This tour will visit the Six Moon Hill community in Lexington, MA, developed and built between 1947 and 1953 by and for members of The Architects Collaborative in Cambridge, a firm founded (and at that time still headed, by Walter Gropius). The community, based on egalitarian and utopian principles, encompasses 28 moderately prized houses (ca. $ 20000), which all share a mid-century modern design philosophy and formal language.

Founder and long-time president of Docomomo US Theo Prudon will give a talk reflecting on his life’s work as architect, educator, preservationist.

This tour will this visit the Paul Rudolph-designed Boston Government Service Center to consider how urban redevelopment of the 1960s played out here and its legacies for today. Twenty-first century redevelopment is transforming this area rapidly.

Brigitte Shim, Founding Partner of Shim-Sutcliffe Architects in Toronto, Canada, will present a talk titled “Materiality and Architecture.”

Join Docomomo US/New England for an afternoon of architecture at the new MIT Museum. Architect Eric Höwler of Höwler + Yoon will lead a tour of the new space and discuss its design. Assistant Curator of Architecture and Design Jonathan Duval will guide an overview of architectural drawings in the museum’s collection from modern architects and firms, including The Architects Collaborative (TAC).

This tour, led by Docomomo US/New England President and Brown University professor Deitrich Neumann, will include short presentations on John Nicholas Brown and Richard Neutra at the John Nicholas Brown Center, and will then visit several modern and postmodern buildings on the Brown campus.

In the generation following the Second World War, the University of Massachusetts Amherst engaged in one of the most ambitious academic building programs in the United States. Following a 1963 master plan by renowned landscape architect, Hideo Sasaki, UMass Amherst employed some of the most distinguished architects of the time such as Marcel Breuer, Kevin Roche, and Edward Durrell Stone, who remade the campus in a distinct Brutalist style.

This two-day symposium will provide a unique platform that brings together nation-wide scholars, industry professionals and passionate citizens with an interest in concrete Brutalist architecture and preservation of the architectural icons.

From the 1930s to the 1970s, modernist architecture thrived in New England. Despite economic problems and a conservative culture, the region fostered the practices of Bauhaus refugees and their students. This tour examines the buildings they made for clients and themselves, from monumental buildings for a renewed downtown Boston to their family houses in the suburbs to experimental weekend houses on Cape Cod. Modernism in New England demonstrates how regional and international tendencies could be in dialogue with one another to make a unique landscape which holds many lessons for the 21st century.

The Boston Government Services Center (BGSC), also known as the Lindemann-Hurley complex, was arguably the most architecturally ambitious project of the Government Center development. Today, the complex is in need of comprehensive renewal, and the Commonwealth is beginning to explore options. Henry Moss, AIA, Principal of Bruner/Cott Associates, will present the steps and findings of this process both as they inform preservation efforts and potential future development. 

Docomomo US/New England invites members and friends of modernism to an open house October 7th.