You might expect a Boston-based firm to adhere to a proper New England architectural tradition when designing housing in a picturesque town in the Berkshires. Not so. Merge Architect’s two multifamily housing structures, just added to a compound anchored by a 2016 residential conversion of the late 19th-century Cable Mills factory buildings in Williamstown, Massachusetts, is different. The firm eschews the regional architecture of white clapboard, black wood shutters, and gable roofs. Instead, the architects’ approach reflects the Modernist direction that took hold in the 1930s and ’40s in the Northeast after the International Style began to have an impact in that part of the country.
But what took root here was not necessarily akin to the machine-like, abstracted designs in the famous 1932 Museum of Modern Art exhibition, curated by Philip Johnson and Henry-Russell Hitchcock. Rather it was a hybrid Modernism that explored regional materials and building techniques typical of rural and industrial buildings, such as board-and-batten wood siding, timber framing, and vernacular, single-pitched roofs. And that concept is alive and well today in Merge’s new Williamstown housing projects, albeit updated in materials and design elements.
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