The House of Kuhn, By the Water

Thomas Kuhn’s one-time vacation home in Wellfleet, Massachusetts, is a modest modernist box. Built in 1960 by Nathaniel Saltonstall and Peter Morton, and empty since the 1990s, it is now in some disrepair, here and there sagging and waterlogged. It remains, in spite of wear and mold, legible as an e...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Author: Helmreich, Stefan
Other Authors: Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Anthropology Program
Format: Article
Language:en_US
Published: University of California Press 2017
Online Access:http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/108237
https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0859-5881
Description
Summary:Thomas Kuhn’s one-time vacation home in Wellfleet, Massachusetts, is a modest modernist box. Built in 1960 by Nathaniel Saltonstall and Peter Morton, and empty since the 1990s, it is now in some disrepair, here and there sagging and waterlogged. It remains, in spite of wear and mold, legible as an exemplar of Cape Cod modern, a Bauhaus-meets-Frank-Lloyd-Wright architectural style that adapts the sharp lines of modernism to the scrub and pitch pine landscapes of the Outer Cape, a thin neck of land fronted on its east by the Atlantic Ocean and on its west by the Cape Cod Bay. Walking through the Kuhn cottage in May 2012, guided by architect Peter McMahon—head of a nonprofit dedicated to restoring mid-century modernist homes—I was taken, no surprise, by the house’s structure.