A New Film Explores Vermont’s Unsung Modernist Buildings 

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• Courtesy Of Jake Gorst
• Peyton House in East Dorset, designed by Ashok Bhavnani in 1958

Midcentury modernism is not the first architectural style that comes to mind when you think of Vermont. But the state's modern structures, dating from the 1930s through 1970s, feature surprisingly often in the new film New England Modernism: Revolutionary Architecture in the 20th Century. And they look stunning.

A project of Jake Gorst and Tracey Rennie Gorst of production company Mainspring Narrative, the film will receive its New England premiere on Wednesday, March 20, at Burlington's City Hall Auditorium and Brattleboro's 118 Elliot, as part of the free Architecture + Design Film Series.

Vermont state architectural historian Devin Colman, who contributed key research to the film, will introduce the Burlington screening. Producer and director Gorst, of Litchfield, Conn.; associate producer Susan Leigh Babcock, of Middlebury; and Colman will lead a Q&A afterward. Following the Brattleboro screening, Mara Williams, curator emerita of the Brattleboro Museum & Art Center, will guide a discussion.

New England Modernism tells the story of the modern movement's genesis in New England and the experiments it left behind. Gorst, who has made films about émigré architect Albert Frey and modernism in Palm Springs, Calif., developed an interest in modern architecture as a child while accompanying his grandfather, modern architect Andrew Geller, on site visits.

The Gorsts interviewed more than 20 experts for the film, including the sons of modern architects Edward Durell Stone and Eliot Noyes. The film features the work of both.

Vermont architect David Sellers and his ex-wife, Candy Barr, tell the story of the state's modernism offshoot, the design-build movement. Sellers, 85, is still practicing; during filming, Gorst and his cinematographer stayed in Sellers' Home Run House in Warren.

By phone, Gorst admitted that covering all of New England's modernist structures was daunting. The project began in 2018 and was planned as a five-part series until the pandemic forced a restructuring.

Even then, Gorst said, "I had to trim the movie down considerably." Yet, in addition to modern icons, he managed to include numerous lesser-known structures.

Some of the Vermont ones are a revelation. The 1958 Peyton residence in East Dorset looks like a couple of bow ties from one side. Its architect, Ashok Bhavnani, would later design the acoustically renowned, brutalist Merkin Hall in New York City.

The Peyton residence "is kind of an important structure that nobody knows about," Gorst said. "It feels like a new discovery, almost."

During the New Deal era, Civilian Conservation Corps projects in New England tended to be in a rustic, vernacular style. Vermont boasts one of the only modernist CCC structures, the Crystal Lake Bath House in Barton, designed by David Fried in 1939.

With such projects, Gorst complicates the standard narrative that modernism arrived in the U.S. in the 1930s with European architects escaping Nazism. "We're going a little against the grain in this film in saying that modernism did not reach New England with the European modernists; it was already here," he said.

New England Modernism comprehensively captures an era while "countering that notion of New England as a staid bastion of colonial tradition," as Colman put it by phone. And the film brings attention to an architectural movement that many don't know about.

"The thing about modernism in New England is that it's not visible from the street, necessarily," Gorst said. "You've got long driveways going up into the woods, and there's an amazing house up there, and no one knows it's there." Many of the houses, he added, are occupied by aging original owners who can't maintain them, and younger generations unfamiliar with the style see them as teardowns.

For that reason, Gorst used what he described as "loving" camerawork to capture the architecture.

"This is not a dry architecture film; it's a very emotional architecture film," he said. "We wanted to reach people's hearts with it. The whole idea behind it was to help people who do not know the history and don't necessarily understand modernism to fall in love with it and thereby preserve it."