About CCMHT
Legislation was introduced to create the National Park Service (NPS) Cape Cod National Seashore in
1959, and for the next two years, while it was debated, over one hundred houses were built within the
park boundaries, including seven significant modern ones. When the legislation passed in 1961, freezing
all new development, the homeowners were bought out and the new houses were slated for eventual
demolition. The seven NPS-owned modern houses fell into administrative limbo, where they have
languished ever since, most of them empty and deteriorating.
The Cape Cod Modern House Trust (CCMHT) was founded in 2007 as a grassroot organization with
the mission of preventing the demolition of this group of significant modern houses owned by the National
Park Service (NPS) on outer Cape Cod, and of renovating and repurposing these structures as loci for
creativity and scholarship, as well as locating and archiving all available related materials. The more
than ninety modern houses in the area represent a little-known cultural asset. CCMHT has leased and
restored the first of these abandoned, federally owned houses (the Kugel/Gips house, 1970, Charles
Zehnder) and has begun using it as the base for an off-season artist/scholar residency program. During
the peak season the house is rented out, making the project economically self-sustaining. We are awaiting
leases from the NPS for two additional houses in 2012.
Through tours, symposia, collaborations with schools of architecture (e.g., the Wentworth Institute in
spring 2012) and its residency program, CCMHT strives to bring fresh thinking to regional problems of
gentrification, lack of affordable housing, moribund employment for young people, the need for off-season
cultural tourism and coexistence with a fragile environment.
We have sought to make an impact through physical restoration of the derelict houses by catalyzing
a wide range of people to see the value of their local, modern legacy, and by reintroducing the ideas
embodied in the work of these experimental, eco-sensitive visionaries who built these houses.
In our first year of artist/scholar residencies we have hosted British architect John Pawson; design activist
Bryan Bell; earth/ installation artists Smudge Studio; filmmaker Erika Beckman and painters Doug Padget
and Irene Lipton. All presented their work publicly, either through local lectures and events or through
entries on our blog.
We are presently writing a book, which is part cultural history and part tectonic analysis of the local modern
houses, and have collected a great deal of primary source material, including oral histories, photographs
and drawings from the descendants of the modern architects, many of whom still live here. Walter
Gropius’s daughter, Ati, for example, lives in Wellfleet year-round and still teaches Josef Albers’s Black
Mountain College paper-folding classes at the town library.
Central to our project is the idea that buildings and landscapes bear cultural memories and ideologies.
Our goal is to extend the usefulness of these buildings in their extraordinary landscapes. To to use the
buildings and the tradition of free-thinking problem-solvers to nurture new creativity and address
contemporary issues of community, sustainability and built form.