CULTURE: There's something in the woods.

A new book shows how conservative New Canaan became a showcase of modernism, writes Neil Jackson

Let me start by saying what I don't like about the new book The Harvard Five in New Canaan. The title is disingenuous; this book is not about the Harvard Five but about 13 different architects, including the eight "others" of its sub-title. The editing is not good and the plans, as we are told, "are not shown in any particular scale and should be considered as artistic interpretations of the original architects [sic] intent".

But such carping is not necessary because these houses, and there are three dozen of them in this book, pretty much knock your socks off.

The greater part of the book, following William Earl's introduction and Jean Ely's essay on "New Canaan Modern", is taken up with a series of House Tours. Each house is presented with a plan, a handful of sharp black and white photographs, or perhaps drawings, and a series of quotations from the architects or from contemporary journals such as House & Home. There is a photograph of Marcel Breuer on the terrace of Eliot Noyes's Bremer House (1951) playing chess.

"We `modern' architects don't hate tradition - the opposite is true," he asserts. And as if to explain the peculiarity of the Boissonas House (1956), Philip Johnson says: "I was interested in Schinkel, classicism, and Ledoux before I was interested in modern architecture."

Maybe it was an awareness of tradition and history which allowed these houses to be built in the arch-conservative environment of New Canaan, Connecticut. There were, perhaps, 100 of them, although many, including nine of the 36 shown, have been demolished. Some, as Earls rightly suggests, might have appeared modern then but today would not pass muster. Others still startle with their arrogant simplicity.

Both Breuer and Noyes built here for themselves not one, but two houses. Breuer's first (1948) was a simple, timber-clad, floating box, much as Neutra might have done but more contained. If that was hesitant, then the second was positively penitent, its long rubble walls reflecting the dry stone walls which still subdivide this rural landscape.