A Satisfying Place to Live
T
The neighborhood of Conantum, 104 homes on 195 acres of woodland hills along the Sudbury River in Concord, was conceived in 1950 as an experiment in speculative development. For a developer to make a modest profit, typically, he would keep the lots small and the roads and waterlines short, remove the trees and flatten the land, scraping off and selling the valuable topsoil. The novelty of Conantum, the brainchild of two MIT professors and an enlightened contractor, was to create a private organization of house buyers who would finance the process according to plans they 52
Discover CONCORD
| Spring 2022
BY EVE ISENBERG had agreed on. This allowed the development team flexibility in road layout, larger lot sizes, and considerate siting of the houses within the topography. The master plan included public space for boat storage, tennis courts, and, at one time, a ski slope. Carl Koch, MIT professor and the architect generally credited with the development of Conantum, describes the first house buyers in his 1958 book At Home with Tomorrow: “Since the project had begun at MIT… our initial group of buyers ran heavily to engineers – electrical, aeronautical, mechanical, and sanitary – together with a few maverick
social scientists, a brace of psychiatrists, mathematicians, architects, a smattering of lawyers, and one aspiring milkman.” The house design was based on a home that one of Koch’s associates had built for himself at half the square foot cost of the average custom home. He saved by using the simple house shape of four straight walls and a pitched roof, the gable ends of which were mostly glass, making the third story bright and usable without the need for cutting the roofline for dormers. The house was to be built on a slope with a livable first floor/basement of which one
Photos courtesy of the author
Concord’s Conantum
