Conn. has history of cultivating new designs and ideas

Wedged between the colossus of New York City and New England’s capital, Boston, Connecticut was declared “a land of steady habits” in 1827, by Boston’s own Commercial Gazette. That branding extends to the common perception that Connecticut’s architecture is as exciting as vanilla ice cream. It then may surprise some that Connecticut is actually home to some of the most fertile fields of expression in Modern Architecture.

The vast majority of houses in Connecticut can be labeled “traditional.” Like every mainstream, there is a countercurrent. “Modern” homes in Connecticut are unusual and often viewed as harder to sell, but “contemporary” architecture has a cache and appeal that is established and vital. Modernist architecture is an alternative to the safety of established aesthetics most associate with this “land of steady habits” as reflected in an October 2020 Harris national poll that showed about 30 percent of us prefer “modern” architecture, while 70 percent favor “traditional” architecture.

Perhaps Connecticut’s conservative branding serves to highlight the power of radical departures from the cultural norm. Connecticut was an early home to radical abolitionists, suffragists, and prohibitionists. When radical Modernist architects were fleeing Hitler’s atrocities they found safe harbor in New England, particularly

Connecticut. In the years after World War II, New Canaan had a subculture of Modern Architectural expression second to none in the United States. This cluster of the “new” amid the “land of steady habits” was led by A. Everett “Chick” Austin, director of the Wadsworth Atheneum, who triggered the move with sustained acquisitions of Modern work and voluble support for the Modern Movement.

If one architect could be said to manifest Europe’s Modern Movement it was France’s Le Corbusier, who visited Austin in Hartford and declared that he was turning the “little town in upper Connecticut” into “a place where burns the lamp of the mind.” Then architect Philip Johnson touted that Austin had changed Mark Twain’s Hartford into “the navel of the world.” The attention made creating an art piece “country home” in Connecticut, specifically in New Canaan, a cutting-edge act of aesthetic innovation.

Boston then, again, defined Connecticut by having some of its architecture school’s faculty members, dubbed “The Harvard Five”, become another group of Connecticut rabble rousers — this group included Johnson, Marcel Breuer, Landis Gore, John M. Johansen and Eliot Noyes who were soon joined by about 20 other architects from 1939 on. In the next 40 years, about 50 “significant” “modern” homes in New Canaan came to be lauded by the National Trust for Historic Preservation.

Beyond this seminal breakthrough infestation of “Modernist” thought, Yale’s own architecture school jumped into the aesthetic revolution with the 1950 commissioning of the Yale University Art Gallery by Louis Kahn who taught there starting in 1947. Followed by Modernist expressions in architecture by Eero Saarinen, Paul Rudolph, Kevin Roche, Gordon Bunshaft and Charles Moore, and others creating more than 100 significant Modernist buildings in New Haven, as recognized by the New Haven Preservation Trust.

This institutionalization of the once revolutionary Modern Movement has created a niche architectural residential market in Connecticut. Beyond New Canaan, Guilford’s Sam Hill/Old Quarry section has a generation of Modernist homes were built by Yale-centric architects, and a number of homes in Greenwich, Westport and Weston enrich those real estate markets.

In this mainstreaming of the revolutionary, Connecticut has fostered some of this generation’s Modern masters. Yale-trained New Haven architects Alan Organschi and Lisa Grey project internationally famous High Modern designs around the world. Another Yale product Joeb Moore in Greenwich produces Modernist tour de force “signature” homes that also win national acclaim. While declaring that she has no “signature style” architect Laura Kaehler creates the lush modern residences that have become a staple niche in the Fairfield County real estate market.

Connecticut’s embrace of Modernism mimic’s the aesthetic movement’s shift from radical reinvention to living in its own tradition — an oxymoronic evolution of the “modern” becoming an established and venerated cultural sidebar. Culture is anything but static, and Connecticut has a legacy of radical ideas finding public voice — first abolition with Henry Ward Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe, onto contraception with Griswold v. Connecticut, and then becoming one of the first states to sanction same-sex marriage in 2008. It should not be surprising that this “land of steady habits” was an incubator of the Modern Movement in architecture and fine art, led by The Hartford Atheneum and Yale University.

In each of these social revolutions, bands of zealots invaded the quaint safety of sleepy Connecticut because they relied on the state’s collective intelligence to transform the status quo to reflect new ways of thinking. Despite its “traditional” branding, Connecticut embraces the Modernist aesthetics that are the literal signature of new ways of thinking.