34 • THE GRYPHON Fall/Winter 2019-20
ALUM SPOTLIGHT
Peter McMahon ’75 Beginning in the late 1930s, Massachusetts’s Outer Cape, with its beaches, pinewoods, kettle ponds, and salt marshes, attracted a wave of European artists and architects seeking refuge from rising tensions in Europe. These creative minds — including the likes of Bauhaus founder Walter Gropius and Marcel Breuer — built a community for themselves, tucked in the pinewoods of Wellfleet. Today, there remain over 100 midcentury modern houses in the area — several owned by the National Park Service, were left abandoned for decades — standing as relics of this important artistic movement. In 2007, Peter McMahon ’75, founded the Cape Cod Modern House Trust (CCMHT), an organization founded “to collect, archive, and share documentation of the outer Cape’s exceptional modern architecture, restore a group of important, endangered modern houses, and to relaunch them as platforms for new creative work.” He is the co-author of Cape Cod Modern: Midcentury Architecture and Community on the Outer Cape(Metropolis Books, 2014)
Photo: Antoine Lorgnier
Your work and interest in modern architecture is filled with connections and ties back to CSW. Can you talk more about that? My mother, A lice McMahon, who taught at CSW for many years, is an art historian so she was a formative influence on me. In addition, while I was a student at CSW, there were a number of friends and connections whose presence in my life helped guide me towards this path. Sam Ogden ’75lived with his family in Marcel Breuer’s house in Lincoln, and then my good friend N icholas Thompson ’75 and his brother B enjamin Thompson ’77 were the sons of architect Ben Thompson, who worked for Walter Gropius and later went on to start Design Research and The Architects Collaborative. Interestingly, a number of my classmates’ parents were also founding members of the Architects Collaborative. (Editor’s note, These include: Norman and Jean Fletcher, parents of J on Fletcher ’64, Judith Getman ’63, Jeremy Fletcher ’66, and Jeff Fletcher ’77, and John and Sarah Harkness, parents of Fred Harkness ’74, John Harkness ’74, Timothy Harkness ’69, and Alice Harkness ’71). So as
a kid, I was spending time in these incredible houses, though I didn’t fully grasp the significance at the time. I was also fortunate to be able to take two semesters of architectural design as a student at CSW, which was rare for that time. And then a short while after graduating, I spent some time working for D an Schmid ’73 including being a carpenter on an addition to the Breuer house. More recently, the CCMHT fully restored the modern and abandoned Kohlberg House in Wellfleet, former home of D avid Kohlberg ’76 and his family. In my private practice, I undertook a twoyear re-building/restoration, with Dorothy Straight ’75 (past CSW board member), of her vintage modern house in Newbury, MA. That’s a lot of CSW connections! It is! I think some of this stems from the fact that CSW is part of a long history of progressive education, similar to what came out of the Bauhaus, which was all about connecting the arts to other subjects.
