Midcentury Houses Today : New Canaan, Connecticut

This is the story of American modernism that has not been told in full before. Midcentury Modern Houses takes on the unparalleled concentration of residential modernism in New Canaan, Connecticut, and demonstrates how the houses are experienced and lived in today. Architects Philip Johnson, Marcel Breuer, Landis Gores, Eliot Noyes, Edward Durell Stone, and others created an extraordinary collection of modern houses in New Canaan, Connecticut, in the 1940s and 1950s. The bucolic New England town—a suburb of Manhattan—became the site of fervent experimentation by some of the leading lights of the movement in the United States, the architects known as the Harvard Five, whose modern aesthetic could be traced to the Bauhaus school of design. They promoted core principles of simplicity, openness, and sensitivity to site and nature, building glass, wood, steel, and fieldstone houses that established architectural modernism as the ideal of domesticity in the twentieth century. Architects Jeffrey Matz and Cristina A. Ross, photographer Michael Biondo, and graphic designer Lorenzo Ottaviani present this vanishing generation of iconic American houses as more than an issue of restoration or preservation, but as an evolving legacy that adapts to contemporary life. Selecting a representative group of sixteen houses from the 1950s to 1978, they portray each in great detail with floor plans, timelines, and both archival and new photography—showing the evolution of the designs, including additions by architects such as Toshiko Mori, Roger Ferris, and Joeb Moore. Voices of architects, builders, owners, and occupants describe how the houses are enjoyed and lived in today, illustrating that the modernist residence is more than just a philosophy of design and construction, but also a philosophy of living.