At the extreme tip of Cape Cod, Massachusetts, Provincetown has become a famous destination for hosting great artists and writers, including Helen Frankenthaler, Mary Oliver, Eugene O’Neill, and Jackson Pollock. Yet few people know that a few miles away, near Wellfleet, is a complex designed by the great modernist architect Marcel Breuer for himself and his friends, consisting of a hundred holiday homes built from 1948 onwards, taking as a model the one that he had initially built for himself and his family after falling in love with that area, and where beside which his ashes and those of his second wife, Connie, were buried under a stone slab made by the sculptor Masayuki Nagare.

Breuer designed the house as a stilt, giving the impression that it was floating in the woods. A portico overlooks three ponds, inspired by the many porches that the architect had seen throughout New England after moving to the United States to teach at Harvard in 1937. The modernist house, according to Professor Barry Bergdoll, brilliantly mixes the Bauhaus ethos with the traditional typology of the American summer cottage.

“These were vacation houses, but also places for making, with studios attached, and informal academic seminars,” said Peter McMahon, who in 2007 founded the Cape Cod Modern House Trust and grew up in a Wellfleet home designed by Charles Zehnder. “They were painters, writers and architects, having political arguments and working. It was a rich cultural soup”. Recently Breuer’s son, Tamas, decided to sell his house and so, McMahon is trying to raise $2 million – from public funds and private donations – to buy it and turn it into a residence for artists, architects, and scholars, recreating the cultural and convivial atmosphere that Breuer had created together with his circle.