Cape Cod Modern

In the summer of 1937, Walter Gropius rented a house on Cape Cod and invited the Bauhaus diaspora. What followed — quietly, over decades, in the woods and dunes of the Outer Cape — was one of the most understated chapters in American architectural history.

McMahon and Cipriani trace the cosmopolitan designers who settled in Wellfleet and Truro between the 1930s and 1970s, building for themselves and each other: a Regional Modernism that fused Bauhaus rigor with the vernacular of Cape Cod fishing towns. About 100 significant homes that almost no one outside the architecture world knew to covet.

New photographs by Raimundo Koch. Drawings of eight houses by Thomas Dalmas. Research built from primary sources throughout.

For anyone who has walked into a room and recognized, without quite knowing why, that someone here was thinking clearly.