FIVE FIELDS RESIDENCE
Lexington, Massachusetts

The house is part of an early 1950s planned community of modern houses designed and developed by The Architects' Collaborative (TAC), the Cambridge partnership cofounded by Bauhaus director Walter Gropius.

The original house has an open layout, extensive glazing, shallow pitched roofs with deep overhangs, and vertical cedar siding. It has a 1953 addition by TAC that created a wing containing a kitchen, bathroom and bedroom under an asymmetric butterfly roof.

Our clients desired a garden room that was usable all year round, especially in summer evenings. It was to be separately heated with maximum exposure for view, light, and ventilation.

The new addition extends the 1953 wing. It connects directly through large sliding glass doors to the existing cedar deck, located as an extension of the main living space. These elements create an open court, further defined by a garden shed and a mature oak tree.

The addition's roof ties into the 1953 wing's roofline. Its windows, including upper transoms and lower fixed-spandrel glass panels, align with similar windows in the house. The exposed wood beams, another original house motif, are supported by a rigid steel framework so that all three sides of the addition can be completely glazed. The floor is an acid-stained radiant concrete slab. Adjustable low-voltage suspended light fixtures allow the room to be used in multiple ways.

Adjacent to the addition, a rock garden has been built from ledge removed during construction. The landscape design includes understory flowering trees at the perimeter woods and evergreen and flowering shrubs at the street edge and alongside property boundaries.

The addition gives the owners another way to enjoy their rustic garden with vegetable beds, remnant stone walls, scoured lichen-covered rock outcrops, and old field junipers overlooking the Common Land beyond.