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Cape Cod Modern House Trust

DESIGN

The Objects of Modernism

Furnishings at the Breuer house reveal the architect’s ideas about everyday design

By Teresa Parker Apr 24, 2024

The house Marcel Breuer built in Wellfleet in 1949 represents the modernist ideal. It is above all simple. Pilings hold its small and seemingly lightweight box-shaped rooms just above the wavy pine-needle-carpeted slope down to Williams Pond.

Standing inside this modest assemblage of plywood and glass, a visitor feels a little naked, though in an enjoying-the-breeze way — a sensation the Bauhaus crowd would have approved. After all, Europe’s utopian craft revolutionaries were here escaping the demands of their academic and entrepreneurial lives. More moving, when you consider the evident joy in these artists’ and architects’ Cape Cod getaways, was that they were also escaping first an encroaching retrograde political climate, then war, then its aftermath in Europe. The Nazis closed the Bauhaus in 1933.

Cinder blocks are stacked to make a base for a slate table on a cantilevered porch at the Breuer house. His Cesca side chairs’ seats are cantilevered, too. (Photos by Agata Storer)

Being “the opposite of monumental,” as architect Peter McMahon and writer Christine Cipriani describe the modernist houses in their 2014 compendium, Cape Cod Modern, they are also fragile. That is evident in the Breuer house, where some siding has rotted and where a birch plywood ceiling has been peeled back for repairs.

Still, there is a comfortableness to the house despite the damp that has snuck in and the mold that now has a foothold on some of the Homasote walls. The objects inside are one reason for that. Since Breuer died in 1981, his son Tamás, a photographer based in New York who now owns the house, has continued to visit, keeping in use both the furnishings his father created and the books he collected.

After years of discussion, Tamás has given McMahon’s nonprofit Cape Cod Modern House Trust the chance to buy the historic building along with Breuer’s objects, art, photographs, and hundreds of books on architecture and design.

The trust is known for its restoration of four other modernist houses, all in the Cape Cod National Seashore in Wellfleet, and for their use as places for creative retreat and scholarship. This is the first property the trust would own; the others belong to the National Park Service. And this is the first that is not an abandoned shell.

Breuer’s long chair. Made at Isokon, maybe.

A Breuer table stands on a screened porch, its weightiness straining, perhaps, a room that’s cantilevered rather experimentally into the woods. The table’s base is homemade and rough: a stack of concrete blocks; its top is a thick slab of slate.

“He loved concrete blocks,” McMahon says, making a pitch for their readymade practicality. Then, “Imagine you didn’t know what they were and just look at them,” he says. Their oval-in-a-square geometry suddenly looks more captivating.

Next to the table are two side chairs made of tubular steel curved in a way that echoes the space: the cane seat is cantilevered. Its backside floats; a tiny bounce cannot be resisted. The knockoff you bought at the Door Store when you lived in Cambridge in the 1970s does not offer that.

Designed in 1928, the chairs were first manufactured as model B32 by Thonet, the Viennese company known for its bentwood café chairs, which were revolutionary in the 1850s. Later, the chairs got a new name, Cesca (Breuer had an adopted daughter named Francesca), when the designer’s manufacturing deal went to Dino Gavina’s Italian company. Gavina was bought by Knoll in 1968, which still produces the chairs.

What Breuer and other modernists mainly did in designing things was to pare them down to their essentials. Space rather than mass mattered. In the case of the Wassily chair, says McMahon, “It’s like he took a club chair and put it through a transmogrifier.” (McMahon’s choice of words reveals he is not only a Bauhaus scholar but a connoisseur of Calvin and Hobbes.)

The Wassily chair iterates the transparency of the house around it.

Even if you have seen the chair or a version of it countless times, its transparency is new and breathtaking against the see-through side of the living room at the Breuer house.

The chair has a story that is partly about the Bauhaus designers’ search for adaptable and inexpensive materials — bentwood for the machine age. Mass-reproducible design for all was part of their philosophy. It is also about Breuer getting a bicycle. Riding his new Adler, he started thinking about how light yet strong his handlebars were, according to Christopher Wilk in Marcel Breuer: Furniture and Interiors (Museum of Modern Art, 1981). A plumber helped him weld the first tubular steel prototype in 1925.

The vinyl-padded Isokon long chair, with its wide, curved plywood arms that curl down and become legs, is a design that Breuer began working on in 1935 after following Walter Gropius to the London workshop of engineer Jack Pritchard. But it gave him trouble. Structural integrity, stability, and the pitch required tinkering through the 1960s. McMahon doesn’t know for sure but says the long chair at the Breuer house may have been one that was sent from the Knoll workshop when its designers created their version for him to critique.

A large pair of brutalist candlesticks await further study.

If the trust raises the $2 million needed to make the Breuer house purchase — Tamás has given them a year, and the fundraising effort now stands at $1.25 million — its restoration will encompass the cataloging and organizing of these things that document the life of the house.

McMahon picks up a pair of iron candlesticks: because of their large scale, he thinks they were probably designed for a church and sent to Breuer here for approval. Breuer designed the St. John’s Abbey in Collegeville, Minn. among other Benedictine outposts that might have been logical destinations for Brutalist altar decorations.

One by one McMahon is uniting the objects of modernism with their stories. “It’s like a fascinating shipwreck,” he says.

IN THE WOODS

Poets From Mexico Build New Worlds in Wellfleet

A Modern House Trust residency on development and design

By Sam Pollak Nov 1, 2023

WELLFLEET — When five Mexican and Mexican-American poets, artists, and architects arrived at the modernist houses that dot the seashores and backwoods here in early October, they had “the best kind of house envy,” says Gabriela Jauregui, a poet and novelist from Mexico City. She was here as part of an artist residency hosted by the Cape Cod Modern House Trust (CCMHT).

Residency curator Mónica de la Torre kayaking on Higgins Pond in Wellfleet with Laureana Toledo (left) and Gabriela Jauregui (right). (Photos courtesy Jenny Monick)

When the poets arrived Oct. 9 for their week-long stay in the restored Kugel/Gips and Kohlberg houses, they scurried from house to house, giddily exploring the architectural oddities of each structure. “We were like, ‘Oh my god, your house! No, your kitchen!’ ” Jauregui says.

She was joined by Alexander Provan, editor of the New York-based magazine Triply Canopy; the conceptual artist and poet Laureana Toledo of Mexico City; the architect and poet Juan Carlos Cano of Mexico City; and Mónica de la Torre, a Mexican poet and editor living in New York who curated this year’s program.

This was the 13th iteration of the CCMHT’s artist residency, which began in 2010 as a way of bringing groups of artists and thinkers to the modernist houses in Wellfleet for a week of collaboration and conviviality.

Gabriela Jauregui (left) and Laureana Toledo.

Although writing is a solitary ordeal, and poetry is perhaps its most solo manifestation, three of the poets were there to reignite a collaborative history that had been on pause for more than a decade. Jauregui, Toledo, and de la Torre, along with a fourth friend, Aura Estrada, published a book of collaborative experimental writing in 2011 titled Taller de Tacquimecanografía, or The Shorthand Typing Workshop in English. (Tacquimecanografía is a Spanish portmanteau coined by the writers that combines “stenography” with “typewriting” — “Even in Spanish, it is a difficult word,” says Jauregui).

Estrada pitched the project as a way for the four emerging writers to push through a male-dominated literary world, cemented by Latin-American literary movements led by prolific male writers like Gabriel García Marquez and Jorge Luis Borges.

“In Mexico, the literary world was a bunch of dudes publishing their dude friends and maybe one or two women who laughed at their jokes,” Jauregui says. The project, in which the four women wrote in all forms and the exchanged their pieces to be rewritten and expounded on, was “a way of rethinking authorship,” Jauregui says, during a time when the only form of written output produced by women was secretarial.

Laureana Toledo at the modernist Lechay house in Wellfleet.

As they were completing their final rounds of text, Estrada was killed in a freak surfing accident on Mexico’s Pacific coast. Toledo, Jauregui, and de la Torre collated the material they had into a book to honor her. De la Torre curated this year’s residency to bring the three together — along with new minds — for the first time since they completed the project.

Here the writers had time to work on their individual projects, too. Jauregui is working on a novel about a woman who goes to live alone in the Mexican countryside, along the “tenuous border between civilization and wildness,” she says. Where Jauregui lives in San Mateo Acatitlán, a rural town an hour outside Mexico City, tensions exist along that border — developers are beginning to clear forests to build suburban gated communities, dispossessing indigenous communities that have stewarded the land there for millennia.

Juan Carlos Cano spent the Wellfleet week working on poetry that pooled his technical expertise in architecture with anecdotes based on what he found inside the Kugel/Gips house, where he stayed. They included imagined moments from Kugel’s life and the shipwrecks that long ago flecked the Cape’s shores. He says he doesn’t like to make poetry out of architecture or architecture out of poetry — “I find it very corny,” he says — but his “architect thinking” informs the structural layout of his poetry.

Juan Carlos Cano (front) and Alexander Provan.

And, Cano admits, there can be poetry found in some architecture. Útopias, a series of municipal projects designed to bring free social and artistic programming and public utilities to marginalized neighborhoods of Mexico City, is one such example. In a neighborhood called Iztapalapa, one of the neighborhoods, Cano is working on a wastewater treatment facility that includes building a wetland over a 20-acre landfill. “I guess if you have debris, and you turn it into a wetland, that’s poetic in a way,” he says.

Mónica de la Torre is studying the Mexican architect Luis Barragán, who designed a residential subdivision in Mexico City in 1945 where a cluster of modernist houses was built above a calcified milleniums-old lava field. Those homes have since been demolished, de la Torre says, and the neighborhood has been parceled into Tudor houses for the wealthy.

“The experience is now completely different from what the original architects had envisioned,” de la Torre says. She is channeling this “failed architectural utopia” into a prose piece that weaves her research together with narrative constellations of the people associated with the project.

At the Hatch house on Bound Brook Island in Wellfleet.

Jenny Monick, president of CCMHT’s board of directors, saw a throughline between de la Torre’s work and the work of Peter McMahon, the trust’s founder. She asked de la Torre to curate this year’s residency.

McMahon, an architect himself, founded the Cape Cod Modern House Trust in 2007 to preserve historically important architectural landmarks in the Cape Cod National Seashore. Now, the trust is at an inflection point — McMahon is working with Marcel Breuer’s son, Tamás, to buy the Breuer house on Williams Pond before it goes on the open market, where it is at risk of being demolished due to its advanced state of disrepair.

McMahon has been raising money to purchase the house. He says that so far he has raised $750,000 of his $1.4 million goal. (An article published in the New York Times in August helped, McMahon says.) If the deal goes through, it will be the trust’s “flagship” house, McMahon says. He hopes to use it to host a four-month residency for scholars of Breuer and the Bauhaus, who would have access to Breuer’s archives here.

Bringing artists from all over the world to enjoy and convene in Wellfleet’s touchstones of modern architecture is, McMahon says, “like bringing salt water back into the East Harbor” — it is about breathing life back into a nearly forgotten ecosystem.

CULTURAL ARCHEOLOGY

In the Wellfleet Woods, Relics of the Bauhaus Avant-Garde

A group of scholars studies a long-lost trove of Christmas cards, poems, and notes on nudism

By Sam Pollak Dec 14, 2022

WELLFLEET — There was treasure hidden deep within the pitch pine woods of Wellfleet — and, according to Elizabeth Otto, one of four scholars who participated in a residency overseen by the Cape Cod Modern House Trust last month, “finding it was slightly haunting and very amazing.”

The four scholars of this year’s CCMHT residency, left to right: Elizabeth Otto, Oliver Botar, Veronika Fuechtner, and Jordan Troeller. (Photo courtesy Peter McMahon)

The treasures came from the library and art collection of Hungarian architect and designer Marcel Breuer (1902-1981), which had been preserved by CCMHT founder Peter McMahon with the help of Breuer’s son, Tamas. They were relics of an era of artistic experimentation and innovation brought over from Europe by members of the Bauhaus, the pre-World War II German art school known for its avant-garde pedagogy and artistic practice. Several of the most illustrious members of the group designed summer houses for themselves and their friends on the Outer Cape.

Otto was the curator of this year’s residency through CCMHT, which annually invites a group of artists and thinkers to stay in the modernist houses in Wellfleet that it has restored. The Bauhaus residency was originally planned for 2019 for the centennial of the Bauhaus school, founded in Weimar, Germany by architect Walter Gropius in 1919, but a series of setbacks, including the pandemic, pushed the residency to 2022.

Otto, a professor of modern and contemporary art history at SUNY Buffalo, invited three other Bauhaus scholars to participate: Oliver Botar, professor of art history at the University of Manitoba in Winnipeg; Veronika Fuechtner, interim chair of Jewish studies and associate professor of German studies at Dartmouth College; and Jordan Troeller, a postdoctoral researcher at the Freie Universität Berlin.

When the scholars finally arrived in Wellfleet, they were not disappointed. The trust’s houses were filled with books and printed ephemera — most of which had never been seen by outsiders before — from the artists’ lives on the Cape more than 70 years ago.

“They were here partly to see this material, which has never been archived,” McMahon said.

Hidden in the collection were journals, Christmas and birthday cards, paintings, and poems by Bauhaus writers and artists, as well as books with inscriptions written from one Bauhausler to another.

“It took us a while to just calm down because it was so exciting,” Otto said. “To be in those spaces with the material was so special. There was definitely some positive haunting.”

Among the more interesting discoveries the scholars made in Breuer’s library was a 1947 book called Are Clothes Modern?, an exciting find for Otto and Fuechtner, who are working on a joint project about nudism in the Bauhaus.

Bernard Rudofsky’s 1947 book Are Clothes Modern? was one of the highlights found in Marcel Breuer’s library in his former house in Wellfleet. (Photo courtesy Elizabeth Otto)

“Neither of us had seen it before,” said Otto, “and it helped us think of the other side of this question of what they were wearing and why they were taking off their clothes.”

Nudism was a pillar of Bauhaus tradition. The German school was evicted from its first building after students were caught bathing naked in Berlin’s Goethe Park. The Bauhauslers who vacationed on the Cape were known to swim, sunbathe, and walk naked along Newcomb Hollow Beach — much to the chagrin of local families and their children, who were “about crotch height with all these beaching Europeans,” Otto said.

Otto also found three books in the Breuer collection that belonged to Marta Erps, Breuer’s first wife. Though Erps was also a member of the Bauhaus, “she always seemed to have gotten rubbed out of the picture,” Otto said. “To find some trace of her history and what she was interested in was magical.”

Botar, the art history professor, found poems written by Breuer’s friend and fellow architect Serge Chermayeff and read them aloud to the group. Otto said the poems “were all about this community in Wellfleet.” Troeller and Otto found handmade children’s books that were given to Breuer’s son by Juliet Kepes, the British artist and wife of Hungarian-born painter and art theorist György Kepes.

“She was one of those artists who was just making stuff all the time,” Otto said of Kepes. “A lot of them ended up as children’s books.”

The Bauhaus artists first visited Cape Cod in the summer of 1937 when Gropius invited a group of colleagues to spend the summer on Planting Island near Buzzards Bay at the base of the Cape.

Fascism was sweeping across Europe, and the trip helped Breuer decide to stay in the United States. “Here at the seaside with the Gropiuses I am having a magnificent time,” he wrote to a friend. “America has above all taken me by pleasant surprise.”

Breuer bought land in Wellfleet near Williams and Higgins ponds where he built a house in 1949 for his family. The structure is a modular timber-framed “long-house” with a cantilevered porch looking out at the ponds. Resting on wooden beams, the house seems to levitate above its surroundings.

The Kohlberg house in Wellfleet, the home base for this fall’s Cape Cod Modern House Trust residency. (Photo courtesy CCMHT)

Breuer persuaded Chermayeff to build a house just down the road from him. György and Juliet Kepes, structural engineer Paul Weidlinger, and architect Olav Hammarström all built houses nearby.

“They would work during the day in their studios and then come out in the evening and swim, drink martinis, and eat together or have a bonfire on the beach,” McMahon said.

McMahon said that this year’s Bauhaus residency was designed to replicate this lifestyle. “We were trying to keep the vibe alive of what was going on with the artists,” he said.

For Otto, the weeklong stay gave her new insights into her subjects. “I thought about what these people were exiled from and how painful that must have been,” she said, “but also what a haven the community of Wellfleet must have provided for them. It was really nice to see all these acts of artistic kindness being passed around among these circles.”

There was a similar sense of community and collaboration among the scholars. “It really did feel like the dream team,” Otto said of her fellow residents. “They all had different strengths that were interrelated.”

A week of archival work, house tours, and “positive haunting” was bookended by a lively dinner in Provincetown before the four scholars returned to their respective homes. But that’s not the end of the story.

Much like the Bauhauslers, Otto said, “We will have an ongoing collaboration now for years to come.”

ARTISTS

Horror Movie Imagery Meets Indigenous Identity

Jeremy Dennis’s Rise series says, ‘We’re still here’

By John Greiner-Ferris Feb 2, 2022

“Noam Chomsky made the comparison that zombies are a reflection of fear and desperation, and that we in the United States try to make something that we’re oppressing into something that’s oppressing us,” says fine art photographer Jeremy Dennis. “I like to make the parallel that, just as zombies come back to haunt the living, we are taught that indigenous people are a vanishing race — but we’re still here and strong.”

Jeremy Dennis. (Photos courtesy Jeremy Dennis)

This past fall, Dennis, a 31-year-old member of the Shinnecock Indian Nation in Southampton, N.Y., was a resident at the Cape Cod Modern House Trust in Wellfleet. Founded in 2007, the trust launched its residencies for artists and scholars in 2010.

With the high cost of housing increasingly making the Cape financially prohibitive for emerging artists to visit and make art, such residencies are important. “If you want critical art, it has to be financed by nonprofits and museums that don’t sell art,” says Peter McMahon, founder and director of the Modern House Trust. “The commercial marketplace is going to be conservative.”

Surrounded by Wellfleet’s woods and beaches, Dennis worked on his Rise project, the title being a play on “rise from the dead” and “uprising,” In it, Dennis depicts indigenous people, all played by him, as zombies.

This untitled 30-by-40-inch archival inkjet print by Dennis shows local resident Sam Sewell on Uncle Tim’s Bridge.

“Where I’m from, on the east end of Long Island with the Hamptons and the real estate, we’re this inconvenient truth,” says Dennis. “You can have a nice Hampton home, you can party on the beach, but it’s on stolen land, and we’re right next door, 10 minutes away. It’s a guilt that a lot of people have to deal with that’s never been reconciled.” Dennis’s photography explores the concept that the mere presence of indigenous people can be fearful to some.

Dennis’s identity-driven work is reminiscent of that of other photographers who injected themselves into the frame, taking on the role of social critic. Cindy Sherman and her Untitled Film Stills come to mind — black-and-white images that comment on a woman’s role in society in the form of movie stills — as does the current work of Renee Cox, who more pointedly comments on the Black female experience.

This untitled 30-by-40-inch archival inkjet print by Dennis was made during his residency at the Cape Cod Modern House Trust.

Like Sherman, Dennis takes familiar cinematic techniques and language and turns them back on his viewers. “I use the same tools as a high-budget Hollywood movie, using them to my advantage to make viewers curious — that there is something beyond what they initially think they’re looking at,” says Dennis. “This means someone from a lower-income community can have the same power the people with a lot of wealth have in terms of persuasion.”

The tools Dennis is referring to are techniques and equipment such as off-camera lighting, composition, and direction. A Canon 50-megapixel digital camera coupled with post-production software such as Photoshop give his work a hyper-realistic, supernatural look, with the heightened realism causing the viewer to feel more involved.

He’s begun using a camera mounted on a drone, which he used exclusively while in Wellfleet and plans to use more on future projects. “I was really happy with the results because of what we associate with drones and what the United States (military) has done with them,” he says. Drawing comparisons to King Philip’s War (King Philip was the English name of the Wampanoag chief Metacom) and the Pequot Massacre, which left 500 mostly women, children, and elderly people dead, Dennis says, “The colonial wars, massacres, and the drone wars are pretty indiscriminate. We don’t think too much about the killing.”

This untitled 30-by-40-inch archival inkjet print by Jeremy Dennis features Peter McMahon, director of the Cape Cod Modern House Trust.

McMahon acted as a model in one of Dennis’s photographs, which was shot on dunes above Wellfleet’s Lecount Hollow Beach.

“He gave very minimal directions; he’s very efficient, and it all took about half an hour,” McMahon said. “He told me to wear a coat and bring binoculars.” For his Rise photographs, Dennis dons “Indian” costume and a wig and sets his camera’s auto timer to release the shutter every seven seconds. After each exposure, Dennis changes his position, and afterwards inserts his multiple selves into the image during post-production.

“Native people have always been here, but maybe you just haven’t seen them, or haven’t been looking for us,” he says. “It’s almost like Bigfoot.”

NATIVE ART

Hawk and Sierra Henries Create Beauty out of Wood

Father and daughter are Weidlinger house residents this week

By Saskia Maxwell Keller Oct 13, 2021

Hawk Henries has been making hand-carved wooden flutes since as long as his daughter Sierra, 34, can remember. “He’s one of a very small handful of people doing the work that he does in the traditional way,” she says. “So, his work is really precious in the world, and of course he won’t say that, but it’s important that people know about it because it’s knowledge that he’s carrying in his work.”

Hawk Henries. (Photo courtesy Hawk Henries)

Hawk and Sierra are staying at the Weidlinger house in Wellfleet this week as part of a residency supported by the Cape Cod Modern House Trust and the Wampanoag Arts Foundation. Hawk is performing on and talking about some of his flutes at an event at Wellfleet Preservation Hall on Sunday, Oct. 17.

Hawk and Sierra are members of the Nipmuc tribe. They live in Sullivan, Maine, on Frenchman Bay northeast of Mt. Desert Island. Though Sierra doesn’t play the flute, she is also an artist, working mainly in birch bark. She makes intricate designs using a wood-burning tool and X-Acto knife. Sierra says she feels fortunate to have been influenced by many art shows and pow wows growing up.

Though they pursue different disciplines, both Sierra and Hawk work with wood. “There’s this prevailing disconnect in the world regarding the beings that we live beside every day — birds, water, mountains, and trees,” says Sierra. “Art is a way to build on the relationships we have with these other beings and to gain a better understanding of them and more respect and desire to care for them.”

An untitled birch bark artwork by Sierra Henries. (Photo courtesy Sierra Henries)

Birch bark has many traditional uses, including canoes, baskets, and the walls of homes. “It has a lot of amazing properties,” explains Sierra. “It’s anti-bacterial and, though I wouldn’t necessarily recommend this, it has been used to wrap wounds. It’s a fire starter. It’s been used for centuries for record keeping.”

This birch bark piece by Sierra Henries was made with a wood-burning tool and X-Acto knife. (Photo courtesy Sierra Henries)

Hawk is entirely self-taught as a Nipmuc flute player and maker. He is also a composer, having collaborated with the London Mozart Players and artists including Yo-Yo Ma. “Before the flute, I didn’t play any musical instruments, except maybe the radio,” says Hawk. “This sounds so clichéd, but one day, about 30 years ago, I was listening to a recording, and I thought, ‘I need to play this instrument.’ ”

After a few years, Hawk was able to get his hands on a traditional instrument he could afford. “Something one day said to me, ‘Why don’t you try to make the voice of this flute better.’ I ruined it in literally five minutes. It took a half a year for me to figure out how to make it play again.” The challenge of figuring out how it worked is what started Hawk on his path.

A falcon-shaped flute block by Hawk Henries. (Photo courtesy Hawk Henries)

“A flute, musically, is a hollow tube, sometimes with finger holes, always with some kind of opening to allow you to put your breath into it,” he explains. “Once your breath enters the tube, the tube vibrates at a particular velocity, and you can adjust the sound with the finger holes, or by the speed with which you blow into the flute itself. That’s basically it. Any hollow tube can be a flute. It’s kind of embarrassing when you’re at Home Depot and you walk down that aisle with all the PVC pipes and you start playing them like flutes and your family looks at you like you’re silly.”

The flutes that Hawk makes are technically “two-chambered end-blown block flutes,” Hawk explains. “A classical flute has one chamber that’s completely hollow for the length of the tube. The flutes that I play are not that way — they have two separate chambers divided by a solid wall.” The carved piece tied at the top, called a block or a bird, helps direct the air from the first chamber into the second. Hawk uses only hand tools and natural materials, including walnut oil as a finish.

This flute by Hawk Henries is made of cypress with black walnut accents. (Photo courtesy Hawk Henries)

Hawk views his relationship to the flute as an extension both of himself and of his culture. “But well beyond the culture, it’s a tool for expression, which is even more ancient,” says Hawk. “Music for me is a way to articulate my gratitude for life, to express how much I love looking at a bird or a tree or listening to the ocean. To oversimplify it, it’s a tool for prayer. It’s a ceremonial tool, and yet it’s none of that. Playing the flute certainly connects me with culture, but it also connects me with an understanding of my relationship to Earth and to sky and to the things that live in those places.”

Breath by Breath

The event: A performance and talk by Hawk Henries

The time: Sunday, Oct. 17, 3 to 5 p.m.

The place: Wellfleet Preservation Hall, 335 Main St.

The cost: Free

An Architectural Conversation on ‘Masterful Moderns’

By The Independent Mar 24, 2021

Join the Arts Foundation of Cape Cod for a free conversation with Peter McMahon, founding director of the Cape Cod Modern House Trust, and Mark Hutker, principal and founder of Hutker Architects, on Thursday, March 25th, at 5 p.m. It’s part of AFCC’s virtual speaker series, “Modern Love: Conversations on Art + Architecture.”

“Cape Cod has long attracted artists,” says the talk write-up, “and the legacy of one art colony that flourished in the middle of the last century is an inventory of architecturally revolutionary houses tucked into the landscapes of the Outer Cape.”

RSVP at artsfoundation.org/patron-speaker-series.

ARTIST RESIDENCY

Wellfleet’s Modern Houses Are Still Laboratories for Collaboration

Four artists from Brooklyn make the most of 10 days in October

By Susannah Elisabeth Fulcher Feb 3, 2021

artists1 — This past October, four Brooklyn-based artists were invited by the Cape Cod Modern House Trust to spend 10 days in Wellfleet. Each stayed in a modern house, creating art inspired by the architecture and surroundings. Mindful of the need for isolation during the pandemic, the group met virtually or outdoors. But at the end of the 10-day residency, they finally gathered briefly at the Lechay House for a photo. Clockwise from left are CCMHT founding director Peter McMahon, Asiya Wadud, Marcus Leslie Singleton, CCMHT board member Jenny Monick, mayfield brooks, and Brittany Engel-Adams. (Photo Ron Erlih)

A storm rolls toward the Outer Cape, stirring the ocean’s waves and sending shivers through the pine forest. Unperturbed, a lone figure dances on the deck of the Kugel/Gips House, nestled among Wellfleet’s kettle ponds. Moving with a certain geometry in mind, Brittany Engel-Adams climbs a rail and tilts her face into the rain, mirroring the angle of the locust leaves around her as they bow with the weight of falling water.

artists3 — While at the Weidlinger House on Wellfleet’s Higgins Pond, artist, vocalist, and writer mayfield brooks developed “a dance for the pond and the otters who play there, a dance for the rain, a dance for the endless windows that frame this house.” (Photo courtesy mayfield brooks)

Less than a mile away, in the living room of the Weidlinger House, movement-based performance artist, vocalist, and writer mayfield brooks playfully navigates the architectural space, eyes closed, listening to the cacophony of the natural world (brooks uses the pronouns they/them and no capital letters in their name).

“One day while I was here, a family of otters came up the little pathway to the house,” brooks says. “They were dancing, and I’m a dancer, so their movement inspired me.”

From the Lechay House, a short walk from Wellfleet’s Main Street, the visual artist Marcus Leslie Singleton explores the world of the town’s winter residents, wondering, he says in his work statement, “what their stories may be.”

Engel-Adams, brooks, Singleton, and Asiya Wadud, a poet and visual artist who was the curator of the group, are four artists of color based in Brooklyn, N.Y. They were invited by the Cape Cod Modern House Trust (CCMHT) to spend 10 days in four modern homes in Wellfleet to create art inspired by the architecture and its environment. This was CCMHT’s 2020 residency program, which took place in late October. The art the group created during their stay is documented in “Digital Guestbook: 2020,” a virtual exhibit that launches on ccmht.org on Thursday, Feb. 4.

By attending the CCMHT residency last fall, the four artists stepped into a tradition of creative discourse and collaboration that began in these very homes in the mid-20th century. Bauhaus architects Marcel Breuer and Walter Gropius, who came to the U.S. as refugees from Nazi Germany, along with like-minded Americans and other European modernists who settled stateside, designed and built the houses as summer getaways on the Outer Cape after World War II. Nestled between kettle ponds, off hidden dirt roads, they became fertile gathering spaces for architects, artists, writers, and academics — a nexus of creativity and thought.

Starting in 1961, the Cape Cod National Seashore took over much of the area where the modern houses were located. Over the years, most were left empty and untended, and they fell into disrepair. CCMHT was founded in 2007 by architect Peter McMahon to preserve these architectural landmarks. The trust now leases four modern homes from the National Seashore that it has painstakingly restored to their former glory — the Kugel/Gips House, Hatch House, Weidlinger House, and Kohlberg House — all of them in Wellfleet.

artists2 — Dancer-choreographer Brittany Engel-Adams created Before Zeta, a site-specific improvisational dance video from which this shot is taken, during her stay at the Kugel/Gips House in Wellfleet. (Photo courtesy Brittany Engel-Adams)

“To the Bauhaus architects, they weren’t just vacation homes — they were laboratories for their own work and for collaboration with others,” says McMahon. “We wanted to bring back that vibe instead of turning them into museums.”

The format of the residency reflects that collaborative legacy. “Every year we pick a curator, and then the curator picks three artists,” McMahon says.

Because the 2020 residency was held in October, one artist (Singleton) was put up in the Lechay House, a modern home owned by the family of painter James Lechay, instead of the CCMHT’s Hatch House, which doesn’t have heat.

As curator, Wadud wanted to keep things relevant and immediate. “I asked myself what kind of togetherness is possible in this specific pandemic moment, and how can we think of that as just as rich and potent as the togetherness of being in the same space pre-pandemic,” she says.

The nature of this residency, Wadud realized, with each artist living in a different house, lends itself to a “kind of alone together distance.” To form the group, she chose artists who fit together well. “Works by Brittany, mayfield, and Marcus speak to each other,” Wadud says, but “that doesn’t happen directly as much as it does in a sideways or oblong way. There are so many different questions that could emerge between the three of them.” She gives the example of Singleton’s painting: “I see his work as bounded in movement. It has this same aliveness as mayfield’s or Brittany’s dance movements.”

Wadud’s curatorial statement emphasizes that each of the artists she invited to the residency lets “Blackness and history haunt their work.” All three, she says, “trouble the value placed on Black life and they do so in a number of registers.”

artists5 — Poet and visual artist Asiya Wadud, the residency’s curator, focused on themes of connection — and the word latch — in bringing this particular group of artists together. She created this page in the digital guestbook.

The idea to document each year’s CCMHT residency in the form of digital guestbooks was inspired by Bauhaus founder Gropius. “He had a guest book in each house he lived in,” says McMahon. “They had these amazing entries from Picasso, Miró, Igor Stravinsky. In that same way, we ask our artists to leave a clue about what they were up to while they were staying in one of the homes.”

Wadud explored connectivity in her poetry by focusing on the word latch. “I got very interested in things that get latched together, and what possibilities could exist if you put two different things side by side that normally don’t go together,” she says.

Spending 10 days at Charles Zehnder’s Kugel/Gips House, says Engel-Adams, “was a very moving time for me. It was the first time I had been out of the city since Covid, and I’d never stayed in a home built in such a way before. I have a dance practice of mapping spaces, and I did improvisations moving inside the house and outside, trying to embrace its architectural features.”

Engel-Adams had previously explored other aspects of Bauhaus design. “I did a performance-based piece related to [painter-sculptor-choreographer] Oskar Schlemmer’s work,” she says. “So, I was already present to the possibilities of moving in relation to space, geometry, and form before the residency. But now I’ve gained a deeper connection, a deeper appreciation for architecture. I’m noticing the spaces I inhabit in a different way.”

artists4 — Artist Marcus Leslie Singleton created a series of portraits on unbleached paper of local people he encountered during his time on the Outer Cape, including this one, Woman Near the Beach. (Photo courtesy Marcus Leslie Singleton)

Brooks worked on a piece, Whale Fall, that will be performed at the Abrons Arts Center in New York City this April. It explores what happens to a whale when it dies. “It’s a huge event when a whale falls to the ocean floor, because their bodies feed hundreds of other animals,” brooks says. “The idea is that when death and grief come, there is also an opportunity for nourishment and regeneration.”

Being in Wellfleet, brooks felt very connected to the ocean. “I didn’t get to see any whales, but it was a very palpable feeling knowing that these largest of mammals might be there,” the artist says. “It touched me and fed into my creative process.”

Because of the pandemic, the group was careful to meet mostly outdoors, even for dinner gatherings, despite the cold weather. “We were working independently on our projects, and then we’d come together outside to talk and reflect,” says Engel-Adams.

“There weren’t many times when we were physically in the same space at all,” Wadud says.

None of the precautions dampened the group’s sense of connection. “Simply knowing that each artist was staying in a modern house close by brought us together,” Engel-Adams says.

“The 10 days we spent on the Cape were filled with possibility,” Wadud says. “We started a collaboration at the residency that will continue, and we share a desire to be here together again.”

GALLERY

House to House on Bound Brook Island

Exploring the past on a walk in the woods

By Milisa Moses Dec 31, 2020

moses1 — Celestial elements on a traditional Cape. Moon and stars adorn red trim around the door to the Baker-Biddle House. (Photos Milisa Moses)

moses2 — The Hatch House, designed by Jack Hall, is shuttered for the winter. Once summer arrives, the shutters hinge up and latch to the frame, opening the view completely.

moses3 — The Colonial Revival structures around the Atwood-Higgins property are being purposefully allowed to fade into the landscape.

Following the roads and paths of Wellfleet’s Bound Brook Island, you’ll find hillsides covered with bearberry and stands of winterberry along the now-still tidal brook below. There are houses, too — historic ones that still shape the identity of this place.

The Atwood-Higgins House, built in 1730, is the oldest house within the Cape Cod National Seashore. In 1920, it was inherited by George Higgins. He spent 40 years restoring the house before giving it to the National Park Service in 1961, the year the National Seashore was created.

The house is surrounded by a collection of rambling structures that suggest a village. Grayed out and fading into the landscape, these buildings turn out to be the product of Higgins’s romantic Colonial Revival vision.

But the original house, now tended by National Seashore staff and opened in summer for tours, remains a fine example of the Cape Cod style. On a sunny winter walk, stop outside the house to consider one of its cleverest features, a protected south-facing façade.

Up the road towards the beach lies the Baker-Biddle property. The National Park Service is also the steward for this historic place, where four buildings dating from 1690 to 1850 are clustered on 10 acres of land. Whale processing, historians say, happened here. Lorenzo Dow Baker, Wellfleet’s “Banana King,” was born here. Later, it became a retreat where literary and political luminaries gathered — John Dos Passos and Judge Francis Biddle among them.

There is proof this place was home to many others, longer ago. National Park archaeological investigations in 2012 uncovered ancient tools, pottery, and coins on this land — layers of history that could date back as far as 5,000 years.

Nearby, built above a glacial kettle hole, the Hatch House shakes up the traditional idea of what a home should look like.

The house was designed by self-taught architect, carpenter, and painter Jack Hall for Robert Hatch, executive editor of The Nation, and his wife, the painter Ruth Hatch. Perched on a few concrete pilings in the sand, the outdoors connects the inner spaces made of rectangular boxes sheathed in vertical fir boards.

Originally built in 1962, the house was restored by the Cape Cod Modern House Trust in 2012. Along with the Atwood-Higgins House, it is listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

As if with you on your walk, Peter McMahon of the Modern House Trust writes in his book, Cape Cod Modern, that arriving here, this place evokes “the most visceral, astonished response, even from veteran architects.”

ARCHITECTURE

Nauset Students Recognized by Cape Cod Modern House Trust

Winning design projects show college-level sophistication

By Susannah Elisabeth Fulcher Jul 9, 2020

“It is unusual for a high school to have an architecture program,” says Peter McMahon, the founding director of the Cape Cod Modern House Trust (CCMHT) and co-author of Cape Cod Modern: Midcentury Architecture and Community on the Outer Cape. Five years ago, the architect Richard Tichnor was given free rein by Nauset Regional High School to create a curriculum for students interested in architecture.

Sebastian Sacco won the Cape Cod Modern House Trust’s first Young Architect Award. (Photo Susannah Elisabeth Fulcher)

“We started the first year with a single Intro to Architecture class and five students,” Tichnor says. “Over the years, we’ve grown to four classes: Arch 1, Arch 2, advanced, and, last year, we added honors level. Having the freedom to create my own curriculum has afforded me the opportunity to spend a lot of one-on-one time with each student and to help them discover where their strengths and interests lie.”

Two graduating Nauset seniors are planning to continue their architecture studies at top universities this fall. Their work on a semester-long project to redesign the Hatch House in Wellfleet — a modernist gem overlooking Cape Cod Bay that was restored by CCMHT — inspired the trust to create an annual Young Architect Award.

“These kids are quite amazing,” McMahon says. “I do a lot of projects with college-age kids in architecture school, and I was very surprised with the quality of the work they came up with.”

An honorable mention went to Sophie Friend, who created her own illustrated architecture history book as a senior project. (Photo Susannah Elisabeth Fulcher)

Sebastian Sacco won the first Young Architect Award for his remarkable drawings and model of the Hatch House redesign, which was presented at a socially distant ceremony at the Hatch House last week. “He has a great eye and has always been a very good designer,” Tichnor says.

Sacco was one of the first students in Tichnor’s program and went on to take six semesters of course work. His interest in Cape Cod modern houses was instrumental in bringing McMahon into the Nauset program. “I was already inspired by the architectural history of Cape Cod and the Cape Cod Modern House Trust before I got [McMahon’s] book,” Sacco says.

Tichnor put Sacco in touch with McMahon, who took him to visit the Marcel Breuer House in Wellfleet. “I loved how well the house fit into the site,” Sacco says, “and the way modernism blends with vernacular ideas about what a ‘Cape house’ should look like.”

In 2019, Sacco’s interest in the CCMHT houses led Tichnor to devise a semester-long project for his class in collaboration with McMahon. “The idea was to take the concept of the Hatch House, which is modular boxes, and reimagine it with the same number of modules — 18 interior, 18 exterior — and the same basic grid,” McMahon says. Tichnor had each student do a set of drawings and a quarter-inch-scale design model.

Sebastian Sacco’s redesign of the Hatch House uses the same modular concept and number of modules as the original. (Photo courtesy Richard Tichnor)

Sacco’s winning concept focused on stretching the house out and creating exterior access with a deck. “I had a linear axis that ran through the entire length of my design,” he says, “which is different from what the Hatch House looks like now, with modules that face each other.”

This fall, Sacco will begin his studies in architecture at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, N.Y. “I’m excited to hone my skills,” he says, adding that he’s especially interested in designing houses that are environmentally friendly: “That kind of activism is something I am passionate about.”

Sophie Friend, who received honorable mention in the competition, followed her interests in a different direction. As a result of Tichnor’s classes, Friend developed “almost an obsession” with the history of architecture and architectural sites throughout the world, she says. “My favorite building is St. Basil’s Cathedral in Moscow — I did a presentation in class and want to thank my classmates, because I talked for an hour about Russian architecture from 400 B.C. to 2019.”

Friend’s family’s heritage inspired her next to research the history of African architecture. “I’m fourth-generation Cape Verdean,” she says. “I feel that people write off African architecture, because they compare it to gothic cathedrals, for example. I believe that one kind of architecture is not better than another. Africa actually has some of the oldest cities in the world. They are really amazing and deserve to be studied.”

When McMahon started to work with Tichnor’s class, Friend impressed him with her research on the history of Cape Cod modern houses. “Sophie is very academic,” he says. Friend went on to work with McMahon on her senior project, creating the fully illustrated and hand-lettered book, An Overview of Architecture.

This fall, Friend will study art history, architectural history, and design at Smith College. She hopes in the future to work on protecting lesser known heritage sites in countries prone to conflict.

The Hatch House in Wellfleet: Nauset students were challenged to redesign the modular house anew. (Photo Antoine Lorgnier)

“Well-known cultural sites are already being protected,” she says, “but less well-known, day-to-day architecture is just as important.” Friend cites as an example the painted houses of the Ndebele people, who live in South Africa and Zimbabwe. “They are beautiful houses with murals covering the outside,” she says. “The mother paints her home, then she passes down that pattern to her daughter, who paints it on her home, and so on.”

Friend hopes that preserving existing homes will also have an effect on climate change. “The building industry creates 30 percent of carbon emissions,” she says. “It has been proved that renovating and restoring buildings is 10 times more effective in reducing environmental damage than tearing down and building new. If we can work on conserving, that will help us in our climate change battle.”

GALLERY

Thinking Inside the Box

Peter McMahon’s designs turn simple materials into useful geometry

By Molly Newman Mar 12, 2020

A few principles guided the planning for the Independent’s new office on the first floor of Provincetown’s Whaler’s Wharf: simplicity, versatility, and cost. The challenge was to create quiet work spaces within an open space big enough for staff meetings — without spending much.

Peter McMahon, the Wellfleet architect best known for creating the Cape Cod Modern House Trust, offered a solution in the form of modular boxes. McMahon confessed he is obsessed with boxes and their countless configurations. He admires their geometry and their utility.

“I have a definite idea about the best way to set them up for now, but they can be moved as you grow into the space,” McMahon said. An idea that suits a startup. —Molly Newman

“There is no problem that cannot be solved by a plywood box,” said McMahon. His vision turns a basic cube into the foundation for diverse uses: the boxes serve as shelves, room dividers, and support bases for desks. They can be easily rearranged and moved. Newspaper archives fit easily into their deep dimensions. When filled, the boxes provide effective sound absorption in an open office. (Photo Nancy Bloom)

Accessible design allows for an element of DIY: Independent staff and volunteers put the final touches on the cubes. The ¾-inch Baltic birch plywood requires only a light finish. Volunteer Eric Borg (left) and Harrison Fish, Independentadvertising associate, brush on the nontoxic, water-based polyurethane McMahon recommends. (Photo Nancy Bloom)

McMahon’s “Y” tables will be central in the office. “The workingman’s version” of a Jean Prouvé design, he says. The flying V shape of the steel legs is stable but never in the way. The tops are plywood finished in phenolic resin, which makes for a good work surface. (Photo Nancy Bloom)

McMahon’s main contractor, Paul Rosen, built the boxes in his large Eastham shop. The carpentry of gluing and screwing the pieces together is straightforward, but careful craftsmanship makes for more durable finished pieces. Left to right: McMahon, Rosen, and David Darakjy, who assisted in construction. (Photo Molly Newman)

BOOK REVIEW

Paul Weidlinger: A Brilliant Engineer Split in Two by Exile

The Restless Hungarian: Modernism, Madness, and the American Dream by Tom Weidlinger

By Josephine Boyle Mar 12, 2020

Perched on stilts, the Weidlinger house on Wellfleet’s Higgins Pond peers out from the surrounding green like a wide pinhole camera. This camera-like impression echoes the Marcel Breuer house nearby, as does the semi-freestanding fireplace inside. But in Paul Weidlinger’s design, the fireplace is set askew, its angles oblique like the entrance wall and ramp leading up to the house. An otherwise static, grid-like structure is made dynamic, adding nautical metaphors to the photographic: for Tom Weidlinger, the son of its creator, “It was like … a ship in the forest.”

Tom Weidlinger’s recent memoir, The Restless Hungarian: Modernism, Madness, and the American Dream, tells the compelling story of Paul’s life and career as a designer and engineer. Tracing his father’s footsteps from his childhood during World War I in Hungary across Europe, to Bolivia, and finally the United States, Weidlinger presents a man propelled by a desire, later made compulsory by Nazism, to sever historical ties.

The dizzying narrative of Paul’s first 30 years ultimately shaped the man: at work, he was audacious, experimental, easily bored. His first break was working in London with painter and photographer László Moholy-Nagy, whom he cold-called, introducing himself as “the best draftsman in the whole world.” Later he designed nuclear missile silos during the Cold War. Weidlinger charts his father’s achievements as a structural engineer across two dozen chapters, keeping the reader’s attention with a filmmaker’s gift for cinematic hooks and turns.

This book was almost not written at all. Weidlinger found himself deeply reluctant to learn about his father’s past: he inherited a trunk of his father’s documents after his death in 1999, which would become the foundation for the book, but left it mostly untouched for years. It was only a 2013 invitation from Peter McMahon of the Cape Cod Modern House Trust (CCMHT) to help restore his old Wellfleet home that led him to have the trunk’s contents, written in five languages, translated and read for the first time.

Paul Weidlinger’s own reticence about his past went far deeper than his son’s. As a father and husband, he was carefully guarded. At home, he was distant, closed, evasive; Tom’s mother, Madeleine, would accuse him of a cold indifference. Even to his closest family, he denied his Jewish origins until he died.

But much of Paul Weidlinger’s success as a structural engineer was due to this resolutely forward-looking gaze. Unfettered by his past, he acted as if he could do and be anything he wanted. “In some ways, because I broke with my background,” he said, “I had no standards. I didn’t know what one does.”

Modernism’s experimental spirit was the perfect complement for the kaleidoscopic landscape of his exile. At its most functionalist, modernism was inspired by the machine age to imagine a fully rationalized world. Artists and architects were to emulate the engineer as social, economic, and political life were reformed along technical-scientific lines.

Paul Weidlinger took up these ideas in a 1938 manifesto while working for Le Corbusier. In it he grapples with the Logical Positivists, whose philosophical efforts to build knowledge out of the simplest propositions resonated with the increasingly utilitarian Bauhaus of director Hannes Meyer in Dessau. Completely shorn of the mystical, sentimental, and decorative, pure functionalism, Weidlinger feared, would result in “merely a concatenation of rooms.” Mass production risked losing sight of an elusive, but still crucial, architectural goal: creating an enhanced spatial experience for the particular people involved, a “joy of space.”

Weidlinger’s biography of his father was published in 2019 by SparkPress.

Tom Weidlinger learned the joyful relationship with space envisioned for their Wellfleet home only years after his father’s death, during a residency with the CCMHT. Left there with his schizophrenic mother after his parents’ divorce, Tom experienced the Wellfleet house as a “cursed repository” of fearful times. In a letter to his father during that period, Tom accused him of denying him a home. “Why do I need a home now,” Tom wrote, “after I have been without one all my life? A home is not an apartment or a house, it is a set of relationships that never existed within our family.”

Perhaps most fascinating about the book is its portrayal of a man split in two by his exile, his restless movements becoming a habit of thought that yielded an incredible career while also failing to sustain intimate family relations. Tom describes himself as a kind of homunculus in his father’s eyes: “lifelike yet not living.” Ironic, then, that lifelessness is precisely what Paul Weidlinger feared in the functionalist strain of modernist aesthetics. The house on Higgins Pond, with the dynamism of its hearth, was exemplary of his philosophy. He did not live to see it achieve its end.