Six Moon Hill is a residential neighborhood and historic district of mid-century modern houses in Lexington, Massachusetts.
Description
Incorporated in 1947, the community originally encompassed 28 houses which were built between 1947 and 1953. Most were designed by members of the Cambridge, Massachusetts firm The Architects Collaborative (TAC) who also lived and raised their families in the new development. The neighborhood was added to the National Register of Historic Places list in 2016.
The development attracted attention from both the architectural and popular press right away because of the contemporary design ideas, reasonable cost, and practical thinking about how to support community life. Started soon after the construction of Lexington's first modernist house, Six Moon Hill was the first of many modernist developments in Lexington. Developments that followed include Peacock Farm, started in 1951; Five Fields, also designed by TAC architects and begun in 1951; and the slightly later Turning Mill/Middle Ridge neighborhood, launched in 1956.
Background
After World War II, a quickly expanding population looked to develop land for housing near major metropolitan areas. The establishment in 1934 of the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) which underwrote mortgages and the GI Bill which subsidized low-cost mortgages for returning soldiers were factors in the rapid growth of suburban communities. Many large planned communities resulted, such as Levittown, New York (and other related Levittowns in Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Puerto Rico) and Rohnert Park in California. But, with involvement of the FHA came some undesirable constraints on both design and the racial makeup of homeowners. In Cambridge, students at the Harvard Graduate School of Design and MIT School of Architecture and Planning were also thinking about housing and planned communities, but wanted to bring some of the new ideas emerging from those schools to how the problems should be addressed.
In 1947, a group of architects from the newly-formed TAC were looking to move from their rented lodgings in Cambridge and had the idea of building their own community. Their goals were two-fold: build homes based on modern design principles and establish an ideal community. Norman Fletcher, one of the founders of TAC and Six Moon Hill, described the young architects as having been influenced in their ideas by "utopianism and socialism".
Modernism as an approach to housing design was already established in Massachusetts when they began their work. Walter Gropius and Marcel Breuer built houses for their families in Lincoln, Massachusetts in 1938-1940. Carl Koch, later to gain renown as a pioneer in the use of prefabricated materials in construction, built a set of five houses called ‘Snake Hill” on steeply sloped land in Belmont, Massachusetts in 1940. In a nearby area in east Lexington, Hugh Stubbins, Jr. finished the first of a set of houses in 1947, just around the time TAC bought the land for the Six Moon Hill project.
An indication of the cooperative nature of TAC's endeavor was that after house sites had been drawn up, they were all priced the same. The first twelve sites were assigned to participating families by drawing numbers from a hat. The egalitarianism of the neighborhood also reflected the philosophy of Walter Gropius and TAC. All members of TAC, including Gropius, had equal shares in the company, and he insisted that he not be looked at as the president. Of the original TAC founders, only Gropius did not have a house on Moon Hill, having already built his house (Gropius House) in Lincoln, Massachusetts.
The group found the land in Lexington during a Sunday ski outing. It was purchased from an auto dealer of the Moon Motor Car, and the project was given the name "Six Moon Hill", a nod to the six automobiles found in a barn on the property. It turned out that one of the cars was a Franklin, but they liked the original name too much to change it.
With a focus on collaboration rather than individualism, the TAC approach was applied to all aspects of the community: design, development, construction, and operation. TAC established a nonprofit corporation and bought on which to build, which were divided into 29 equally-priced lots of about one-half to three-quarters of an acre each. The neighborhood continues to run as an organized community in which each household pays dues and holds two voting shares.