Lincoln Modern - Walter Gropius and J. Quincy Adams
Thursday, 15 May 2025 | 6:30 – 8:30 pm
Dana Robbat (USA) tells us about Walter Gropius and J. Quincy Adams and the Cultivation of a Modern community in Lincoln, Massachusetts, USA.
A quiet revolution was sparked in 1938 when the great revolutionary leader of the European Modern Movement, German architect Walter Gropius, moved to Lincoln, Massachusetts. His meeting with J. Quincy Adams, a young aspiring Modern architect with visions for what might be, fortified Adams’s resolve to practice town-planning ideas that inspired him as a student of architecture—how people and places shape each other. Transforming his grandfather’s four-hundred-and-fifty-acre farming estate into a Modern neighborhood with affordable essential houses instead of estate houses, as easily could have happened, set an important tone in Lincoln. To preserve its sense of place, over-sized building lots conserved land for public use, while the simple forms of architecture minimized the visual impact of houses within naturalized settings. Of national importance, Lincoln’s collection of Modern architecture (1937 – 1970) and town planning concepts made it one of the most significant communities for Modern architecture and land conservation in the country. The history is about more than Lincoln’s significant collection of Modernist buildings, important as that is, but significantly, it also about a heritage of thought, perceptions, and values concerning communal life.
Dana Robbat is a founder of the Friends of Modern Architecture/Lincoln (FoMA), a nonprofit organization created to honor and promulgate Modernism’s mission, its ideals, and preserve its legacy through tours and events, forming a collection of oral histories with architects, clients, and academics of the Modern era; building an archive of photographs and architectural plans; and preservation efforts to protect Lincoln’s collection of modern houses. Her 2002 master’s thesis, “Plain Living, High Thinking: The Early Modern Houses of Lincoln, Massachusetts, and the Arrival of European Modernism to New England,” provided the basis for FoMA’s mission and scope of work.
From 2003 to 2006, she served as executive director of Boston By Foot, a nonprofit organization in Massachusetts providing architecture and history walking tours of Boston. Since then, she has devoted her activities to FoMA, serving as president for sixteen years and chairing its programming committee.