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Peacock Farm Historic District | |
 Typical Peacock Farm House with asymmetrical roof | |
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| Location | Lexington, Massachusetts |
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| Coordinates | 42°25′15″N71°12′13″W / 42.42083°N 71.20361°W |
| NRHP reference No. | 12000949 [1] |
| Added to NRHP | November 21, 2012 |
Peacock Farm is a residential neighborhood and historic district of mid-century modern houses in Lexington, Massachusetts.
Peacock Farm is a residential neighborhood located in the southeast corner of Lexington, Massachusetts. Most houses use a standard split-level plan designed by the architectural firm of Comptom & Pierce and were built between the years of 1953 and 1960. [2] Because of siting on the hilly landscape and use of mirror-imaged versions of the plans, the effect is one of diversity but with a common architectural theme. The neighborhood includes a large tract of community-owned land for active and passive recreation. [3] This was the third planned modernist development to have begun in Lexington, after Six Moon Hill, and at about the same time as Five Fields.
The original c.1830 farmhouse and barn still stand and can still be seen today, at the entrance to the modern development. Previous to its purchase for the development, the land had been used for training trotting horses and raising peacocks. [3]
The neighborhood was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2012 as the Peacock Farm Historic District. [1]
In 1951, Danforth Compton and Walter Pierce were recent graduates of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's School of Architecture. At MIT they had been influenced by the ideas of William Wurster, Lawrence Anderson, and the houses built in the area around the same time by Carl Koch. [4] MIT, like the Harvard Graduate School of Design (led at that time by Walter Gropius), represented the trend in design education away from backwards-looking Beaux Arts, to instead embrace the principles of Modernism. [3] As explained by Pierce in a 2011 interview, there was an interest in whether through standardization, homes could be built based on contemporary principles at a price young homeowners could afford. [5]
The newly formed Compton & Pierce firm purchased 42 acres (17 ha) of land that had been a dairy farm in the 19th century, as a place to try out their ideas. By this time, modernist designs for housing were no longer anomalies. The widely-circulated magazine Better Homes and Gardens featured both modernist and traditional plans which subscribers could order from the magazine. However, modern housing designs were most popular in areas with more cosmopolitan tastes such as the suburbs of New York, Boston, and coastal California. [3]
Compton & Pierce designed a single-story house with a raised basement, low-pitch roof, and vertical cedar siding that was available in several sizes. The entry was at mid-level, and the houses incorporated large expanses of glass. The house at 4 Peacock Farm Road was built as a demonstration model late in 1951. Pierce said most traditional architects had found the land undesirable for development: "Much of the land gradient was steep, and much of the site was underlaid with ledge. To our eyes, these were assets that could be worked with. The land formed a natural bowl, shielded from the north by the hill and sloping down to the south and southeast, nice attributes in this northern latitude." [5]
Similar to other modernist communities in Lexington, Peacock Farm attracted young professionals and academics. The neighborhood was organized to function as a community with shared land, bylaws, and architectural restrictions. These restrictions were reaffirmed by membership vote in 2001. [6]
Walter Adolph Georg Gropius was a German-American architect and founder of the Bauhaus School, who is widely regarded as one of the pioneering masters of modernist architecture. He was a founder of Bauhaus in Weimar and taught there for several years, becoming known as a leading proponent of the International Style. Gropius emigrated from Germany to England in 1934 and from England to the United States in 1937, where he spent much of the rest of his life teaching at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. In the United States he worked on several projects with Marcel Breuer and with the firm The Architects Collaborative, of which he was a founding partner. In 1959, he won the AIA Gold Medal, one of the most prestigious awards in architecture.
Lexington is a suburban town in Middlesex County, Massachusetts, United States, located 10 miles (16 km) from Downtown Boston. The population was 34,454 as of the 2020 census. The area was originally inhabited by Native Americans, and was first settled by Europeans c. 1642 as a farming community. Lexington is well known as the site of the first shots of the American Revolutionary War, in the Battle of Lexington on April 19, 1775, where the "Shot heard 'round the world" took place. It is home to Minute Man National Historical Park.
Back Bay is an officially recognized neighborhood of Boston, Massachusetts, built on reclaimed land in the Charles River basin. Construction began in 1859, as the demand for luxury housing exceeded the availability in the city at the time, and the area was fully built by around 1900. It is most famous for its rows of Victorian brownstone homes—considered one of the best preserved examples of 19th-century urban design in the United States—as well as numerous architecturally significant individual buildings, and cultural institutions such as the Boston Public Library, and Boston Architectural College. Initially conceived as a residential-only area, commercial buildings were permitted from around 1890, and Back Bay now features many office buildings, including the John Hancock Tower, Boston's tallest skyscraper. It is also considered a fashionable shopping destination and home to several major hotels.
Benjamin C. Thompson was an American architect. He was one of eight architects who founded The Architects Collaborative (TAC) in 1945 in Cambridge, Massachusetts, one of the most notable firms in post-war modernism, and then started his own firm, Benjamin Thompson and Associates (BTA), in 1967.
The Gropius House is a historic house museum owned by Historic New England at 68 Baker Bridge Road in Lincoln, Massachusetts, United States. It was the family residence of Modernist architect Walter Gropius, his wife Ise Gropius, and their daughter Ati Gropius. The house was designated a National Historic Landmark in 2000 for its association with Walter Gropius, as he was an influential teacher and leader of Modernist architecture. The house includes a collection of Bauhaus-related materials unparalleled outside Germany.
John Cheesman "Chip" Harkness was an American architect who was a founder and partner of The Architects Collaborative (TAC) in Cambridge, Massachusetts with Walter Gropius and six other architects. He was a part of TAC from its inception in 1945 until the firm's demise in 1995.
Six Moon Hill is a residential neighborhood and historic district of mid-century modern houses in Lexington, Massachusetts.
The MIT School of Architecture and Planning is one of the five schools of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Founded in 1865 by William Robert Ware, the school offered the first architecture curriculum in the United States and was the first architecture program established within a university. MIT's Department of Architecture has consistently ranked among the top architecture/built environment schools in the world.
Oscar Gregory Stonorov was a modernist architect and architectural writer, historian and archivist who emigrated to the United States from Germany in 1929. His first name is often spelled "Oskar".
Carl Koch was a noted American architect. He was most associated with the design of prefabricated homes and development of the Techcrete building system.
The Landis Gores House is a historic house on Cross Ridge Road in New Canaan, Connecticut. It is a "Wrightian" house that was designed by architect Landis Gores and built by John C. Smith for the Gores family's use. The design represents an innovative fusion of American Wrightian modern architecture and the more International style of the Bauhaus in which Gores was trained. The house was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2002.
Kilham & Hopkins was an architectural firm in Boston, Massachusetts formed in 1899 or 1900 by its founding members, Walter Harrington Kilham and James Cleveland Hopkins. The firm later became Kilham, Hopkins & Greeley after William Roger Greeley joined the firm in 1916, and Kilham Hopkins Greeley and Brodie after Walter S. (Steve) Brodie joined the firm in 1945.
The Atlantic Heights Development is a historic company-built worker subdivision in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. Bounded by I-95, the Piscataqua River, and the tracks of the Boston and Maine Railroad, this small neighborhood was built in 1918–1920 to meet housing demand for workers at the Atlantic Company Shipyard, located just to the south, and served as a prototype for later residential subdivisions. It was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2006.
Walter Smith Pierce was an American modernist architect, best known for designing post-World War II suburban homes.
Campbell, Aldrich & Nulty (CAN) was an architectural firm based in Boston, Massachusetts. The firm's principals were leading modernists, from the 1950s to the 1970s, when International Modernism matured in America. CAN was a successor of Campbell & Aldrich, founded in 1945. Its principals were Walter E. Campbell, Nelson Wilmarth Aldrich, and Lawrence Frederick Nulty. In the late 1960s and in the 1970s, the partnership of Aldrich and Nulty designed some of New England's most recognizable and controversial modernist architecture.
The Poppy Peak Historic District is a neighborhood and historic district located in the southwest corner of Pasadena, California. The neighborhood is located on the side of Poppy Peak, a 991-foot-high (302 m) mountain of the San Rafael Hills. Developer William Carr platted the neighborhood in 1924. The homes in the district were designed by a number of significant Modern Movement architects. The district was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 2009.
Fort Hill is a 0.4 square mile neighborhood and historic district of Roxbury, in Boston, Massachusetts. The approximate boundaries of Fort Hill are Malcolm X Boulevard on the north, Washington Street on the southeast, and Columbus Avenue on the southwest.
Five Fields is a modernist residential neighborhood in Lexington, Massachusetts developed starting in 1951. It consists of 68 half-acre lots with modernist houses on an 80-acre site designed by The Architects Collaborative (TAC). Partners in charge from TAC were Norman Fletcher and Louis McMillen with Richard Morehouse as senior associate. A 20-acre portion is held in common and includes community facilities such as a swimming pool and playground.
Spokane and its neighborhoods contain a patchwork of architectural styles that give them a distinct identity and illustrate the changes throughout the city's history. Spokane has a rich architectural history for a western city of its size and much of it is a product of its circumstances at the turn of the 20th century when as a rapidly growing city, the Great Fire of 1889 destroyed 32 blocks of the city center which was quickly rebuilt in a more grand fashion by a community flush with money coming from regional mining districts. Many of the architects that found work in the city and building on the blank slate of the downtown commercial district became highly esteemed architects such as Kirtland Cutter, who has been credited with giving the city a distinctive character. In particular, the city has a high concentration of Romanesque Revival style institutional and commercial buildings and American Craftsman bungalow residences. The architecture of Spokane gained national recognition in industry publications in the early 20th century.
Turning Mill is a residential neighborhood of mid-century modern houses in Lexington, Massachusetts, US.
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