The houses in Five Fields don't face the lot lines. They face each other, and they face the common land. The Architects Collaborative built sixty-one of them on a former Lexington farm in the early 1950s as an experiment in shared land and modest, well-made houses. Each house is sited to its particular piece of ground — to the slope, the trees, the views, and to the other houses around it. The lots are real, but the buildings ignore them. They are in conversation with each other instead.
Sixty years on, the conversation has held. Neighbors still gather on the common land. Every spring there is a burn, where everyone collects the winter's deadfall and stands around the fire as it goes down. There are summer potlucks. There are progressive dinners that move between three houses in a single evening. Participation has thinned over the years — fewer people come to the burn than used to — but the place still holds, because the architecture still places people in each other's path.
Five Fields Collaborative is named for that idea: that a building can be sited and shaped in a way that makes community ordinary instead of accidental. It is a working principle. The design that belongs in a place is rarely the obvious one, and almost never the fastest one to conceive. The practice exists to find it — by walking the site, by understanding the zoning and conservation rules, by talking with the people who live or work there or have known the place a long time, and by working closely with clients, contractors, and consultants to build something that belongs.
The work runs across scales — from a play structure in a field to a federal building. Different problems, different scales, same approach: pay attention, take care, build something that belongs. The practice is modest and intentionally so. It takes on a manageable number of projects at once so that each gets the attention it needs, and works in genuine collaboration with the people on every side of a project.
We bought our house for the house, not for the neighborhood — we didn't even know the common land existed. While we were painting before moving in, I noticed a fire in what I thought were the woods behind us. There were people around it, so I didn't think much of it. Then someone walked up from the common land and knocked on the door. He turned out to be the husband of the founder of an architecture firm that shared a floor with Schwartz/Silver, where I was working at the time. It was the annual burn. He brought me down and introduced me to everyone. That was the day we started to understand where we lived.
Our house looks out on the common land. The common land, I think, is the beating heart of the neighborhood, not because anyone owns it but because everyone keeps it up. The lesson Five Fields teaches, the one this practice carries into every project, is that good design is what makes that kind of shared life possible. TAC didn't write the rituals. The neighbors did, over sixty years. But the architecture put them where they could find each other.
I have served on the neighborhood board for nearly our entire time here, and I was elected to the Lexington Planning Board in 2021. I have chaired the Planning Board since 2024. The two roles cut differently. Neighborhood work is small, voluntary, and earned through showing up. Planning Board work is the public, contested kind — board hearings on housing, zoning, and the projects that come before the town. Massachusetts is in a serious housing and affordability crisis, and Lexington was the first town to pass its MBTA Communities housing bylaw. The bylaw passed; the changes since have not. The work is to listen, to take the legitimate concerns seriously, and to keep moving toward what the town actually needs.
Most of my time on the Planning Board is spent across the table from architects bringing projects forward. That perspective changes the practice. When the work is going well, the project benefits from a real conversation — the way I started in this field, sketching back and forth across trace paper with the landscape architect who first hired me; the way we worked with Zahner in Kansas City to fabricate the complex geometry of the McCoy Federal Building, and ended up close to the original vision because the relationship was a real one. A general contractor on an earlier project of mine had a phrase for it: we're all in the sandbox together, so there's no need to be throwing sand.
That is what Collaborative in the name is for. The work has always been collaborative — with clients, contractors, and the colleagues doing the work alongside, however many there are at any given time.
Michael Schanbacher, AIA. Five Fields Collaborative, principal. Bachelor of Science in Architecture, University of Virginia, 2001. Master of Architecture, Rice University, 2007. Twenty-plus years of practice across landscape architecture, residential, institutional, and civic work, on projects ranging from $150,000 to over $100 million.
Prior to founding Five Fields Collaborative: nearly a decade at Schwartz/Silver Architects in Boston, project manager on the Shain Library at Connecticut College, the McCoy Federal Building in Jackson, a restaurant in Boston's South End, amongst many others; and over two years at NADAAA, where the office completed the Adams Street Branch Library in Dorchester.
Has taught at the Boston Architectural College and served as a visiting critic at Northeastern, MIT, Wentworth, the University of Michigan, and Roger Williams.