Culturally Curious: Revolutionary Design
On Thursday, May 25 at 7:00 p.m., I watched the Zoom webinar Revolutionary Design: Modern Architecture in New England hosted by Jane Oneail of Culturally Curious. This organization is based in Manchester, NH and focuses on history throughout New England. Each program is sponsored by a New England organization, with this webinar funded by Manchester City Library. Oneail focused her talk on five buildings, each constructed by a different architect.
The first building was Gropius House, a Historic New England property that I visited last year in July. Born in Germany in 1883, Walter Gropius survived World War I as a young adult and founded the Bauhaus style in 1919. The campus of the Bauhaus, designed by Gropius around 1926, is now a UNESCO World Heritage Site. His technique of using prefabricated industrial materials such as concrete and glass, preferring muted tones over bright colors, and building a streamline or even austere structure made his buildings popular around the world. Unfortunately, Adolf Hitler and the Nazis hated modernism in general, forcing Gropius to flee to the United States with his wife and daughter. Helen Storrow, the creator of Storrowton Village at the Big E and the wife of banker James Storrow for whom Storrow Drive in Boston, MA is named, gave four acres of land in Lincoln, MA to the Gropius family. In 1938, they built a 2,300 square foot Bauhaus style house containing three bedrooms, three bathrooms, a living-and-dining room, a kitchen, a study, and a second story porch. Highlights from this house include a metal spiral staircase on the outside wall, giant plate glass windows to produce passive solar energy, and a wall of bookshelves held up by industrial brackets. A friend of the Gropius family and fellow designer, Marcel Breuer, created the mid-century modernist furniture for the house and later built his home nearby. Today, the Friends of Modern Architecture (FoMA) in Lincoln is dedicated to preserving the many modernist homes in the area.
The second building was The Glass House in New Canaan, CT, part of a fifty-acre, fourteen building campus designed by Philip Johnson beginning in 1949. Johnson was a student of Gropius at Harvard Graduate School of Design along with classmate I.M. Pei whose firm designed the John Hancock Tower in Boston. Johnson’s own controversial Boston building was his addition to the Central Library of the Boston Public Library in Copley Square. As for The Glass House, Johnson built all walls of glass except for a red brick fireplace and bathroom. Mies van der Rohe, a colleague of Gropius, designed the simple furniture for the house. Johnson and his partner, art curator and Worcester, MA native David Whitney, found they could not live in the house. Besides a lack of privacy, intruders would sneak onto the property hoping to catch a glimpse of the famous artists. Additionally, the house became incredibly hot during the summer. Johnson and Whitney ended up using the property for parties with celebrity like Andy Warhol. Johnson built Brick House for guests and an underground bunker as a Painting Gallery in the 1960s. He intended the property to become a museum after his death, so he designed another building called Da Monsta as a “visitor services portal”. Inspired by the work of architect Frank Gehry, its weird angles cause vertigo and nausea in some visitors, prompting the museum to create a more convenient visitor center.
In 1950, a year after Johnson built The Glass House, Frank Lloyd Wright constructed the third building, Zimmerman House in Manchester, NH. Wright is best known for Fallingwater in southwestern Pennsylvania, which he constructed in 1935. While visually similar to this mansion, Wright designed the Zimmerman House in his Usonian style, intended as a high-end but affordable family home. Back in 1936, he had debuted this style with the Jacobs House or Usonia 1 in Madison, WI. As a two-bed, two-bath home with 1,800 square feet of space, the double income and no kids Zimmerman couple could easily afford the $60,000 price tag for the house, which is $750,000 today. Wright precisely designed every element of the house, scoring four-foot squares onto the Cherokee Red colored concrete floor to act as a base measurement. Four-foot square cushions rest on the long bench of the Garden Room below two-foot square concrete blocks with cutouts holding one-foot square panes of glass serving as windows. Additional four-foot square windows frame views of the backyard, creating an indoor-outdoor living space. An innovative lighting scheme, with lightbulbs half-hidden behind wooden slats in the ceiling, give the subtle illusion of sunlight filtering through the forest canopy, while red brick columns holding up the ceiling act like tree trunks. Similar to Johnson and Whitney, the Zimmermans wanted to preserve their special house, so the property is now owned by the Currier Museum of Art, along with Wright’s Usonian Automatic or Kalil House also located in Manchester.
At this point in the talk, Oneail shifted focus to discus libraries. Russian-Jewish architect Louis Kahn, who immigrated to the USA as a child, designed the library at Phillips Exeter Academy in Exeter, NH around 1972. I visited the campus last September 2022 but was unable to go inside the library, as school was in session. Medical researcher Jonas Salk funded the construction of the building, which cost $4 million, about $29 million today. He had previously hired Kahn in 1965 to create the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in La Jolla, CA, about twenty minutes north of San Diego, and his son attended Phillips Exeter. Most buildings in the area are in the Georgian Revival style, and Kahn drew inspiration from that architecture. He used locally made rough red bricks to create a nine-story structure, the largest secondary school library in the world. Kahn posthumously received the American Institute of Architects’ Twenty-five Year Award in 1997 for this innovative design.
The fifth and final building was the reimagined William Allan Neilson Library, originally funded by philanthropist Andrew Carnegie in 1905. Since then, too many wings were added to the original building, creating a dark, labyrinth-like structure. Chinese-American architect Maya Lin, who first debuted on the American architecture scene after winning the Vietnam Veterans Memorial contest as an undergraduate at Yale, took on the $120 million project in honor of her mother, who fled Communist China as a teenager with her acceptance letter to Smith College sewn into her clothes. The surrounding campus and botanical gardens at Smith College predate the original library building, as they were design by the firm of Boston-based landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted in 1893. Lin’s renovation involved ripping down all of the extraneous wings and most of the old building. They new library better compliments the original gardens than the previous structures. The main section retains a red brick New England college character, while the many windows of the branches allow plenty of light into the space. A sunken garden at one side of the library is dedicated to Lin’s mother, and a built-in amphitheater hosts outdoor college gatherings. This new library opened in March 2021 during the COVID-19 pandemic. I have not visited Smith College for several years but will return the next time I am in the Northampton area to explore this library.
Oneail gave a fast-past tour of five remarkable structures in Massachusetts and New Hampshire. She has an astounding amount of knowledge about these buildings, and showcased beautiful photography on her slides. Unfortunately, five historically significant buildings in an hour was too much. Some slides felt rushed, especially towards the end of the webinar, and the talk finished fifteen minutes past the hour. This presentation would be stronger by focusing on either the three houses or the two libraries, slowing down the pace, and providing more information about the design choices and the lives of the architects. Overall, I greatly enjoyed Revolutionary Design, and I hope to attend more talks by Oneail in the future.