Toward the end of a narrow spit of land about two hours from Boston, through dense woodlands and pitted dirt roads, lie almost 100 midcentury houses that have come to define their era – yet not their surroundings. Their designers ranged from lauded academics to well-heeled dabblers, but theirs was an unusual architecture: it strove for neither monumentality nor permanence. Because so many of us still associate the Cape with shingled saltbox cottages, it can be startling to learn how many modernist homes are hiding in Cape Cod’s outback, and, in turn, how quickly they have become relics of a more adventurous time.

In the wake of World War I, left-leaning writers began to settle in the wilds of Wellfleet, Massachusetts, at the wrist of the arm that is Cape Cod. Much of the town’s land belonged to Jack Phillips, scion of the old Massachusetts family that founded Phillips Exeter Academy, who had studied with Walter Gropius and Marcel Breuer at Harvard’s new design school. During World War II, Phillips began selling plots to fellow intellectual travelers, and before long Wellfleet had a summer community of architects, writers, painters and scholars from Boston, Cambridge and Europe. By the late 1940s, the world’s most progressive design schools were represented here, including the Bauhaus, Cranbrook, Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the Harvard Graduate School of Design.