A look at the hub of early moderns

Chicago, L.A., and Houston, yes, but not the Hub of the Solar System. For the longest time, the city's low skyline was defined by the charming, tiresome, red brick of our Colonial past. This was our conceit. We were proud of it and visitors swooned.

In the 1980s, we saw a spasm begin of forgettable modern buildings in Boston. I'm thinking of ones like One Devonshire Place, the generic downtown structure of glass and steel. Most of our modern office buildings are mediocre. The notable exception is the John Hancock Tower, which everyone excoriated when it went up as a blot on our fragile sense of scale.

But Greater Boston turns out to have been, along with greater Los Angeles, the center of early modernism in this country. Who knew? The Observer sure didn't until Keith Morgan, who teaches the history of architecture at Boston University, took me on a tour last week to prove it.

Early modernism was the revolution in design that ran from the early 1930s through the mid-1950s, influenced heavily by the Bauhaus school in Germany founded by Walter Gropius in 1919. He also founded the influential The Architects Collaborative in Cambridge in 1945.

The Bauhaus design is known for its simple white facades, cubic, flat-roofed buildings with great use of ribbon windows. But early modernism here also drew from Frank Lloyd Wright and modern movements in Europe - thus appropriating the broader term "International Style." Whatever you called it, H.H. Richardson it was not.

One of the finest examples of Bauhaus in the area is the Gibbs House at 6 Chilton Street in Brookline, amid rows of Tudor revivalist brick homes. Dr Frederick and Erna Gibbs vacationed in Germany in the 1930s and were smitten by the Bauhaus design. They returned with a mission to replicate here what they saw there. Architect Samuel Glazer designed a beauty - a substantial home with white concrete facade, flat-roofed, full of square glass blocks that must have stunned everyone else on Chilton.

I say "Greater Boston" about early modernism because most of the prime examples are located in the suburbs north and west of the city - places like Lexington, Belmont, and Lincoln. Lexington has more examples of early modernism than any other community, says Morgan. "One project spawned another," he says.

Morgan showed me the Lexington enclaves of Six Moon Hill Road, built in the late 1940s, and the larger Peacock Farm development, begun in the early 1950s. Also the smaller Belmont community on Snake Hill Road, where the noted architect Carl Koch designed nine homes, including one for himself, in the early 1940s. These are small wooden, flat-roofed houses in earth tones and a lot of glass to merge with landscape.

All of these suburban enclaves were designed to accommodate young professionals and their families entering postwar society. We're talking artists, academics, fellow architects, engineers - people on tight budgets - who wanted to live in nature. These houses look small today, inside and out. The Gropius house in Lincoln, a National Historic Landmark, is all of 2,400 square feet. I found it claustrophobic. But then small houses are in vogue now, as we move to what architect and early modernism preservationist Gary Wolff calls "the not so big house" with a small carbon footprint.

At least these early moderns improved on the traditional Cape house, a small, depressing structure notorious for dark, cramped rooms, low ceilings, and tiny windows. The modern house had more open space, better light. What space it had was flexible, and linked with the environment. "They were very Yankee," says Morgan. "They were cheap, small 20th-century equivalents of the houses of the first settlers."

I wouldn't have looked twice at the aging wooden houses on Snake Hill Road had Morgan not explained their significance. By now, they appear nondescript and insubstantial. Many of the early moderns look a bit rundown, and, says Morgan, maintenance can be a problem with them. Beyond that, the early moderns became victims of their own success and increasingly produced yawns.

The early modern movement didn't stop in the mid-1950s so much as lose its early purity. It got modified, endlessly, over time. For example, deck houses, whose bloodlines run straight back to the early modern movement, became as common as the Golden Arches of McDonald's

Or worse. In 1964, Peabody Terrace, the ghastly modern housing for married Harvard students along Memorial Drive appeared, the progeny of the early moderns. Morgan tells me it actually won awards. I speak for many in declaring it one of the major eyesores in the Western Hemisphere.

And then came the challenge to the early moderns in the 1970s by the preservationist juggernaut that arose to protect much older buildings of historical significance. It remains much easier to gather support to preserve an early 18th-century home than an early modern one appreciated by a relative few.

Still, Boston wasn't the flop I assumed when it comes to modern architecture. It was an incubator of early modernism. But like so much else in the city and its surroundings, someone has to tell you it's there in the first place.

Sam Allis can be reached at allis@globe.com.