Charlie Zehnder Gips House

Charlie Zehnder
   Charles (“Charlie”) Zehnder’s father was a successful physician with an office in Newark, New Jersey. Charlie attended the University of Virginia, where he spent one long evening with a group of other students and Frank Lloyd Wright, an event that had a lifelong impact.
    He received a degree in industrial design from The Rhode Island School of Design and, immediately after leaving the Marine Corps in 1957, came to the Cape to help his friend, Ray Brock, build a house in Truro. Settling into Wellfleet, he bought some land on the bayside and started an architectural practice which ultimately produced over forty highly original houses, all on the Outer Cape. He also was one of the prime movers behind building the local drive-in movie theater on what was once an asparagus field.
   Zehnder creatively cross-pollinated with the prominent Modernists who had settled in Wellfleet before him while maintaining his own maverick approach to architecture. He was influenced by Wright and Thomas Jefferson (both as an architect and inventor), and by the geometric, concrete bunker fortifications at Normandy. His restless experimen-tation with geometries and materials led to a body of work, remarkable for its intimate relationship with the Cape’s terrain, climate and lifestyle of informal creativity. Most of his clients were artists and writers and many became lasting, close friends.
    If he had money he would often buy a car on the spot, and sometimes give it away, just as spontan-eously, to someone who needed it. Charlie loved cars, boats and aero planes, saying that they were designed honestly.
   He died in an accident in Wellfleet in 1985.