Summertime staff favorite 'Cape Cod Modern: Mid-Century Architecture and Community on the Outer Cape' is back in stock! ⠀ In summer 1937, Walter Gropius, founder of the Bauhaus and professor at Harvard’s new Graduate School of Design, rented a house on Planting Island, near the base of Cape Cod. There, he and his wife, Ise, hosted a festive reunion of Bauhaus masters & students who had recently emigrated from Europe: Marcel Breuer, Herbert Bayer, László Moholy-Nagy, Xanti Schawinsky & others. Together they feasted, swam & planned their futures on a new continent, all sensing they were on the cusp of a momentous new phase in their lives. Yet even as they moved on, the group never lost its connection to the Cape Cod coast. Several members returned, when they had the means, to travel farther up the peninsula, rent cabins, buy land & design their ideal summer homes. The flow of talent onto the Outer Cape continued &, within a few years, the area was a hotbed of intellectual currents from NY, Boston, Cambridge & the country’s top schools of architecture & design. Avant-garde homes began to appear in the woods & on the dunes; by the 1970s, there were about 100 modern houses of interest here. In this story, we meet, among others, the Boston Brahmins Jack Phillips & Nathaniel Saltonstall; the self-taught architect, carpenter & painter Jack Hall; the Finn Olav Hammarström, who had worked for Alvar Aalto; & the prolific Charlie Zehnder, who brought the lessons of both Frank Lloyd Wright & Brutalism to the Cape. Initially, these designers had no clients; they built for themselves & their families, or for friends sympathetic to their ideals. Their homes were laboratories, places to work through ideas without spending much money. The result is a body of work unlike any other, a regional modernism fusing the building traditions of Cape Cod fishing towns with Bauhaus concepts & postwar experimentation.⠀ ⠀ Marcel Breuer's Stillman House / Hayden Walling's Lechay House / György Kepes & Serge Chermayeff / Hayden Walling's Halprin House / Serge Chermayeff’s Wilkinson House / Jack Hall's Hatch House⠀ ⠀ #capecodmodern #bauhaus⠀ #capecodmodernhousetrust⠀ https://www.instagram.com/p/CAiQA1IJnpi/?igshid=1gv9z3mrh1lqx
