Gutsy Mid-Century Architects Made Modern History In Bucolic New Canaan

One of the most remarkable periods in the history of Connecticut's evolving architectural landscape was the late 1940s to the late 1960s, when a group of Harvard-trained architects took up residence in the town of New Canaan and made modern history.

Known as "The Harvard Five," Eliot Noyes, Philip Johnson, Landis Gores, John Johansen and their teacher Marcel Breuer built homes for themselves and others that were nothing like the traditional clapboard Colonials with pitched roofs and many-paned windows that dotted the leafy town.

These architects took a gutsy new approach in their Mid-Century Modern designs, using broad horizontal lines, exposed steel beams, dramatic cantilevers, spare detailing and massive walls of glass that blurred the line between the inside and the great outdoors.

New Canaan quickly became the locus of Modern home design in this country. House tours were organized to benefit local charities and so the architects could show off their work but they created traffic jams in the sleepy town.

"This was an architecture that burst on the scene. And like the uninvited guest, many a resident wished for some forewarning," Jean Ely wrote in an article published in the New Canaan Historical Society Annual of 1967.

The unconventional designs were derided as "packing boxes," dismissed as "cracker boxes," and in a poem that ran in the local newspaper and set off a flurry of other versifying critics likened to "partially-opened bureau drawers set on steel posts and stanchions, an architecture as gracious as Sunoco service stations."

A couplet from one of the many replies: "They're lousing up the countryside with buildings most alarming, It isn't like New Canaan, where everything's been charming."

William D. Earls, a Wilton architect and author of "The Harvard Five in New Canaan" (W.W. Norton, 2006), said the young architects have to be given credit for taking chances with their careers and reputations.

Eliot Noyes, for example, who was the first of the five to settle in New Canaan and built his first house in 1947, used his own houses as "experiments, with little regard for conventional public opinion," Earls writes. The second home Noyes designed for his family, on Country Club Road, was built in 1955 around a central courtyard, with massive stone walls that evoke New England's classic stone walls. Bedrooms and bath are on one side of the house; the kitchen, dining room, living room and study on the other.

Some visitors were rather aghast that the family had to walk outside through the covered courtyard to get from one side of the house to the other.

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Gutsy Mid-Century Architects Made Modern History In Bucolic New Canaan