Lincoln Modern

Lincoln Modern: Plain Living, High Thinking is the first comprehensive survey of the extraordinary concentration of modernist architecture in Lincoln, Massachusetts. Tracing the town’s transformation from a seventeenth-century New England farming community into one of the most significant laboratories of twentieth-century architecture in the US, the book reveals how American intellectual traditions and European modernism converged in a unique cultural landscape.

Through extensive archival research, oral histories, and interviews with many of the architects who shaped the community, Dana Robbat documents more than three decades of architectural experimentation. Eminent architects such as Walter Gropius, Marcel Breuer, Hugh Stubbins, Walter Bogner, and others found in Lincoln an ideal setting in which to explore new relationships between architecture, nature, democracy, and community.

Richly illustrated with historic photographs, architectural drawings, archival materials, and contemporary photography, the book situates Lincoln alongside Palm Springs, New Canaan, and Columbus (Indiana) as one of the defining centres of American modernism while offering a fresh perspective on the philosophical foundations of modern architecture in New England.