New Haven Register (Sunday) (New Haven, CT)
‘THE HARVARD 5’
HOW MID-CENTURY MODERNISM CAME TO NEW CANAAN
There are times when circumstances conspire to explode our perspective. At this moment, we may think that a pandemic is changing our values. But 70 years ago, it was World War II that transformed America, including Connecticut.
After a brutal Depression and the near-death experience of war, everything changed. Highways, television sets and frozen food flooded our culture, and aesthetics changed too. “Modernism” had been introduced in Europe before World War II, but the style that is now popularly called “contemporary” design also became part of the new world. In those years, one town, New Canaan, Conn. was the mise en scene where “young Turks” of Mid-Century Modernism expressed themselves.
After World War II, architect Philip Johnson led other architects — Marcel Breuer, Landis Gore, Eliot Noyes and John M. Johansen — to look to Connecticut as a place to build. They all taught at Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design, and came to be known as a mini-movement of the greater Modern Movement; they were dubbed “The Harvard 5.”
Johnson had spent the previous 20 years visiting Hartford’s Wadsworth Atheneum, basking in its embrace of Modernism. The museum had hired a new director in 1927. A. Everett “Chick” Austin who proceeded to blow the minds of Nutmeggers with acquisitions of modern work and voluble support for the Modern Movement in general.No less than the Modern Master Architect Le Corbusier visited Hartford and the Atheneum and he said that Austin was turning the “little town in upper Connecticut into a place where burns the lamp of the mind,” as reported by Travel and Leisure.Johnson touted that Austin had changed Mark Twain’s hometown into “the navel of the world,” the
Observer reported.His encouragement of his fellow wealthy New Englander sophisticates to build second homes in “the country” created a market for Modernist homes.
Johnson had already worked with the New York City’s Museum of Modern Art to create the 1932 exhibit “Modern Architecture: International Exhibit” and its subsequent book “The International Style” before building his own Glass House in New Canaan in 1949.
As the pied piper of “The Harvard 5,” he led these already successful architects into domestic dabbling in Fairfield County, and their work became a virtual boutique of an aesthetic wave. “The Harvard 5” were joined by about 20 other architects for the next 40 years to build about 50 homes in the New Canaan area. These homes have been recognized by architectural preservation groups like the New Canaan Preservation Trust as being “significant.”
When history captures a unique aesthetic moment, it becomes fascinating to those looking back upon it. One of those fascinated by “The Harvard 5” is Robert Gregson, an artist and graduate of Chicago’s Art Institute, who is also a photographer and an architectural preservationist. Gregson is a devotee of understanding Modernism as a movement in architecture. His photography is exquisite and his words and work showcasing “The Harvard 5” are full of insight, garnered by decades focused documentation.
Gregson describes this unique time and place in Connecticut:
“’The Harvard 5’ were friends and competitors, but what brought them together in New Canaan was their mutual respect and support. Each had his own personality and talents.
John M. Johansen was the rebel of the group.
Landis Gores fought polio to design elegant homes as well as working with Philip Johnson to help him realize the Glass House.
Philip Johnson was the colorful master of self-promotion. His architecture reflects his ever-evolving love of design. His estate in New Canaan was his playground.
Eliot Noyes was a visionary. He was able to see beyond a building to conceptualize how the elements of architecture fit together into a larger whole.
Marcel Breuer was a genius. He mixed the pragmatic with his eye as an artist.”
Using Gregson’s photos and words, looking at the work of “The Harvard 5” becomes a tapestry of a moment. Breuer was from Hungary and created the Wassily Chair and the U.N.’s UNESCO Building. Gregson notes that Breuer’s work in New Canaan was partially “an homage to New England’s stone walls. Breuer’s first house in New Canaan was what he calls his ‘long house.’”
Perhaps the least famous of “The Harvard 5” architects was Gores from America’s Midwest, and Gregson’s insights are valuable here as well. “Landis Gores is the toughest of ‘The Harvard 5’ to define because of his early onset of polio which affected his career. His own home reflects his admiration for Frank Lloyd Wright,” he says.
Johansen was from New York and had an incredible career making buildings now dubbed as “Brutalism,” which is defined by the Merriam-Webster as “a style in architecture using exaggeration and distortion to create its effect (as of massiveness or power).” As Gregson notes, “John M. Johansen was always inventing. His Bridge House spans a small stream. It was designed for the head of Mobil.” Its precision is a delightful contrast to his “Brutalist” work.
Noyes was an incredible designer; his works include the designing buildings for IBM as well as the Selectric typewriter and the iconic Mobil gas stations all over America. He also collaborated with legends like Mies van der Rohe, Eero Saarinen, and Charles Eames. Gregson notes, “Eliot Noyes was a visionary. He had a very special house. It really was two pavilions — one with the communal spaces such as kitchen, dining, living — and one with the bedrooms and bathrooms. The only connection was the open courtyard between.”
The provocateur and leader of “The Harvard 5” movement was Johnson, Gregson notes. “Despite the fact that he was inspired by Mies to do the Glass House, Johnson’s house is a very different take. Frank Lloyd Wright came to visit and as they sparred about architecture, Wright would get up to fill his glass and would move a sculpture. When Philip got up he would push it back. Wright got angry and said he did not like it there and said to Philip ‘Symmetry is for the Gods.’”
Perhaps it is only in retrospect that a fine arts trend can become a cultural reflection of a time. With the entire world reborn after an existential crisis, those living in the new superpower of America were anxious to manifest their newly-discovered destiny. The Eisenhower Federal Highway System, the Space Race and President John F. Kennedy’s New Frontier all had the heady empowerment of revolutionary invention. I think that intoxicating cultural hubris helped launch Modernism within the “land of steady habits” — Connecticut.
The irony of iconic Modernism finding a public forum in the tiny hamlet of New Canaan, while its revolution raged on at the Museum of Modern Art, Harvard and the Hartford Atheneum is not lost on Gregson. The homes of “The Harvard 5” manifested an aesthetic bubble that is hard to overlook. When these homes were built, thousands upon thousands of “Colonial Reproduction” homes were flooding the fallow fields of abandoned farms. It was a time when both The Big Mac and National Public Radio found places in the lives of millions of Americans.
Although architects may think they are leading our sensibilities to new futures, it is our complicated and messy culture that creates the hothouses where these aesthetic ideas can grow. But who knew that New Canaan would be such fertile ground?
HIGHWAYS, TELEVISION SETS AND FROZEN FOOD FLOODED OUR CULTURE, AND AESTHETICS CHANGED TOO.