Every so often the liberals take over the White House and Congress, but the architecture of suburban Washington, D.C., remains perpetually conservative. A notable exception is ten miles south of the neoclassical marble and monuments of the National Mall, a few miles south of the quaint streets and colonial storefronts of Old Town, Alexandria, and near the road that leads to George Washington’s home, Mt. Vernon. Here, just inland from the Potomac and surrounded by leafy but bland suburbs of split-levels and faux colonials, is a neighborhood of 450 midcentury modern homes called Hollin Hills.

Hollin Hills got its start in the late 1940s when Robert Davenport, who had previously developed an experimental neighborhood in the same area, called Tauxemont, with colleagues from the Department of Agriculture, teamed up with Charles Goodman, one of the few modernist architects practicing in the Washington area. In Tauxemont, Davenport had drawn on his agricultural and New Deal background to build simple rectangular houses made of low-cost materials purchased in bulk and arranged to reflect the topography of the site. After acquiring a tract just north of Tauxemont that most developers thought unbuildable because it was so hilly, Davenport engaged Goodman as the architect. In Davenport, Goodman found a like-minded partner willing to build modern houses instead of the ubiquitous colonials then being constructed by the thousands across northern Virginia. The challenges of the site led Davenport and Goodman to bring modernist landscape architects into the mix. Their collaborative efforts to design, develop and market a subdivision based exclusively on modernist principles was unprecedented in the United States. The quality of their product garnered immediate attention; indeed, Hollin Hills won its first of many design awards in 1951, barely two years after the first homes were completed.