Fall Update - and how you can help
Attendees at the open houses who hiked, biked, kayaked, and Funk bus’d to the house
Because of the generosity of our supporters, the Breuer house restoration is now complete. In early September CCMHT hosted two open houses at Breuer with over 700 people showing up to see the finished project. We especially wanted Wellfleetians to see the house, since they helped fund the restoration by voting in favor of our Community Preservation Fund grant application in town meeting. Visitors used non-automotive means to get to the site so as to spare the roads and neighbors excess traffic and a van shuttle service was provided as well. Thanks again to the excellent docents and volunteers who helped the events run smoothly.
If you’d like to help ensure that the Breuer house and our other historic properties remain preserved, accessible, and active, contributions can be made through our website or click button above. Every gift, large or small, supports our ongoing work.
Work in progress
It's been a very busy two years fundraising for and restoring Breuer, and we now have a chance to get back to projects at the other houses.
Two serious issues are being addressed at Kugel/Gips. The first is a longstanding dampness problem in the lower floor, partly caused by condensation on the uninsulated glass and cement block. To address this the carpet has been removed to be replaced with an epoxy floor, some ceilings have been raised, Homasote is being replaced with moisture resistant sheet rock, and more air ventilation has been deployed. The improvements have been felt immediately. The other issue has been caused by problematic detailing in the original balcony, which traps water and has rotted out one of the exterior corners. This required a complete re-build of this part of the deck. We are also replacing the entry doors and removing obsolete heaters throughout the house. Thanks to Tim Dickey and Design/Build for doing the work.
Work resumes at Breuer soon, including digging a new well to mitigate the high iron content of the existing water, removing some large perilous pine trees still hovering over the house, more road and drainage work, and other improvements that were cut short in the final rush to finish.
The A-frame at Kohlberg needs deck repairs and a new window, and Hatch needs new tracks for the sliding doors, some new entry doors, and deck and shutter repairs.
General maintenance all around includes painting, filling potholes, rot repair, and dealing with rampaging mice.
Collaborations
Ágnes Sebestyén, center, and Tas Tóbiás, right, at the opening.
photo: Gábor F. Tóth, Hungarian Museum of Architecture
Budapest:
In the last few years we have gotten to know some talented young cultural producers in Budapest including journalist Tas Tóbiás and curator Ágnes Sebestyén. These connections led to CCMHT de-accessioning some artifacts from the Breuer house to the Hungarian Museum of Architecture, where Ágnes works. The museum is creating a permanent Breuer collection in his home country, which he left at age 18 to attend the Bauhaus. The most important item we transferred is Breuer’s Isokon Long Chair, once in the Wellfleet studio. Like some other items that came with the purchase, the chair is too fragile and valuable to keep in situ, and can now be seen by the public along with a few other pieces, 20 books, and some of Tamás Breuer’s photos. In exchange the museum supplied the crucial funding we needed to finish the house restoration. Here’s an
article by Tás on the sold-out Budapest opening of the exhibit of Wellfleet artifacts.
Mid-century Wellfleet was an important refuge for Hungarian avant-garde creatives, which has been a mostly unknown story in their country of origin. We are honored to be a part of this evolving dialogue, and the growing interest in and appreciation for these mostly Jewish and politically progressive figures who made such an outsized impact on American life.
We have also archived over 200 rare and significant books from the house and are presently working on archiving many hundreds of rolls of film that will eventually be available to scholars and others. Some photos have already been used in print and in documentaries such as Curating Modernism by Jake Gorst, premiering February 13, 2026 at Palm Springs Modernism Week. There have also been discussions about building a secure vitrine in the Breuer house to display select one-of-a-kind books and objects.
Residencies
Part of Tom Burr’s 2017 installation at the Armstrong/Pirelli Rubber building
Our first artist-in-residence at the Breuer house is conceptual artist Tom Burr, who will be there for three weeks this fall, three weeks in the spring and another three weeks next fall. His practice has long been in dialogue with the history of minimalism, Brutalism, and specifically Breuer’s work. In 2024 we started a conversation inspired by his 2017 project involving Breuer’s Armstrong/Pirelli Rubber building in New Haven (now the Hotel Marcel). When the building was vacant, and before the back wing was demolished, Burr did a large installation incorporating architecture, sculpture, autobiography, and references to cultural events that took place nearby around the time of the building’s construction.
Tom is a 2025 Guggenheim Fellow and has shown extensively throughout Europe and the Americas. His work has been collected by the Whitney Museum of American Art (New York), Migros Museum (Zurich), MOCA (Los Angeles), and the Hammer Museum (Los Angeles), among others. For more please go here.
We look forward to seeing what Tom does at the Breuer house.
Filmmaker Ericka Beckman was one of our first artists-in-residence in 2010, when she and one of her students from Mass Art made a short film at Kugel/Gips and later started a film at Hatch before we had leased it, while it sat empty and in disrepair. Left unfinished, Ericka and a crew of five returned this month to expand and complete the project. The film should be available soon, so watch this space.
Her exhibitions include one-person shows at the Museum of Modern Art (New York), the Smithsonian’s Hirschhorn Museum (Washington, DC), and the Walker Art Center (Minneapolis), with works in the film collections of the Museum of Modern Art, Anthology Film Archives, the British Film Institute, and the Walker Art Center Media Collection.
Go here. for more on her work
How you can help
Aside from the day-to-day cost of keeping things running, our main expenditures are:
Paying down the $700,000 still owed on the Breuer project
Special projects and upgrades to the houses
Archiving the Breuer materials
Programming, including residencies, educational programs, public access, student internships
Whether it supports paying down the Breuer debt, maintaining the houses, or expanding programming, your contribution enables us to preserve these places and provide access to scholars, artists, and the public.