Architectural Phenomenology

The Story of a Thriving Bauhaus Style Home in Concord

BY EVE ISENBERG

“I’m in such a good mood all the time. Nature fills me up with light and color. I don’t ever feel blocked.”

The owner of this Bauhaus home in Concord is a prolific painter whose art exploded when she moved into her midcentury modern house. It is located on a main thoroughfare in the town, but you would never know it when you are inside. The floor-to-ceiling glass draws attention to the sunlight dappled forest and meandering brook in the backyard. The siting allows views of the constantly changing seasons. The stream swells in the spring and brings otters, muskrats, deer, and all manner of birds into the picture throughout the year.

Photo courtesy of the author

The Architects Collaborative (TAC), the architecture firm of Walter Gropius who also founded the Bauhaus school in Weimar Germany, 1919-1933, was responsible for the Six Moon Hill neighborhood in Lexington, the Harvard Graduate School of Design (GSD) building, and this home in Concord. In the Bauhaus tradition, the architects of TAC sought to align architecture with the disciplines of art, economics, and sociology. This effort, in theory, enabled architects to treat design as a social process, one responsive to the needs of individual patrons and sites.

The house was commissioned in 1953 by Dr. George E. Valley, a physics professor at MIT, whose work on the use of computers in air defense led to the formation of the MIT Lincoln Laboratory of which Valley was a leader from 1949 to 1957. In 2008 internationally renowned urban planner Anthony Mallows bought the house and completely restored it based on the original TAC blueprints. Mallows, who was trained in architecture at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, also added an architecture studio above the garage. The current homeowners bought the house from Mallows in 2015 and renovated again, pushing out the front entry where it once was recessed and adding a workshop to the back of the garage. They enclosed a covered deck at the back, creating a two-story addition including a sunken sitting room with walls of glass underneath a bedroom which they call “the treehouse.” They chose to side the addition with stucco and wrapped the horizontal sun control trellis at the roofline around the new rooms to stay in keeping with the modern aesthetic. New outdoor lighting schemes illuminate the yard, extending the indoor-outdoor conversation with nature into the evenings.

These current homeowners knew when they walked through the door that they had to have the house. They had raised their family in a lovely old colonial and never considered a modern house. Now they are grateful to own a house filled with daylight that fosters peace and creativity. They describe their visceral reaction to their new life in this home: “Having this house brings out something you didn’t know was in you.”

Photo courtesy of the author

The term Phenomenology as it relates to architecture is used to describe the instinctual response evoked by the play of architectural elements such as form, material, space and proportion, light and shadow, and color; each sensory cue inducing an emotive, cohesive, powerful experience. Thanks to the care and foresight of its three sets of owners over its seventy years, this house will continue to bring joy to future generations.

Eve Isenberg, Principal of the Concord-based, women-owned Inkstone Architects LLC, is a MA and NH registered architect and a Deck House owner in Concord.