Gunnar Peterson And His Modern Architecture

By DEBORAH G. SCANLON

E. Gunnar Peterson, longtime Falmouth resident and modern architect, designed buildings that he considered suitable to Cape Cod, “contemporary architecture done in a manner independent of traditional forms.”

Explore the streets of Falmouth and Woods Hole and you will see many examples of his architectural style. He designed WHOI’s Smith Laboratory Building on Water Street, Lawrence-Lynch Corporation’s building on Gifford Street, houses on Bywater Court and Oyster Pond Road, and many other homes and businesses. The project that he is probably most noted for is the Nautilus Motor Inn in Woods Hole with the geodesic dome that he hired Buckminster Fuller to design.

Peterson’s architectural designs were not always popular, but it didn’t bother him and, in fact, it inspired him according to his son, Joel Peterson. His response to his critics was that they based their opinions on “an outworn romantic idea of what the Cape used to be.”

Ernest Gunnar Peterson was born in Brockton, the son of Ernest and Augusta Peterson, who came to this country from Sweden in the early 1890s. His family moved to Falmouth in 1905, when his father took a job as caretaker for the Nathaniel H. Emmons estate.

The Petersons lived in the farmhouse on Elm Road, one of Falmouth’s oldest homes. In 1955, the family sold it to John T. Hough, editor of The Falmouth Enterprise, and his wife, Mary Hough.

Gunnar Peterson graduated from Lawrence High School and went to Tufts University before transferring to Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He graduated in 1929 and worked for Harold Kellogg, a Boston architect. When the architectural firm won the contract for Falmouth’s new Village Grammar School in 1931, the Enterprise reported the story, referring in the lead paragraph to “Gunnar Peterson, Falmouth boy associated with Mr. Kellogg.”

Gunnar Peterson soon moved back to Falmouth and had his own business. He met Ruth Kramer, who had come from Duxbury to teach at Lawrence High, and they were married in 1939.

In 1935 he was hired to design a new Falmouth police station on Shivericks Pond with access from Main Street before Katharine Lee Bates Road was built. The fireproof building with brick facing was on a concrete slab and made of steel joists and was police headquarters until the late 1960s. Inside was a mural by Fritz Fuglister, an artist who later became a WHOI scientist, funded by the Works Progress Administration during the Great Depression years.

The design of the police headquarters was relatively traditional but the modern movement in architecture was Gunnar Peterson’s favored style. In a 1938 article for the Enterprise, he wrote an article titled “‘Modern Style’ Will Become Native To Cape Cod.”

“The principal advantage of the modern house,” he wrote, “lies in the complete freedom, which the designer has, to develop an efficient plan.…Its large windows make it possible to gain a roomier, and more expansive effect, and to literally bring the garden into the house. In the winter when the sun rides low in the sky—the sun is permitted to reach way into the room; in summer—the sun being high it offers no obstacles to getting shade. The benefits to be derived from the health standpoint cannot fail to be apparent.”

He ended his article with, “The modern home offers the home builder unlimited opportunities for providing the family of today with the best and more reasonable form of shelter, unhampered by artificiality.”

After designing two traditional homes in Mill Park, which he developed off Mill Road facing Siders Pond—one for his family, the other for George Bywater Cluett II, he and Cluett moved on to a development of modern houses off Surf Drive in 1941. Mr. Cluett developed Bywater Court and Mr. Peterson designed modern houses on 13 acres, some of which remain today.

The Enterprise reported that, “Mr. Peterson received commendation in last month’s issue of ‘Architectural Forum’ in an article titled ‘A Cape Cod Rebellion in Architecture.’…Both he and George B. Cluett who handled the subdivision, were complimented on the design and construction of the houses.”

That same year, Gunnar Peterson built a house for his family on a high point of land off Oyster Pond Road, across from Trunk River. He later added three more houses to the development that he called Bellevue. The Peterson house was “very modern and had great views,” according to Joel Peterson, who grew up in it. The house, which was featured in House & Garden’s October 1944 issue, still stands.

An Enterprise article at the time noted that the Oyster Pond Road house “will embody the latest facilities for comfortable living. The conveniences will fit into Peterson’s conception of what modern living should be. If they don’t, the reason will be E. Gunnar Peterson, for he is designing the house from the floor to the two-car garage to the top of the flat roof. Every nook and corner will be of his design.…A feature, unique in American homes, will be the heating system, called radiant heating…”

Peterson also designed a home for Dr. Shields Warren, internationally known pathologist from Boston, who had previously built a house on Seconset Island in Waquoit that was destroyed in the 1944 hurricane. He hired Mr. Peterson to design a “hurricane-proof” house which, the Enterprise reported in Dr. Warren’s obituary, “rose at the end of the bay from a Gibraltar-like foundation of steel pilings, concrete and brick. The house withstood the hurricane of 1954 and every great storm since.”

But modern style was still not being fully accepted in Falmouth. In February 1946, responding to a Town Meeting vote in favor of traditional colonial and Cape Cod style, Mr. Peterson told the Enterprise, “Falmouth has had a tradition of tolerance for more than 200 years. I wish I could see some of that tolerance infused into today’s attitude toward architecture of the town.”

 “I wouldn’t presume to tell Harvey Martin how to sell hardware…or Sam Smith how to run a clothing store, or Dr. Wiswall how to treat his patients,” he said, referring to well-known Falmouth merchants and a physician. “They’re all specialists in their own line. But everyone in this town presumes to give his opinion on architecture, which is my specialty.”

Despite the public criticism, he continued to design buildings in his modern architectural style. Frederick V. Lawrence hired him for the family contracting business headquarters on Gifford Street. It was “ultra modern,” according to the Enterprise, and built of cement and cinderblocks. The plant, now the Lawrence-Lynch Corporation, also featured radiant heat.

Peterson also designed the Tides Motel and Falmouth Yacht Club, and commercial buildings in Falmouth that included Fay’s, on the corner of Main Street and Lantern Lane; the N.E. Tsiknas block across from the Falmouth Public Library, and Issokson’s, farther down Main Street; Parke Memorial Chapel at Oak Grove Cemetery; and New England Telephone & Telegraph Company’s telephone exchange building at the corner of Main and Gifford streets.

He was hired in 1951 by the US Navy to design WHOI’s Laboratory for Oceanography on Water Street, which was later named after his friend Edward H. Smith, the institution’s director for six years.

Soon after, he began the Katy Hatch development between Elm and Woods Hole roads. Some of the land was owned by his father and he purchased the rest, then put in roads leading from Woods Hole Road. But at about that same time he was starting his biggest project, the Nautilus Motor Inn and Dome restaurant, so he sold the land for Katy Hatch to Falmouth builder William Mullen.

The Nautilus was built on land that he had bought overlooking Little Harbor, site of the Robert Chambers house and property, formerly part of the Joseph Story Fay estate. He moved his office and his home there. The Chambers’s house was left intact and sold to his friend, Edward Smith.

The Nautilus Motor Inn was just 12 rooms when the family moved into it in 1954. They lived in two rooms. Additions were made later to the building, which ended up with 54 rooms. Ruth Peterson managed the motel and Joel and his younger brother, Carl, helped.

Mr. Peterson decided to build a dome to house the restaurant accompanying the motor inn. At a Woods Hole Historical Museum Conversation in 1979, he explained: “When anybody builds a motor inn or motel, usually they’ll have some kind of scene…a lot of ship models and this and that.…At the time, I felt that I wanted something unique that would stand out and intrigue people, would excite them, make them ask questions about it.”

He knew Buckminster Fuller through MIT colleagues. At the museum conversation, he recalled that as he worked with Mr. Fuller, “What hit me at the time was the trinity of effort, material and cost—those three factors, which are the underlying philosophy of his teachings: how to do more with less.”

Mr. Fuller and his wife lived with the Petersons in their house overlooking Oyster Pond Road during the summer of 1953 as the dome was contructed. He had only done one commercial job, for Ford Motor Company, a relatively small dome. 

MIT architectural students, who lived in a small domed tent on the site, built the dome using pieces that had been cut in MIT’s carpenter shop. The sections fit together so they could be assembled and bolted on location. “It was sort of a rotating crew…they were from all over the globe,” Mr. Peterson said in his museum talk.

He added, “As far as I was concerned, I think one of the most interesting if not the most interesting part of my whole life was to be part of that.” 

After a long and productive career, Gunnar Peterson died in 1992 at age 89.

Holiday, an American travel magazine, called him an “evangelist for contemporary architecture.”