In the summer of 1937, Walter Gropius, founder of the Bauhaus, rented a house on Planting Island, near the base of Cape Cod. Thus began a chapter in the history of modern architecture that has never been told _until now. The area was a hotbed of intellectual currents from New York, Boston, Cambridge and the country's top schools of architecture and design. Avant-garde homes began to appear in the woods and on the dunes; by the 1970s, there were about 100 modern houses of interest here.

Introduction -- Sixteenth-century England -- Early seventeenth century -- Late seventeenth century -- Characteristics of the Cape Cod house -- Historic homes -- Other Cape Cod towns with historic Cape Cod homes -- Conclusion

A monograph on the work on an American architecture firm, famous for capturing the essence of 'The American Summer'.

"Between Species/Between Spaces assembles text and images resulting from a pilot artistic research residency hosted by the Cape Cod Modern House Trust and the Cape Cod National Seashore in Cape Cod, MA. Artists in the book reflect on the geological forces that are reshaping the landscape and ecology of the Outer Cape which illuminate and to some degree mirror the broader global dynamic of instability, loss, and transition we are facing as a result of anthropogenic climate change. The book collects new artworks in a variety of media by ten contemporary artists whose work investigates the relationships between ecological crisis, communities, individual subjects, and the environment - the result of collaborations between visiting artists and researchers at the NPS field station in the National Seashore. An introductory essay by Peter McMahon, founding director of the Cape Cod Modern House Trust, reflects on the Cape as a site of groundbreaking collaborations between artists, architects, designers, and scientists in the middle of the 20th century, led by visionaries Serge Chermayeff, Bernard Rudofsky, Gyorgy Kepes, and Marcel Breuer. An epistolary essay by NPS cartographer Mark Adams, who is also a painter, meditates on the Outer Cape as a site of community with an uncertain future; Adams' own work has indicated that a predicted 4000 year timeframe for the Cape's dunes and sandy shores to erode entirely into the sea may in fact be accelerating under climate change. Contributions by Adams, along with artists Jean Barberis, Joshua Edwards, Marie Lorenz, Nancy Nowacek, Jeff Williams, Lynn Xu, and Marina Zurkow and artist/curators Kendra Sullivan and Dylan Gauthier, who organized the residency and culminating exhibition, present multimodal research into species extinction, terraforming, ecological restoration and regenerative practices, as a window onto the past, present, and future of this unstable place"--

Thirteen exquisite houses create a portrait of life in one of America’s most exclusive coastal destinations, along the beaches of Martha’s Vineyard and Cape Cod. Hutker Architects, led by founding principal Mark A. Hutker, has designed more than three hundred houses along the New England shore. A member of the close community on Martha’s Vineyard since his arrival in 1985, Hutker has become an expert at interpreting the ideal lifestyles of his clients within the respected traditions and restrictive codes of the beautiful but fragile environment. In their design and construction, these houses honor the vernacular traditions of craft and indigenous materials, are deeply respectful of the cherished landscape, and demonstrate a lively range of solutions to building on the bluffs and dunes that line the shores of the Vineyard and Cape Cod. A working organic farm fulfills a family’s dream of simpler values; a luxurious renovation saves the best of an antique shingle cottage while transforming it for contemporary family life and a raised structure clad in naturally weathered boards combines the legacy of midcentury regional modern architecture with Cape Cod’s maritime tradition. The firm is committed to the principle “Build once, well,” looking to the historic architecture of the region and the inherited experience of its carpenters and craftspeople as inspiration for contemporary design. The result is an architecture that is at once adaptable and livable, yet enduring, efficient, inevitable, and appropriate. The houses sit lightly on the land, deferring to their surroundings, often built as a series of modest pavilions linked by passages or grouped to enclose an outdoor space. Creative design solutions—a light-filled gallery running the full length of a house, a continuous wall of sliding glass doors—make houses both open to views, but protective in a storm. Specially commissioned photography captures the craftsmanship and the settings of the houses, from dramatic bluffs overlooking the sea to secluded coves and rolling meadows filled with wildflowers, creating a unique portrait of Cape Cod and Martha’s Vineyard.

Breuer's Bohemia explores a vibrant period of midcentury modern design and culture as seen through the influential New England houses designed by Marcel Breuer for his circle of clients and friends. The iconic twentieth-century architect Marcel Breuer was a prolific designer of residential architecture, which is often overshadowed by his early renown as a Bauhaus furniture maker and his large-scale projects. Breuer’s Bohemia surveys the houses he designed in Connecticut and Massachusetts from the 1950s through the ’70s, many of which were commissioned by a few culturally progressive clients—chiefly Rufus and Leslie Stillman and Andrew and Jamie Gagarin—who coalesced around him into a dynamic social circle. Included in this scene were prominent cultural figures such as Alexander Calder, Arthur Miller, Francine du Plessix Gray, Philip Roth, and William Styron, and more, marking a unique intersection of postwar architecture, art, and letters. The publication of Breuer’s Bohemia coincides with the feature-length documentary of the same name by author and filmmaker James Crump, exploring Breuer’s explosive residential practice on the East Coast. Through original research and interviews, the voices of principal characters from Breuer’s circle and notable figures from the field of architecture help tell the story of Breuer’s collaborations with his friends and clients, breathing new life into the history of the rich cultural atmosphere of which they all played a vital part. Heavily illustrated with vintage and contemporary photographs as well as rarely seen archival materials, Breuer’s Bohemia is a unique glimpse of a twentieth-century milieu that produced an aesthetic, intellectual, and sometimes sybaritic community during a fertile period of American design and culture.

The Restless Hungarian is the saga of an extraordinary life set against the history of the rise of modernism, the Jewish Diaspora, and the Cold War. A Hungarian Jew whose inquiring spirit helped him to escape the Holocaust, Paul Weidlinger became one of the most creative structural engineers of the twentieth century. As a young architect, he broke ranks with the great modernists with his radical idea of the “Joy of Space.” As an engineer, he created the strength behind the beauty in mid-century modern skyscrapers, churches, museums, and he gave concrete form to the eccentric monumental sculptures of Pablo Picasso, Isamu Noguchi, and Jean Dubuffet. In his private life, he was a divided man, living behind a wall of denial as he lost his family to war, mental illness, and suicide. In telling his father’s story, the author sifts meaning from the inspiring and contradictory narratives of a life: a motherless child and a captain of industry, a clandestine communist who designed silos for the world’s deadliest weapons during the Cold War, a Jewish refugee who denied he was a Jew, a husband who was terrified of his wife’s madness, and a man whose personal saints were artists.