Critical Archive of the Visual and Related Arts
Eliel Saarinen
American, Finnish; 20th-century
Wellfleet, MA: 640 Chequesset Neck Road
71%
The Colony. 1948 (with Oliver P. Morton)
Saltonstall and Morton were affiliates (however loosely) of many of the major expat European architects who frequented and occasionally practiced on Cape Cod in the postwar years: Gropius, Breuer, Saarinen. The Colony, a compound of eight cottages in the woods by the water of an inlet off the bay, is in the International Style. The rectilinearity and monochromaticity of these small buildings, plus their mingling of base materials like cinderblocks with ample glass and ventilating grates and swaths of plain wood siding, mark them as "modern" — though this modernism can feel a bit stifled, studied. At its worst, The Colony participates in a Bauhaus mannerism, the huge flat eaves and proliferated rectangles of its eight structures signifying acquaintance with architectural vogues rather than resolving themselves into cohesive arrangements. (The tendency of the cottages' several rectangular rooms to look like appendages without a body signals this lack of cohesion; there's a centerlessness to Saltonstall's and Morton's designs that seldom feels justified.) At their best, however, the cottages manage to intervene on modernism uniquely, if hesitantly. You'll notice these interventions in their small incorporations of vacationland vernacular idioms, and in their relationship to the landscape and to each other. Their slightness is a boon, too: all tight compression with few moments of internal release, the cottages' tend to force you outside of them both visually and spatially, into their forest environs and onto the beaches just beyond it. (TFS, 2025)