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Indian Hill House

1963 establishments in MassachusettsBuildings and structures in Groton, MassachusettsHouses in Middlesex County, Massachusetts
Indian Hill House Winter 2017
Indian Hill House Winter 2017

Indian Hill House is a private residence named for the Indian Hills of Groton, Massachusetts, online at Indian Hill House. Designed in 1962-63 by Maurice K. Smith, the house was built by Ralph S. Osmond & Sons. The house appears in several architectural works, including the Harvard Art Review (1967), Harvard Educational Review (1969), Spazio e Societa (June 1982) as Casa/House 1, and Progressive Architecture (March 1982), [3 images w/o notation].An extensive photographic study of the house, then only a few years old, was taken for the Winter 1967 issue of Harvard Art Review. In his 1989 work, Architecture and Urbanism, Henry Plummer concluded of this house that it contained "innumerable locales, of fragmentary rooms loosely interlocked, of zones both intimate and grand, created for an almost endless array of eyes, and heads and bodies and voices, an abundance which no longer bears upon the needs of a single person. Not only does the building form evolve but it is never perceived by two persons in quite the same way." In his 1967 work, World Architecture 4, John Donat described this house as "a place that prescribes nothing, an architecture that is intense without imposing itself on you." He goes on to write that this family house is "a place of real options and opportunities [that] can be richly interpreted by whoever is living in it." MIT School of Architecture Chair Mark Jarzombek wrote in 2013, "Indian Hill House – in a more restrained clean modernist aesthetic — is different from [Smith's] own house in many respects. A series of low, concrete walls staggered across the crest of the hill rise up to meet wooden, glazed walls of slightly different heights. The whole is protected by shed-and-gable roofs designed to appear as thin and lightweight as possible."Indian Hill House is set on 7 acres (28,000 m2) at the uphill woodland end of Skyfields Drive. The property complements a nearly 500-acre (2.0 km2) preserve of surrounding woodland under care of the Groton Conservation Trust, Massachusetts Audubon Society, and Groton Conservation Commission. Its Indian Hill Road access was closed and the approach changed to Skyfields Drive when the original, larger property was subdivided in March 2000. During its planning and construction from 1962 to 1965, Indian Hill House was referred to by architect Smith as "Blackman House 1" to be followed in the 1990s by Blackman House 2 (Manchester-By-The-Sea). Blackman House 3 (Groton) was designed by others. Fifty-three drawings and photographs of the house are kept by the MIT Libraries.

Excerpt from the Wikipedia article Indian Hill House (License: CC BY-SA 3.0, Authors, Images).

Indian Hill House
Skyfields Drive,

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Latitude Longitude
N 42.591388888889 ° E -71.556666666667 °
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Skyfields Drive 132
01450
Massachusetts, United States
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Indian Hill House Winter 2017
Indian Hill House Winter 2017
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Groton High School (Groton, Massachusetts)
Groton High School (Groton, Massachusetts)

The old Groton High School is a historic school building at 145 Main Street in Groton, Massachusetts. It has also variously been known as the Prescott School, Groton Junior High School, and Butler School. The building is two stories, with a flat roof. It is divided into four sections: a central portion that protrudes slightly from the main facade, which is topped by a pedimented gable, two wings that flank the central portion, and a rear section behind the central building. Because the building sits on a sloping lot, the rear section is actually three full stories; its ground floor section is made of concrete, while the rest of the building is predominantly made of brick, laid in a variation of an English cross bond pattern. The central portion was built in 1871 to a design by Henry M. Francis, originally with Second Empire styling, and named the Butler School in honor of a long-serving town clerk, Caleb Butler. The school served all grades until 1915.In the late 1920s the building was extensively altered, adding the three wings, and removing the third floor of the original building, which had been damaged by fire in 1925. Exterior changes also gave the building its present Colonial Revival appearance. Despite significant alterations in use to accommodate different grades over the years, the building's interior also remained remarkably intact. In 1975, the town joined with neighboring Dunstable, and its high school students were relocated to the Groton-Dunstable Regional High School. This building was renamed the Colonel William Prescott School, and house lower grades until it was closed in 2008.The building was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2010.