Together, these very different books on New England houses provide an intimate introduction to American domestic architecture and the values it embodies. Architectural historian William Morgan’s Monadnock Summer focuses on one quietly elite, very small town but explains how the buildings there exemplified some of the aspirations and achievements of the nation. Architect Alexander Gorlin’s Tomorrow’s Houses concentrates on houses in New England built between 1912 (Purcell & Elmslie) and 1967 (Richard Meier), describing the forms Modernism took on this side of the Atlantic and how it sought to represented the way Americans lived, at least while the movement's idealism lasted.
Gorlin begins by noting that the houses he describes “are humanly scaled, luxurious in their restraint, and emblematic of a desire for living in harmony with the natural environment that is current once again.” But he also asks, “Why did the grand experiment in many ways fail, so that today the vast majority of homes built in New England are of the very same styles—Georgian, Colonial, and Neoclassical—that the early modern architects pronounced dead as early as the 1930s?”
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