Unique Homes MA
Five Fields
TAC's second cooperative neighborhood, on Field Road off Concord Avenue.
The Architects Collaborative (TAC)’s second cooperative neighborhood, Five Fields was established in 1951 in Lexington on Field Road off Concord Avenue. Roughly 70 homes spread across 80 acres, with communal open space and shared land covenants that set the precedent for later modernist developments.
The neighborhood built directly on lessons from Six Moon Hill two years earlier, where TAC partners had refined the cooperative model and were ready to scale it. Walter Gropius, John C. Harkness, Sarah P. Harkness, and other TAC architects sited the houses on a former dairy farm, working with the land rather than leveling it. Curved cul-de-sacs branch off Field Road, and roughly a quarter of the acreage (woodland, two ponds, and a pool) is held in common by the homeowners association rather than carved into private lots.
The houses share TAC’s Mid-Century Modern vocabulary: post-and-beam framing, flat or low-pitched roofs, walls of glass facing private rear yards, and modest street facades. Five Fields joined the National Register of Historic Places in 2010, the same year as Lexington’s Peacock Farm. It remains an active cooperative, and the Five Fields HOA maintains the common land and easements that have kept the original site plan intact.
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