I checked out the Walter Gropius House in Lincoln, MA yesterday. Gropius was the founder of Bauhaus, and his first U.S. home was model of effective use of space, materials, and design. You can read all about Bauhaus, Gropius, and the house elsewhere, so I won’t go into details here.

Unique about the tour were the visitors themselves. I kept quite for the tour, but some of the other tourists had a little battle of wits between themselves and the tour guide. In a way, it was the perfect representation of New England stereotypes. We had the high-art housewife, just back from New York where she picked up a wonderful art book about so-and-so. She was quick to come up with general answers to the guide’s “does anyone know why…” questions, but she was always outdone by the young, nerdy (in the negative sense) design enthusiast who seemed rather obsessed with materials. “What kind of plaster? What is that surface made of? Where exactly was the television?” Finally, we had the New England middle-age man, concerned with the weather, the heating system, the flat roof, and always with a noticeable, but not heavy Boston accent.

At first, the uninhabited house seemed staged and sterile, everything in it’s right place. As the other tourists began to define themselves through questions, they became the ones who were staged - stereotypical, yet completely authentic.