[MassHistPres] Boston Early Modern

[Ttorwig at aol.com]

_http://www.boston.com/news/local/massachusetts/articles/2009/05/24/a_look_a
t_the_hub_of_early_moderns/?page=full_ 
(http://www.boston.com/news/local/massachusetts/articles/2009/05/24/a_look_at_the_hub_of_early_moderns/?page=full
)  
The  Observer 
A  look at the hub of early moderns 
Bauhaus  design found a following in Greater Boston 
By  _Sam Allis_ 
(http://search.boston.com/local/Search.do?s.sm.query=Sam+Allis&camp=localsearch:on:byline:art)   
Globe  Columnist /  May 24, 2009  
Boston  has been accused of many things, but being a hotbed of 
distinguished modern  architecture is not one of them. 
Chicago,  L.A., and  Houston, yes, but not the Hub of the Solar System. For 
the longest time, the  city's low skyline was defined by the charming, 
tiresome, red brick of our  Colonial past. This was our conceit. We were proud 
of it and visitors  swooned. 
In  the 1980s, we saw a spasm begin of forgettable modern buildings in 
Boston. I'm thinking of  ones like One Devonshire  Place, the generic downtown 
structure of glass and  steel. Most of our modern office buildings are 
mediocre. The notable exception  is the John Hancock Tower, which everyone 
excoriated when it went up as a blot  on our fragile sense of scale. 
But  Greater Boston turns out to have been, along with greater Los Angeles, 
the center of  early modernism in this country. Who knew? The Observer sure 
didn't until Keith  Morgan, who teaches the history of architecture at 
Boston University, took me on a tour last week to  prove it. 
Early  modernism was the revolution in design that ran from the early 1930s 
through the  mid-1950s, influenced heavily by the Bauhaus school in Germany 
founded  by Walter Gropius in 1919. He also founded the influential The 
Architects  Collaborative in Cambridge in 1945. 
The  Bauhaus design is known for its simple white facades, cubic, 
flat-roofed  buildings with great use of ribbon windows. But early modernism here 
also drew  from Frank Lloyd Wright and modern movements in Europe - thus 
appropriating the broader term  "International Style." Whatever you called it, 
H.H. Richardson it was  not. 
One  of the finest examples of Bauhaus in the area is the Gibbs House at 6 
Chilton Street in  Brookline, amid  rows of Tudor revivalist brick homes. Dr 
Frederick and Erna Gibbs vacationed in  Germany in the 1930s and were 
smitten  by the Bauhaus design. They returned with a mission to replicate here 
what they  saw there. Architect Samuel Glazer designed a beauty - a 
substantial home with  white concrete facade, flat-roofed, full of square glass blocks 
that must have  stunned everyone else on Chilton. 
I  say "Greater Boston" about early modernism because most of the prime 
examples  are located in the suburbs north and west of the city - places like 
Lexington, Belmont, and  Lincoln.  Lexington has  more examples of early 
modernism than any other community, says Morgan. "One  project spawned another," 
he says. 
Morgan  showed me the Lexington enclaves of Six Moon Hill Road,  built in 
the late 1940s, and the larger Peacock Farm development, begun in the  early 
1950s. Also the smaller Belmont community on Snake Hill Road,  where the 
noted architect Carl Koch designed nine homes, including one for  himself, in 
the early 1940s. These are small wooden, flat-roofed houses in earth  tones 
and a lot of glass to merge with landscape. 
All  of these suburban enclaves were designed to accommodate young 
professionals and  their families entering postwar society. We're talking artists, 
academics,  fellow architects, engineers - people on tight budgets - who 
wanted to live in  nature. These houses look small today, inside and out. The 
Gropius house in  Lincoln, a National Historic Landmark, is all of 2,400 
square feet. I found it  claustrophobic. But then small houses are in vogue now, 
as we move to what  architect and early modernism preservationist Gary Wolff 
calls "the not so big  house" with a small carbon footprint. 
At  least these early moderns improved on the traditional Cape house, a 
small, depressing structure notorious for  dark, cramped rooms, low ceilings, 
and tiny windows. The modern house had more  open space, better light. What 
space it had was flexible, and linked with the  environment. "They were very 
Yankee," says Morgan. "They were cheap, small  20th-century equivalents of 
the houses of the first  settlers." 
I  wouldn't have looked twice at the aging wooden houses on Snake Hill Road 
had  Morgan not explained their significance. By now, they appear 
nondescript and  insubstantial. Many of the early moderns look a bit rundown, and, 
says Morgan,  maintenance can be a problem with them. Beyond that, the early 
moderns became  victims of their own success and increasingly produced  
yawns. 
The  early modern movement didn't stop in the mid-1950s so much as lose its 
early  purity. It got modified, endlessly, over time. For example, deck 
houses, whose  bloodlines run straight back to the early modern movement, 
became as common as  the Golden Arches of McDonald's 
Or  worse. In 1964, Peabody Terrace, the ghastly modern housing for married 
Harvard  students along Memorial  Drive appeared, the progeny of the early 
moderns.  Morgan tells me it actually won awards. I speak for many in 
declaring it one of  the major eyesores in the Western  Hemisphere. 
And  then came the challenge to the early moderns in the 1970s by the 
preservationist  juggernaut that arose to protect much older buildings of 
historical  significance. It remains much easier to gather support to preserve an 
early  18th-century home than an early modern one appreciated by a relative  
few. 
Still,  Boston wasn't  the flop I assumed when it comes to modern 
architecture. It was an incubator of  early modernism. But like so much else in the 
city and its surroundings, someone  has to tell you it's there in the first 
place. 
Sam  Allis can be reached at _allis at globe.com_ (mailto:allis at globe.com) .  
©  Copyright 2009 Globe Newspaper  Company.
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