of Trustees for The Institute of Architecture and Urban Studies.
In 1968, Gwathmey Siegel built
the Cooper House in Orleans. Although flooded and battered in the ‘perfect
storm’ of 1991 and
drastically altered, it still stands.
Charles Jencks
Charles Jencks, born in 1939 in Baltimore, is one
of North America’s
best known architectural theorists
and critics, and is an accomplished architect and landscape architect.
His 1977 book, The Language of
Postmodern Architecture, and others, framed the debate, then raging,
on the legacy of Modernism and
the counter-revolutions that followed. His family first came to Wellfleet
in the 1940s, buying land on
Bound Brook Island and later from Jack Phillips. His own house is made
from two of the pre-fab
barracks Phillips erected on the surrounding land. ‘Garagia Rotunda’,
Jencks’ studio made out of a
ready-made garage, is a philosophical bookend to the Bauhaus experiments
built down the
road: All were do-it-yourself meditations on their creators’ principles.
John Johansen
Johansen studied under Gropius and Breuer when
they came to lead Harvard’s Graduate School of Design. He was one
of the ‘Harvard Five’; the other four were Philip Johnson,
Marcel Breuer, Landis Gores, and Eliot Noyes. He has been a bold and
innovative contributor to American architectural discourse for the last
60 years. He has summered in Wellfleet since the 1940s with his wife
Ati Gropius.
Jean Keaselo
Jean Keaselo was the son of Charles Keaselo, a Swedish
immigrant and well-known Provincetown
painter. When both of his parents became incapacitated, Jean was raised
by a series of local
luminaries, including the writer John Dos Passos. After three years of
architecture school, he married
Avis Perry, a woman from a local, Portuguese family, and together they
operated a design/build firm. They
built the Provincetown Airport and part of the Provincetown Art Association
and Museum. In 1954 they
built a copy of the ‘Lewis House’ by Long Island Modernist,
Robert Rosenberg. Plans for this radical
house on stilts were available through American House Magazine. He is
survived by his wife and
children, Treg, Breton, Gref and Odin.
Florence Knoll
After being orphaned at age 12, Florence Schust attended
Kingswood School in Bloomfield Hills,
Michigan, studying architecture under Eliel Saarinen and textile
design with his wife Loja Saarinen who
supervised the school's weaving studio. Florence then attended Cranbrook
for two years, studied at the
Architectural Association in London, interned with Gropius and Breuer,
and finished her architecture
degree at Illinois Institute of Technology under Mies Van de Rohe. After
working with and marrying Hans
Knoll, she succeeded in making licensing agreements which led to the
mass production of much of the
great, architect-designed furniture of the era. She became president
of Knoll International after her
husband’s death. Florence Knoll was an enormously talented furniture
designer in her own right, revolutionizing office furniture and work
environments. In 1961 she became the first woman to be
awarded the Gold Medal for Industrial Design by the American Institute
of Architects. She came to the
Cape first with the Saarinens and has vacationed in Wellfleet at many
points in her life.
Elliot Noyes
Mr. Noyes fused art, architecture, interiors, products
and graphics to construct a unique corporate
style. He was known as a consultant, as well as a creator, who influenced
the titans at IBM,
Westinghouse, Cummins and Mobil to become sponsors of applied futurism.
Noyes was the founding
member of the ‘Harvard Five’ (John Johanson was another)
and collaborated extensively with
pioneering graphic designer, Ivan Chermayeff (Serge’s son) to create
some of the best-known
American corporate logos and identities. He designed three houses on
Martha’s Vineyard, one of which was for his
family, where they still reside.
Anne Ozbekhan
Anne Ozbekhan was born in Glencoe outside Chicago.
She studied with Mies Van De Rohe at Illinois
Institute of Technology, graduating from the architecture school with
her brother Roy. She designed
three houses for herself. One in Rye, New York, was begun by Breuer in
1948. She was unhappy with
the design and took over. She designed her own house in Weston, Connecticut,
in 1950 with her first
husband, Paul Rand, Yale Professor and arguably the most influential
American graphic designer of the
20th century. In the ‘70s she designed a summer house in Truro,
where she lived with her second
husband, Hasan Ozbekhan, the economist, cyberneticist, and founder
of the global think tank,
The Club of Rome. The Truro house’s formal minimalism shows Mies’ influence;
it also has a sunny,
sheltered courtyard surrounded by fruit trees. Anne wrote the novel What
I Shall Cry, and four elegant
children’s books that were illustrated by Paul Rand. She was
close to Connie Breuer, the
Chermayeffs, and Jack Hall and his family.
The Saarinens
The Saarinen family, including renowned architects
Eliel and his son Eero, summered in Wellfleet
starting in the 1940s. It’s been reported that Serge Chermayeff
and Eero were sometimes seen rowing
a small boat around Slough Pond with a rock and string, making a chart
of the bottom and arguing
about architecture. Eero’s first wife, Lily, had Olav Hammarstrom
design a house nearby in which her
family still lives.
Henry Wright
Henry Wright was a talented architect as well as being
an editor of Architectural Forum Magazine and a
frequent collaborator with George Nelson. Nelson was the enormously influential
designer/writer/critic
who was the art director for Herman Miller during the years in which
that company, along with Knoll,
produced the bulk of the icons of mid twentieth century furniture. Wright
and Nelson together wrote
pivotal books, including Tomorrow’s House. They jointly
designed the Storage Wall, a system of
modular, free-standing, storage components that could be used to separate
rooms. Wright was a
familiar face in Wellfleet for many years, and was instrumental in planning
the relocation and expansion
of the library.