From Moon Hill
to Macallen:
Searching for
Purpose in the
New Modernism
by James Hadley AIA
Virgil wrote his Eclogues and Georgics over 2,000 years ago,
examining the relative virtues of life in the country and the city.
Since Virgil’s inspiration was the Idylls of Theocritus, written
in the third century BCE, we know that our sales agent — who
is cheerfully opening doors and pointing out views on this
sunny Saturday afternoon — is on well-trodden ground as she
enthusiastically compares life in the Fort Point Channel/South
Boston area with her former home in the suburbs. Virgil drew
no hard-and-fast conclusions in his pastoral works; today,
distinctions are more easily drawn. The new Macallen Building
that the agent is describing offers an on-site health club and lap
pool; a function room with adjacent landscaped roof deck; and
very attractive industrial-modern apartments with high ceilings,
lots of natural light, and high-end appliances. High-speed Internet
access is included in the condominium common charges. The
building is right across the street from a Red Line T-stop and
within a very short walk to South Station, so the enclosed parking
that is included with every apartment is more a luxury than a
necessity (and can be removed from the apartment offering with a
substantial saving in the base cost). It is all very new, up-to-date,
and quite appealing.
Most important, the building has achieved a LEED Gold
rating for environmental friendliness; in fact, it is the first
64 ab ❘ ArchitectureBoston
LEED-certified residential building in Boston. The Macallen,
designed by Office dA with Burt Hill, is the first step in what
the developer, Pappas Enterprises, intends to be a model urban
neighborhood. Pappas has already completed a rehabilitation
and condo-conversion of the warehouse-style building that
lies next to the Macallen. The former street between the two
buildings has been blocked to form a pedestrian space between
them. The developer’s next structure — planned for a site
across the street — aims for a LEED Platinum rating. All are
in place to become the northwest outpost of a revived South
Boston — perhaps the next evolving neighborhood in the
city. For many, moving to this formerly neglected area will be
a statement of belief as well as a move to a hip and attractive
place. For these people, like our sales agent, the attitudes that
created the suburban rings around our cities are out of date,
and they are ready for a new life and a new way of thinking
about the environment. Nature in the suburbs was about
participation; at the Macallen, it is about stewardship. Sitting
in your living room on the fourth floor may not offer you a
view of trees, but it’s nice knowing as you sit there that you may
have saved a few. Society — at least in the West — has changed
its entire attitude toward the natural environment; the old was
all romantic passivity, today we are talking about concerned
 < Harkness House. Photo courtesy, Perry Neubauer FAIA.

Macallen Building. Photo by John Horner.

<

Beyond the glass and

aluminum lies an uneasy
relationship with the
natural world.

May•June 2008 ❘ ab 65
For many, moving to this formerly
neglected area will be a statement of
belief as well as a move to a hip and
attractive place.
activism. Modern architects are, as always, ready to join the
revolution — ready to create the new world.
And yet 60 years ago, when architects turned their attention
and themselves towards the suburbs, they were just as convinced
that they were doing the same. The members of The Architects
Collaborative (TAC) who in 1948 began the Six Moon Hill
community in leafy Lexington, just outside Boston, were all
associates of Walter Gropius, who had brought European
Modernism with him to the United States when he fled
Germany in the 1930s. The simple, wood-sided houses they
designed for themselves and the other families who built with
them were, if anything, more revolutionary than the Macallen
is today. With large areas of glass, flat roofs, and no ornamental
trim, they were nothing like houses that Americans were used to
seeing. More important than the style of the buildings was the
attitude toward nature that they represented. They celebrated
the natural world, mainly by emphasizing their slick newness
in contrast to the rustic natural scene, which they left largely
intact. With their elimination of ornament and emphasis on
constructivist detail, much of the visual interest these houses
provide to their occupants comes from outside. This became
66 ab ❘ ArchitectureBoston
clear to me when I recently called Sally Harkness, one of the
founders of both TAC and Six Moon Hill. As we spoke, she
described to me the warmth of the light that was falling on her
from a large window near where she was sitting, and told me
of her delight in the ever-changing views from all her windows.
Clearly parts of the Six Moon design concept still work for one
of its founders, even after 60 years of occupancy.
Other aspects of Ms. Harkness’ life in Six Moon Hill have
turned out to be less successful. These are mostly about
mobility; although active, she no longer drives a car, and relies
on neighbors for trips to town. She is fortunate, because the
community spirit that characterized the original settlers lives
on with newer arrivals, and much help is at hand in the form of
rides from caring neighbors. Here is another aspect of Six Moon
Hill that was, and still is, revolutionary — it was more than just
an experiment in architecture. As Martin Filler reminds us, “The
forgotten (or suppressed) truth about Modernism was that the
radical new forms of architecture and urbanism its practitioners
advocated were only parts of broad and highly detailed agendas
for the reform of life in everything from economics and politics
to spirituality and class equality.” It is very easy to forget the
impact of Socialism on the architecture of the mid-20th century.
(Sally Harkness confessed to me that the founders of TAC had
considered calling it “The Architects Cooperative,” but rejected
the name as too political.) The plans for Six Moon Hill illustrate
the underlying feelings of the group. The elimination of all
 fancy details in the houses other than what results from the
needs of the construction process is very much in the European
anti-bourgeois tradition. Communal ownership of the pool
and open space, with common charges to support them were
new, then. (Now they are standard operating procedures for
condos like the Macallen.) What was most important was the
group effort that Six Moon Hill represented. The founders were
architects; they looked for and acquired the property together,
then chose one of their group to prepare the subdivision design
and fell into line behind him. Properties that were carved from
the overall plot were assigned to the purchasers by the drawing
of lots. The spirit carried on as the community progressed,
with activities like snowstorm parties, held when the roads
were covered, providing an excuse for getting together. Because
of these organizational underpinnings, the sense of the place
remains largely as it was conceived. Additions have been made
to many of the original houses, but they still appear relatively
small and deferential within the natural surroundings. There are
no fences. Children still play in the street. And also because of
the non-quantifiable things that a real community still has, Sally
Harkness can get a ride to the store.
It is hard not to wonder what might have happened if the
social thought that inspired Six Moon Hill had spread to the
larger community. What if notions of a shared responsibility
for public infrastructure had led to the development of
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transportation networks reaching outlying districts, much as
the Regional Plan Association proposed for the greater New
York tri-state area in the late 1960s? Would amenities offered
by cities have spread to the outer rings? Would traffic jams
have evaporated along with much of the traffic that made them
up? Could seniors with an interest in culture remain in their
woodland homes? Would bright young adults whose children
have finished high school still sell their homesteads and move to
the South Boston/Fort Point Channel area?
The questions are important ones, because it is very clear
that, at a certain age, most American families will choose
the suburbs over the city for reasons that have nothing to
do with design amenities or newness. The developers and
architects of the Macallen are clear about their market: it is
young professionals without children, or with children prior
to school age; and empty-nesters. Much of the population at
this exemplary building is either on the way into, or out of,
the suburban ring, and the energy saved by its state-of-the-
art design will be used up by those families who move to a
single-family home on a separate lot outside the city, in future
commuter traffic and the many, many HVAC systems this
lifestyle will require.
The opportunity to live on a field or in the woods remains
at the center of an American dream. Alas, at the onset of
the 21st century, this dream of a benign and life-sustaining
natural world is deeply conflicted, in ways that neither Virgil,
May•June 2008 ❘ ab 67
 > Harkness House. Photo courtesy, Perry Neubauer FAIA.

Theocritus, nor the founders of Six Moon Hill could have

imagined. There is perhaps no better example than the Slow
House proposal by Diller + Scofidio: a beach house featuring
a picture-window-cum-video-screen that records and replays
the water view. We no longer live in nature, but with nature in
an uneasy standoff. Having bought up the world, we are now
frightened of the responsibilities we, as a species, have taken
on. Within a climate of fear of — and guilt about — nature, we
look only to the technological aspects of the Modernist vision
for help. And we begin to sense the inadequacy of our current
paradigm — the market — for solving environmental problems.
Developing new and greener apartment buildings in cities may
succeed as conservation and as a sales strategy, but the energy
these projects save may well turn out to be less than the energy
generated by a lifestyle that they facilitate. (I know of at least > Macallen Building.
one architect with a home on Cape Cod who is purchasing an Photo by John Horner.
apartment in the Macallen as a pied-à-terre.)
It is hard to imagine architects and developers solving the
environmental problems of the 21st century no matter how masters…” We have reconnected with the vocabulary of the
inventive our new buildings become. It will take social will movement — could it be time to revisit some of the goals? One
as well as imagination to do this. Perhaps it is time to step thing that architects know is that problems have solutions; we
back from the anxieties we have with our place in the natural just want to be sure we’re addressing the right problems. ■
order, and resurrect some of the collective self-confidence
that characterized Modernism — in its broadest sense — for James Hadley AIA is a partner with his wife, Patricia Crow,
much of the mid-20th century, to look again at what Filler a landscape architect, in Hadley Crow Studio in Orleans,
calls “…the humane ideals of the Modern Movement’s early Massachusetts.

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