Save modernist houses, Friends beg

Architect Henry B. Hoover, who designed several dozen houses in and around Lincoln, was so unpretentious that when someone asked him to define modernist architecture, he would often say it included any house with interior plumbing.

There's more to it than that, though, which is why several local residents are trying to preserve at least some of the more than 50 modernist houses in town built between the 1930s and the 1970s.

Tucked in many Lincoln neighborhoods -- including on some little-traveled private ways -- they stick out and they don't. Their squat shape and flat roofs make them different from surrounding houses, but many appear to grow right out of the ground.

Friends of Modern Architecture, a loosely organized group of Lincoln residents, hopes to persuade owners of modernist houses that they are worth saving and offer ideas and technical assistance from experts to do that. The houses are at risk, because they make for what many real estate agents and developers consider ideal candidates for teardown: They are several decades old, many were built with cheap materials, and they are relatively small by today's standards.

''They need the kind of championship that we're providing in our group . . . to foster awareness of their historic value and importance to the town's character," said Henry B. Hoover Jr., son of the architect and a current Lincoln resident.

Modernism can be hard to define, but one of the goals of modernists was to build economical houses that maximized space, drew in natural light, and used solar heating.

While New England is often associated with Cape-style houses and white church steeples, this area was a hotbed of American-style modernism several decades ago. American architects took principles developed in Europe in the early 20th century and made a local version.

''If you're looking at the history of modern architecture, the whole idea of creating a new American way of living that started in the '30s and then especially after the war, the western suburbs can sort of be seen as a laboratory for that," said David Fixler, president of the New England chapter of a group called DOCOMOMO-US, a somewhat confusing acronym that stands for Documentation and Conservation of Buildings, Sites and Neighborhoods of the Modern Movement, an international organization founded in Holland in 1988.

Lincoln, more so than most, is in that category, Fixler said, because it may have the most modernist houses per capita of any town in the area.

About 10 modernist architects settled in Lincoln during the 1930s and 1940s, said Dana Robbat, a Lincoln resident who last year completed a master's thesis called ''Plain Living, High Thinking/ The Early Modern Houses of Lincoln, Massachusetts: The Transmission of European Modernism into a New England Town."

The most famous was Walter Gropius (1883-1969), the German-born founder of the Bauhaus movement who was influenced by American architect Frank Lloyd Wright (1867-1959).

Wealthy benefactor Helen Storrow gave Gropius the wherewithal to design and build a modernist house on land she owned off Baker Bridge Road in Lincoln. The house, built in 1938, is now a museum.

Other modernist architects followed, finding receptiveness to their ideas from the forward-looking residents of Lincoln, who tend to favor a curious mix of traditionalism and progressivism.

Gropius's two-story home, with a plain exterior, flat roof, and right angles all around, stands in sharp contrast to the traditional farmhouse across the street. It created a stir when it was built, said Hoover, whose father, in addition to being an architect, served as the town's building inspector at the time.

''A lot of people didn't know what it was," Hoover said. ''It was too far away from the road to be a gas station, not enough clearance to be an airport. So what was it?"

Indeed, one of modernism's problems is that it requires some explaining. Education is one of the primary goals of Friends of Modern Architecture.

''If people understand what their houses are, they'll appreciate them more, and hopefully think about preserving this legacy," Robbat said.

In 2000, after Hoover retired from a job with the federal government, he returned to Lincoln to restore the house he grew up in. Set on a hill off Trapelo Road, it's the oldest modernist house in Lincoln, built in 1937, according to the specifications of his father, who died in 1989.

Visitors to the Hoover house are in for a surprise. You enter, turn a corner, and are greeted by a stunning view of Cambridge Reservoir and Prospect Hill, framed by a series of large glass windows, about 23 feet wide and about 9 feet high.

The effect is partly about the breathtaking vista and partly about engaging with nature. The one-story house blends in with the landscape, which is a hallmark of Hoover's father.

''These houses grew out of the land," Hoover said. ''They grow from the site, and they enhance the site. They don't look like they were put on top of the site."

Advocates for preserving modernist houses emphasize that they don't want to make them into museums. They acknowledge that many need renovations that might call for using different materials than the original, and that some may need to be expanded, because they are so small.

Hoover's father, for instance, built an addition to the 1937 house off Trapelo Road during the 1950s.

Lincoln residents who want to preserve modernist architecture aren't trying to prevent alterations in homes but rather to suggest ways that take advantage of the original principles and perhaps build on them.

''I think you don't always need to mimic, but we're hoping the original fabric could be somewhat respected," said Lucretia Giese, daughter of the elder Henry B. Hoover.

Still, that can be a tough sell. Modernism is controversial. Some consider the style -- with its sharp angles and a boxy, no-frills exterior -- ugly. Many feel the houses are too small, even if the interiors are laid out efficiently so as to create the illusion of more space than they really have.

While many people see the value of preserving, say, Colonial farmhouses or Federalist mansions -- which is why many of those houses end up in historic districts, such as the one in Lincoln Center -- modernist houses don't elicit the same emotions from the general public. Not yet, anyway.

''These houses are safe from destruction," Hoover said, while driving past the stately, ancient structures in the center of town. ''And what we want is for modernist houses to be seen in the same way."