Middlesex County, which extends from Cambridge out to Concord and Carlisle west of Boston, was the locus of some of the earliest and most significant domestic modern architecture in the region, if not America. Anchored by towns such as Lincoln, where both Walter Gropius and Marcel Breuer first settled and built family homes, Middlesex County is home to four world renowned universities, numerous other institutions of higher learning and a center for research and development of advanced technologies. Many of the people who came to work and study at these institutions believed in modernity as a force for bringing scientific and economic progress and social justice to the world, and to live in a modern house enabled them to more fully embody the experience of living in the modern world.
In conjunction with and support of the Concord Museum, whose “Middlesex County Modern” exhibition features a similar profile of domestic modern architecture across Middlesex County, and the Friends of Modern Architecture Lincoln (FoMA), Docomomo US/New England is presenting a tour of seven modern houses from the 1930s to the 1960s. Including two houses in Snake Hill, the first modern house development in America and featuring works by architects such as Carl Koch, John Quincy Adams, Walter Bogner, and Marvin Goody, this tour will demonstrate both the breadth and variety of modern house design in New England and how many of these dwellings have been successfully updated to accommodate contemporary lifestyles.