Lecture + Lunch: Driftwood Manifestos: Modern Architecture and Culture on Outer Cape Cod
Lecture by Peter McMahon, Founding Director, Cape Cod Modern House Trust

Cape Cod Landscape
The Outer Cape Cod comprises a unique landscape of beaches, pinewoods, tidal marshes and glacial ponds with a brilliant quality of light that has drawn artists and writers since the nineteenth century.

History
In 1937, Bauhaus founder Walter Gropius and a close circle of his friends and former faculty spent the summer on a small island at the base of the Cape, reprising their communal European holidays before spreading out to transmit their revolutionary teachings around the US. In the early 1940's the Outer Cape beconed this group back. Many of modern architecture's prime movers, including architects Marcel Breuer, Serge Chermayeff and Olav Hammarstrom and engineer Paul Weidlinger, built houses for themselves, their friends and clients. Walter Gropius, Xanti Schawinski, Konrad Wachsmann, Costantino Nivola, the Saarinen family and Florence and Hans Knoll were frequent house guests here.

The Outer Cape's Creative Culture
The Cape's modern architects enjoyed a lifestyle based on communion with nature, solitary creativity and communal festivity. Their houses embody this. They believed in the power of design to improve the human condition and to integrate man with nature. They applied those principles equally to the great projects they undertook in the world beyond Cape Cod and to their own cottages, which were sometimes made with salvaged material, Homasote and driftwood.

The Cape Cod Modern House Trust
The Trust was founded in 2007 to prevent the demolition of a group of significant modern houses owned by the National Park Service on outer Cape Cod, and of renovating and repurposing these structures as loci for creativity and scholarship, as well as locating and archiving all available related materials. CCMHT has leased and restored the first of these abandoned houses as home for an artist/scholar residency program.