Architecture icon: Hollin Hills

Now that mid-century modernism has become clichéd, over-exposed and a victim of ham-fisted pastiche, it is easy to forget how much the movement was charged with political energy and post-war idealism. In our March issue, the American design and architecture journalist Jennifer Kabat writes about Hollin Hills, a development of modernist housing built between 1949 and 1971 just outside Washington DC. It is a story about modernism as social project and personal passion and one that she can tell with particular insight. She grew up in Hollin Hills (The Ice Stormcomes to mind and Kabat confirms that Hollin Hills saw its share of ‘progressive’ bad behaviour).

Hollin Hills is now home to both the original modernists and a new generation of modernists, architects, designers, journalists and others committed to the modernist aesthetic. If you are cynical, and we try so much not to be, you could see this as the pickling of Hollin Hills as a kind of architectural theme-park, a recreation society where people indulge in period fantasy, a retreat, irony of all ironies, from the modern world. There is some of that but we prefer to see it as an attempt to keep a particular set of ideals alive, preserve them but also remake them and ensure that Hollin Hills is a living, successful community where fine, modern, human architecture are a given but also representative of a particular and progressive take on the world.

Kabat returned to Hollin Hills with photographer Juliana Sohn and we liked Sohn’s pictures so much we thought you should see more of them than we could fit in the magazine. Take a look at our gallery below.

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8 February 2007 | Architecture