Breuer House Restoration

Cuban Modernism

News

Breuer Progress

The birds are singing and the peepers are peeping, so it must be spring. In spite of a lot of bad weather and bad news cycles, work has been steady at the Breuer house and we expect to meet our completion deadline of late June. Insulation is finished and we can start working inside this week. The very particular lumber we needed for the decks was hung up at the Canadian border for over a month, however the spaces are starting to take their final form and it’s possible to see Breuer’s intent in many details large and small. Sourcing materials to match the originals has been an egg hunt; for example: all the bathroom walls were covered in a light grey sheet laminate called Marlite, before demolition, and luckily it is still being made in exactly the same color. Matching linoleum floor tiles however is more challenging.

We are planning at least one open house in June so watch this space.

We recently hosted curator Ágnes Sebestyén from the Hungarian Museum of Architecture and Monuments. We are exchanging some artifacts, books and a few pieces of furniture with the museum for the funds needed to get the restoration to the finish line.

The museum is preparing for exhibitions on both Brutalism and Hungarian ex-pat architects, Breuer being the most well-known. We hope we can continue to collaborate with the institution fruitfully on research and scholarship surrounding Breuer’s life and work.

The museum's Director just wrote:

Dear Peter McMahon,

As the director of the Hungarian Museum of Architecture and Monument Protection Documentation Center, I would like to thank you for your cooperation with our institution and my colleague Ágnes Sebestyén in the process of purchasing the selected material from the Breuer House in Wellfleet. We highly appreciate your cooperation and your willingness to secure the material’s presence in our museum in Breuer’s home country. This is one of the most important – if not the most important – acquisition of our institution in the past decades. I also would like to thank you for welcoming Ágnes in Wellfleet and helping her work there.

With best regards,
Kornél Almássy
Director

Cuban Modernism

***Clockwise from upper left:*** 1. The group in Revolution Square, Havana. 2. Dance students in the unfinished National School of the Arts. 3. The Parque Deportivo José Martí by Octavio Buigas in the upscale Vedado district. The public sports facility (under repair) was one the first things built by Castro after the revolution. 4. Eduardo Luis Rodríguez speaking at the conference.

I was in Cuba for a week in March at the invitation of Docomomo US. The trip and conference was also sponsored by Modernism Week and meant to support the burgeoning efforts on the island to preserve their modern structures built both before and after the 1959 revolution. I spoke at the Day of the Architect event at the old Havana Hilton (now the Havana Libre) along with Eduardo Luis Rodríguez, the architect, historian and Chair of Docomomo Cuba. He is doing heroic work trying to preserve the thin shell concrete structures of Max Borges Recio. We also got a tour of the National Art School, an amazing complex of organic-modern Catalan arches and vaults. Although it was abandoned half way through construction, parts of it are in use by the dance, ceramics and fine art departments. The post-revolution school was built on the former grounds of a Whites-only golf course. Our tour guide was Universo Garcia, the valiant architect spearheading the restoration of the derelict buildings, which he has undertaken with very little financial support or access to needed materials. Cuba is in extreme economic distress and during the last two days of the trip there was an island-wide black-out. The last night we had a presentation by Eduardo Luis and Cuban-born architectural restoration expert Rosa Lowinger, at the fabled Tropicana night club, a thin-shell concrete structure by Max Borges Recio. A good article by Rosa on the restoration of facades in Havana can be found here.

Thanks to Docomomo US Director Liz Waytkus, for the invite and her stalwart leadership.

Events

The Kohlberg house will be included on the Wellfleet Historic Society and Museum’s house tour on July 27th this year. Contact the museum for tickets.

2025 CCMHT house tours to be announced soon, Dates TBD.

Programs

A new class of Nauset High School students are re-designing the Hatch house. They visited last week with their architecture teacher Richard Tichnor. We will have two of our former Nauset interns helping out again this summer.

Our 2022 residency curator, Elizabeth Otto, is a 2025 Guggenheim Fellow along with artist Tom Burr, who is slated to be our first artist in residence at the restored Breuer house this fall. Congratulations to both!

It’s been an incredibly busy and productive two years since the Board voted to take on the project of buying and restoring the Breuer house. Our hope is that the site once again becomes a place of creativity and enjoyment. As always we are grateful to everyone who has also gotten exited about the work and leant their enabling support.

See you soon!

Spring ‘25 Update:

November Update 2024