Gropius House

Gropius left Germany for London in 1934 and then, in 1937, accepted a professorship at Harvard's Graduate School of Design; a Lincoln, Massachusetts philanthropist, Helen Storrow, offered him a hilltop lot and construction money in exchange for the right to use the finished house as an object lesson for local builders. Working with Marcel Breuer, his former Bauhaus colleague and now fellow Harvard professor, Gropius built himself a house that reads at a distance like International Style orthodoxy — flat roof, ribbon windows, an open plan — but is executed almost entirely in materials a New England contractor already knew how to handle: painted wood clapboard rather than stucco, fieldstone retaining walls gathered from the property itself, and a screened porch adapted from a regional vernacular. A glass-block panel and an exposed spiral stair supply the machine-age notes. Gropius, his wife Ise and their daughter Ati lived in the house until his death in 1969; his family later gave it to Historic New England, which opened it to the public with its original furniture intact.