Mass Modern

One of the first Five Fields houses, Lexington, MA. Photo by Jeph Foust. To see renovation blog of this house, see:
e-volvedliving.com/440/ and Jephfoust.com


Modernism in Mid-Century Massachusetts

Mention the town Lexington to people, and if they have any impression of the place at all, it no doubt consists of tricorne hats, muskets, and guys in knee-high knickers on a town green fending off red-coated British Regulars on a frosty New England April morning. Asking them to pull their focus out a little further, and folks might now picture that triangle of green grass surrounded by neat, center-entrance, white-clapboarded Federalist, saltbox, and Greek Revival-style homes. And these people would not be wrong; the past is well preserved in this colonial-era town.

This scope, however, is woefully limited. There are many eras of significant architecture represented in this town of approximately 30,000 residents. In addition to the authentic colonials, Lexington contains fine specimens of other architectural styles: Victorian, Colonial Revival, Craftsman, 1950s split-level, farmhouses, and simple capes and ranches. But as one tour through such mid-century modernist neighborhoods as Moon Hill, Five Fields, and Peacock Farm will demonstrate, this ain’t no Colonial Williamsburg or Olde Sturbridge Village, a town trapped in time.

As post-war America expanded out into the suburbs, Boston saw the rise of the metro belt highway Route 128 play a significant factor in the draw of professors, engineers, architects and other professionals out to erstwhile rural towns. Not everyone who searches for a home or who lives in Lexington is looking for an antique house, or even what might be considered “traditional” American architecture. In the 1950s, the overall optimism felt about the future and the promise of technology to enhance our lives, as well as the changing nature of family life, can be seen reflected in the architectural vernacular of the time.


A Moon Hill house, Lexington, MA. Photo courtesy of Pradeepa Siva and Talbott Crowell, taken by Jason Williams, smdwilliams@gmail.com

In 1947, one young group of forward-thinking architects, The Architects’ Collaborative (TAC), founded by Bauhaus pioneer, Walter Gropius -- who had fled Germany and joined Harvard University Graduate School of Design -- purchased 20 acres of land on the east-central side of Lexington and formed a non-profit corporation for the community they named Six Moon Hill. On a cul-de-sac, they set aside common land to leave as open space, including an area with a swimming pool. They built about 24 houses in the International modernist style: walls of glass, open floor plans, flat or slant roofs, simple and inexpensive materials, austere lines, nestled thoughtfully into the landscape. Though they at first might have seemed out of place—European modernist statements plopped down in the middle of wooded Lexington and adjacent to farms—they actually reflected the old clichés regarding New England Yankee frugality, sensibility, and working with materials at hand. As an article in the Boston Globe pointed out not too long ago, the houses of Moon Hill “remain remarkably unpretentious and livable.” And, when one stops to think about it, what would have been more out of place than Grecian columns on a farmhouse in the middle of a New England field when those originally started appearing? The Moon Hill houses were as unassuming, if not more so, than the good old white-clapboarded colonials dotting the town. Unlike reproductions of that familiar style, the modernist architects saw no need to busy up the facades of their homes with fake shutters, mullioned windows, cupolas and the like. And the use of rubber, tar and gravel, and other new building materials and techniques did away with the need for steeply gabled roofs to dump away the snow, rain and other byproducts of the New England climate.

A Moon Hill house, Lexington, MA. Photo courtesy of Pradeepa Siva and Talbott Crowell, taken by Jason Williams, smdwilliams@gmail.com

While the houses of 6 Moon Hill were mainly built as a community to house the highly collaborative TAC partners and associates themselves (Gropius built his own famous house out in the nearby town of Lincoln), the architects also conceived of their next such development of spec houses to sell to other home buyers and chose a farm on the southwestern part of town. The old Cutler Farm was purchased by the TAC and the young firm moved forward on their conception of a development that they would control from beginning to end. One of the original eight TAC partners, Dick Morehouse, who was a resident of Moon Hill, oversaw the project and even acted as a salesman, showing the new homes to interested buyers.

One of the first Techbuilt houses in the Turning Mill/Paint Rock neighborhood, Lexington, MA

The project was conceptualized as 68 house sites, though the initial phase consisted of 20 houses built in 1951, 1952, and 1953, the sales of which would finance the rest of the project. The original price points of these homes—some of which now fetch close to $2 million – ranged from about $18,000-35,000. As one of the other original partners, Chip Harkness, explained to the Boston Globe describing the goals of the TAC when they set out to build Moon Hill, “We were interested in down-to-earth socialist issues. An initial goal was low-income housing. We were shooting to build homes for under $15,000. That’s quite a bit less than the $1 million one of the houses recently went for.” Like Moon Hill, form followed function in the design of the houses, the homes were sited sympathetically into their surroundings and the existing contours of the land, and there was common land set aside and a swimming pool for the community. This community spirit carries on today in both Moon Hill and Five Fields.

An example of an expanded Peacock Farm house, Lexington, MA

The third important planned modernist development was started around the same time as Five Fields. “Peacock Farm” was just a stone's throw across Pleasant Street from the swimming pool of Moon Hill. This community was founded not by an architect associated with Harvard, as the TAC was, but by Walter Pierce, from Harvard’s Cambridge rival, MIT. As Laurie Atwater began her article in Lexington’s Colonial Times newspaper,

The cover of the Sunday edition of the New York Times for September 13, 1959 announced: Russians Fire Rocket to the Moon, Expected to Hit Target Today….

Inside the pages, a story from Lexington, Massachusetts: Colony of Contemporary Homes Will Be Repeated Near Boston.

Pierce started his own architecture firm with Danforth Compton after studying at MIT with (amongst others) Carl Koch, a former student of Gopius and a founding father of modern prefab housing in America as the founder of Techbuilt and Acorn Homes (we will recall the House by Mail Craftsman homes from Sears and Roebuck in the early-1900s). Compton and Pierce noticed a "for sale" sign off of Route 2, Peacock Farm Road, a turn off of Watertown Street in Lexington. There was a 45-acre farm filled with wetlands, ledge, and woods. The two architects set out to become the developers of the site, with a plan they referred to as the “Program.” The concept was to build modern, aesthetically progressive homes that would be from a stock design yet looked as if they were custom built for the land.

After initially designing one-floor houses and building a handful of them, Compton suddenly and unexpectedly passed away and Pierce went on to design what is now known as the Peacock Farm House, a modern split-level home that, as Atwater notes in her article, “allowed the home to be ‘of the hill,’ as Frank Lloyd Wright” espoused. The shape of this house style was flexible enough that it could adapt to flat or sloping lots. With some subtle variations, the typical Peacock Farm House had an entrance in the center of the broad side of the structure, a few steps up to a second floor consisting of three bedrooms and a bath or a bath and a half. There is the main floor with a kitchen, dining area and living room with a fireplace and exposed brick chimney. The structure was a basic post-and-beam system with few if any interior load-bearing walls, allowing for great flexibility in the floor plans, and many large windows unobstructed by sashes, mullions, or any unnecessary architectural features. A few steps to a lower level set in various depths of the grading of the site and sometimes a second lower level basement, depending on how much of a slope was present.

Interior, Techbuilt house in the Turning Mill/Paint Rock neighborhood, Lexington, MA

The Compton-Pierce team challenged the traditional notion of a house needing to be facing more or less square to the street. Free from this principal, they oriented the homes to be complimentary to the sites, taking advantage of the views and offering the sites the appearance of more space in between the houses. This was also counter to the trends of most modern developments, which seemed to operate from a scorched earth policy, clearing the land and plopping down cookie-cutter houses one after another and then possibly going back to plant saplings after the fact.

Many of these homes have been renovated and expanded over the years, much like those on Moon Hill and Five Fields. They seem very adaptable to such modifications. And most homeowners in these communities have adhered to the mild covenants that the original developers put into place to keep the communities aesthetically consistent. Note that I did not write, “homogeneous.” Modern, that is to say “present day” builders and developers should take note that a mish-mash neighborhood of new neo-colonial-Georgian-Victorians gussied up with various frills and flourishes is a less effective way of distinguishing a group of new houses from each other than the simple approach demonstrated by these forward-looking architects of the mid-century, using one or two plans and adapting them to the contours of the existing land with as little disturbance as possible to the existing conditions of the environment. Though these houses were not, as originally built, the most energy efficient by today’s standards, due to outdated heating systems, relatively little insulation, and large single-paned windows, they are easily retrofitted with updates for all of those components. They were, however, “green” from the get-go in their approach to land use, both in the conserving of the existing flora, with few having traditional lawns even today, minimizing impermeable surfaces (gravel driveways, e.g.), and reasonable lot sizes with larger amounts of common land for all to enjoy.

Which brings us to the socio-political philosophy that underlies these communities’ origins. Not only were these houses extraordinarily “new” in their styles, standing in stark contrast to the traditional New England vernacular via a contemporary European artistic aesthetic, but the founders of these developments also brought an egalitarian approach with attention to developing a community ideal that contrasted the largely politically and socially conservative post-war suburbs. Levittown was about conforming to the new neat and largely homogeneous suburban idea of the American Dream, trimmed lawns hemmed in by squared fences. These Lexington modernist developments tended to encourage responsibility and cooperation in the neighborhood as a whole, with partnerships in the non-profit corporations formed to watch over the common areas and the upholding of the benign covenants.

The layout of the communities has allowed for a natural sort of privacy yet a community spirit was fostered and has continued to flourish in all of them. Peacock Farm celebrated its 50th anniversary in 2008 and has published a commemoration booklet. Five Fields had done so a few years earlier. Clients of ours that moved into a Peacock Farm house in autumn 2008 were pleasantly surprised to have new neighbors continuously greeting them in their first weekend in their new home. And they couldn't wait for summer to roll around so they could meet even more around the community pool. There is not a high level of turnover in these neighborhoods, as people tend to stay part of the community, adapting the houses themselves to their changing needs. Some of the original architects still live in the houses they designed and new architects have moved into some others, embracing the forward-looking styles and ideals of their predecessors.

A Peacock Farm House, pre-renovation, Lexington, MA






Sources: Five Fields - Five Decades, a Community in Progress. Edited by Lilah Groisser and written by Florence Trefethen; "Was Six Moon Hill a Success?" Boston Globe Magazine, October 31, 2004. Rachel Strutt; "So Modern, The Contemporary Homes of Peacock Farms" Lexington's Colonial Times, September & October 2008. Laurie Atwater; "Bauhaus in the 'Burbs" Design New England September & October 2008. Bruce Irving; Wikipedia.