The House of Kuhn, By the Water

Abstract

Thomas Kuhn’s one-time vacation home in Wellfleet, Massachusetts, is a modest modernist box. Built in 1960 by Nathaniel Saltonstall and Peter Morton, and empty since the 1990s, it is now in some disrepair, here and there sagging and waterlogged. It remains, in spite of wear and mold, legible as an exemplar of Cape Cod modern, a Bauhaus-meets-Frank-Lloyd-Wright architectural style that adapts the sharp lines of modernism to the scrub and pitch pine landscapes of the Outer Cape, a thin neck of land fronted on its east by the Atlantic Ocean and on its west by the Cape Cod Bay. Walking through the Kuhn cottage in May 2012, guided by architect Peter McMahon—head of a nonprofit dedicated to restoring mid-century modernist homes—I was taken, no surprise, by the house’s structure.