As a little history on my images posted in another thread...
Bridgehampton, NY
As a little history on my images posted in another thread...
Bridgehampton, NY
Last edited by jparchitectus; 21-02-2006 at 03:31.
The First Wave of Modernism - 1920-1942
Elizabeth Bodanzky Muschenheim
with her niece in front of the
Muschenheim Bathhouses, c.1933
There was something about the low, horizontal landscape of Eastern Long Island that provided fertile ground for the cultivation of modernism. The beach made a perfect setting for new ideas washing over from Europe.
Several of the American-bred architects who built experimental beach houses in the Hamptons had studied, visited, or worked in Europe, and had returned brimming with a spirit of innovation.
William Muschenheim studied architecture in Vienna, Percival Goodman studied in France, Frances Miller made frequent trips to Europe, and Philip Johnson had lived in Germany. Several others were born in Europe and had emigrated to the states: Antonin Raymond came from Prague; Pierre Chareau fled France before the fall of Paris; Paul Lester Wiener and Bernard Rudofsky came from Austria; and Peter Blake escaped Nazi Germany. Together, they brought with them the latest advances in theory and practice.
Modernist ideas were easily transposed and adapted for use in the summer homes of the pre- and postwar periods. The slender pilotis of Le Corbusier’s Villa Savoye (1929–31) became posts for raising houses to attain better views and for protecting them from hurricane surge. The roof terraces and open porches that Le Corbusier used at his Villa Stein (1927) became sun decks.
The glass facades that Mies van der Rohe and Walter Gropius were using in Germany became sliding glass doors and floor-to-ceiling windows for gazing at the sea. The looseness of the open plan was perfectly suited to the informal lifestyle of a new breed of active, sun-worshipping summer residents.
Last edited by jparchitectus; 21-02-2006 at 02:48.
While the first modernist beach houses on Long Island may have looked like virtual transpositions from avant-garde strains in Europe, there was something else going on. In an early manifesto of the modern movement, the Dutch artist and sometime architect, Theo van Doesburg, wrote: “There is an old and a new consciousness of the age. The old one is directed toward the individual. The new one is directed toward the universal.” But the opposite held true in the emerging beach culture of Long Island. The new consciousness was directed toward the individual.
Modernist ideals that had originated in the socialist culture of Holland, Russia, and Weimar Germany were somehow transformed and pressed into the service of capitalist leisure; updated examples of Thorstein Veblen’s “evidence of esteem.” The principles of the new beach architecture were closer in spirit to Hollywood than to Weimar.
Artists Meet Architects - 1944-1955
Jackson Pollock and Peter Blake, 1949
A group of prominent European artists established a foothold in the Hamptons during World War II. There had been migrations of artists to Eastern Long Island since the Tile Club first came in 1878, but this was different.
The refugee artists of the 1940s included some of the most prominent members of the European avant garde. Unlike Manhattan, which many of the exiles found cold and unforgiving, the Hamptons offered a congenial setting in which to wait out the war. The fluid atmosphere of the beach proved more conducive to spontaneous exchange.
Many of the exiles first came to East Hampton as guests of Gerald and Sara Murphy, an affluent but artistically inclined couple who had lived as expatriates in Paris during the 1920s and had been friends with many of the pioneers of the modern movement, including Pablo Picasso, Fernand Léger, Gertrude Stein, Ernest Hemingway, and F. Scott Fitzgerald. (Fitzgerald had immortalized the couple as Dick and Nicole Diver in his 1934 novel Tender is the Night.)
Image of Jackson Pollock and Blake
Last edited by jparchitectus; 21-02-2006 at 02:48.
The Murphys returned to America in the 1930s and spent their summers at “The Dunes,” a sprawling oceanfront mansion that Sara’s father, Frank Wiborg, had built near the Maidstone Club in 1895. Léger and his companion, Lucia Christofanetti, came out and took up residence at one of the guest cottages on the Wiborg estate.
Christofanetti grew to love the area so much that she eventually found her own house and encouraged many of her émigré friends to visit. Salvador Dali and Marcel Duchamp came out during this period. So did Anaïs Nin, Jean Hélion, Arshile Gorky, Isamu Noguchi, and the Chilean surrealist Matta.
Max Ernst rented a summer house in Amagansett with Dorothea Tanning. Working with everyday objects, Ernst created a series of chess-related sculptures including The King Playing with His Queen (1944).
André Breton, leader of the surrealist pack in Paris, also came to the Hamptons during the war years. He was inspired by the luminous sky and sandy Long Island landscape.
Breton had escaped to New York in 1941. During the summer of 1943, he rented a house in Hampton Bays and commuted from the city every weekend on the Long Island Rail Road. Breton wrote his epic poem Les Etats Genereaux while summering in Hampton Bays (“There will always be a wind-borne shovel in the sand of dreams,” he wrote).
Image of Motherwitt Studio
Last edited by jparchitectus; 21-02-2006 at 02:49.
On some weekends he was also joined by a young protégé named Charles Duits. Together they sat on the train chugging eastward from the city, composing automatic surrealist verse.
This was a trying period of transition for Breton. Not only was he adjusting to his state of exile, but he found himself sharing the house with his estranged wife, Jacqueline Lamba and her lover, a handsome young sculptor named David Hare. Breton sat on the shady porch while Lamba and Hare swam in the ocean or walked naked along the beach, holding hands and flaunting their passion.
While most of the exiles returned to Europe as soon as the war was over, their presence had a lingering effect and set a high level of discourse for American artists to follow. A new generation soon found their way out to this promised land of open vistas and restless tides.
Artwork by Corb
Jackson Pollock and his wife, Lee Krasner, came out to East Hampton in 1945 and purchased a modest two-and-a-half story farm house in the Springs. Robert Motherwell, who had first come out to Amagansett to visit Max Ernst, returned after the war and built himself a house and studio. Mark Rothko came out to visit in 1946, John Little, the painter, in 1947. Willem de Kooning first came out in 1948, as did the Italian sculptor Costantino Nivola and the painter James Brooks. Alfonso Ossorio first came to East Hampton in 1949 to look up Jackson Pollock and decided to stay. Franz Kline first visited in 1950, then, during the summer of 1954, shared “The Red House” in Bridgehampton with Bill and Elaine de Kooning. Jacques Lipchitz came in 1954 and so did Conrad Marca-Relli, Theodoros Stamos, and Larry Rivers. (Rivers first made his mark not as an artist but playing baritone saxophone at the Elm Tree Inn in Amagansett.)
Others who came during this period were William Baziotes, Wilfred Zogbaum, Balcomb Greene, Helen Frankenthaler, Adolph Gottlieb, John Ferren, Hedda Sterne, Iram Lassaw, and Jimmy Ernst, son of Max.
Artwork of Corb Below
Last edited by jparchitectus; 21-02-2006 at 02:51.
Some of the artists only stayed for a few months, others moved out permanently and, like Pollock, renovated older houses or converted barns for their studios. A few, like Motherwell and Stamos, built experimental houses and studios. The painter Balcomb Greene built himself a studio on the wind-swept bluffs of Montauk. In 1952 Ossorio, bought “The Creeks,” the old Albert Herter estate on Georgica Pond, and proceeded to transform it into a kind of surrealist theme park. He filled the house with exotic caged birds, oriental rugs, and an impressive collection of abstract paintings by Pollock, Jean Dubuffet, and others. He also transformed the grounds of the estate with a collection of rare conifer trees and garish sculptures.
These artists changed the nature of the Hamptons. The South Shore was no longer just a string of pretty villages from Westhampton to Montauk. It was more than a collection of pristine beaches, potato farms, and a few exclusive country clubs. As one resident of the period put it, the place was now crawling with “crazy artists.”
Along with the artists came a wave of architects: Pierre Chareau, Peter Blake, Frederick Kiesler, Tony Smith, Paul Lester Wiener, Robert Rosenberg, George Nelson, and others who were struck by the qualities of the sea-reflected light and the all-pervasive sky.
The artists and architects were also joined by writers. Harold Rosenberg, art critic for the New Yorker, had moved to the Springs as early as 1943 with his wife, the writer May Tabak. His New Yorker colleague, Berton Roueché, moved out to Amagansett on a permanent basis in 1948. Truman Capote built a beach house for himself on the dunes in Bridgehampton. John Steinbeck moved to Sag Harbor. Edward Albee moved to Montauk, Dwight Macdonald to East Hampton, Peter Matthiessen to Sagaponack. Even Jack Kerouac, king of the Beat writers, came for a short stay with his mother in North Haven.
The Hamptons proved to be an excellent setting for exploring the depths of the unconscious. Ideas flowed. Boundaries dissolved in the relaxed atmosphere. There was something about the place that freed the imagination. Maybe it was being surrounded by all that water: the ocean, the saltwater inlets and ponds. Maybe it was being located on such an extremity, at the very eastern tip of Long Island.
“Out here it became more playful and more joyous because nature helped,” recalled Ruth Nivola, who moved out to the Springs in 1948 with her husband, Costantino Nivola. “The artists had a real connection with the earth, with the beach, with the poetry of nature.”
Uprisings in the '60s - 1963-1972
Charles Gwathmey, Gwathmey House
Amagansett, 1965
The sixties weekend had little to do with traditional notions of rural repose. Instead, it represented a frenetic set of recreational options and social opportunities. The dividing line between rural and urban became less and less clear. Everyone wanted to get away, but while so many more were heading east to escape the pressures of New York, city and country began to merge in unforeseen ways.
“Long Island is Becoming Long City: 118-Mile-Long Metropolis,” ran a 1964 story in the New York Times Magazine. The city was transforming the rural ambiance just as the rural ambiance was helping to diffuse the pressures of the city. The means of exodus—the Long Island Expressway and the Sunrise Highway—were reaching a bit further every season, making the trip more tempting to those who hadn’t been there before. By 1972 the final section of the L.I.E. was completed and stretched all the way out to Riverhead, the very doorstep to the Hamptons.
At the same time, the East End could no longer be perceived as a string of small villages with lovely beaches, rustic windmills, and eccentric artists. With more houses, more media coverage, and extended highways, it was something different. The area had become the modern phenomenon known as “The Hamptons.”
Last edited by jparchitectus; 21-02-2006 at 02:52.
The 1960s were a time of discovery. Old boundaries were crossed and new extremes were explored in music, art, sexuality, fashion, and cinema. The Beatles invaded in 1964 and brought with them an entirely new sense of style. Women wore miniskirts and hotpants. Men wore their hair longer, lapels became wider, and pants flared. In keeping with the times, younger professionals were inventing new roles for themselves, new attitudes about work, family, and leisure.
The East End itself was becoming more and more like a multimedia event, or in the parlance of the day, a “happening.” It started on Memorial Day weekend and continued all the way through Labor Day weekend. There were reports of wild parties on the beach, police crackdowns on pot smokers, and free love in the dunes.
Mitty’s, the first discotheque on the East End, opened in Water Mill. L’Oursin, a club that featured psychedelic light shows, opened in Southampton. On 31 August 1963, the debutante party for socialite Fernanda Wanamaker Wetherill turned into an all-night bacchanal. Affluent young guests rioted and practically destroyed an oceanfront mansion in Southampton. All the windows were smashed and people were actually seen swinging from the crystal chandeliers. The party made front-page headlines and marked something of an end to old Social Register ways.
Last edited by jparchitectus; 21-02-2006 at 02:46.
Meanwhile, Allan Kaprow and other New York artists organized a series of happenings. Rock bands played on the beach, a garbage dump was filled with foam, girls in bikinis had flowers painted on their stomachs—all of it documented by a television crew for the CBS program “What I Did On My Vacation.”
As the decade progressed there was a noticeable shift in perspective, a shift away from the relatively restrained and pristine functionalism of the fifties beach house—those “flat-roofed blisters” of Peter Blake, George Nelson, and Robert Rosenberg. A younger generation of architects brought a new intensity to the East End scene.
Blake didn’t like what he saw and decided to move away in the 1960s. So did Nelson, who found the beaches too crowded and felt the area was being ruined by the kind of media exposure that he himself had helped instigate.
Last edited by jparchitectus; 21-02-2006 at 03:29.
The houses of the new generation were more gestural and vertical, more agitated and urban in temperament, representing the hyperactive and youth-oriented culture that epitomized the decade. Like sixties pants and collars, the houses went flaring in all directions. Most were relatively small, single-family residences designed for upwardly mobile New Yorkers. Rituals of domestic behavior were challenged, norms of middle-class comfort subverted.
The architecture was characterized by thin planar surfaces and transparent volumes combined in ways that derived from the collage aesthetic of synthetic cubism, the fascist architecture of Giuseppe Terragni, and the early villas of Le Corbusier. Younger architects were rediscovering the vitality of early modernist design while reacting against the repetitive blandness of modern corporate architecture.
Traditional house forms were reduced to the most elementary geometries. Floor plans were turned about to create dynamic spaces. Walls were pulled back and fragmented. Planes were shifted and made to intersect other planes. Facades were infiltrated, removed in part, and otherwise displaced.
The architectural passwords of the day were “penetration,” “rotation,” and “erosion.” Axes were skewed, points of entry shifted, underlying structures revealed. The thin membrane between inside and outside was pushed to the breaking point with ever-larger panels of glass and interpenetrating elements. Transparent voids were “incised” into cubic forms. Bridges and ramps were used in place of conventional stairways.
Last edited by jparchitectus; 21-02-2006 at 03:30.
The Postwar Beach House - 1950-1962
Life magazine spread showing
the Russel House, Water Mill, 1956
Nevil Shute’s popular novel, On The Beach, suggested a double meaning for the beach getaway. The book was published in 1957, the same year that the Soviets launched the Sputnik satellite into orbit, and was made into a Hollywood movie starring Gregory Peck and Ava Gardner two years later. Shute’s doomsday romance was set during the final days of the planet following a nuclear exchange between the United States and the Soviet Union.
For Cold War urbanites, a weekend at the beach held the promise of literally getting away from it all—not just escaping the city but, somehow, the horrors of nuclear annihilation.
If the down side of Cold War domesticity was the private bomb shelter built in so many American basements during the fifties, the upside was the beach house. It may be hard to imagine that the Korean War, the Berlin Wall, or the Cuban Missile Crisis were intrinsically linked to postwar weekend culture, but they were all part of the same mind-set.
What better carrot could American-style capitalism offer the world to offset the threat of collectivism and a Soviet Big Brother? The weekend house was the object of desire, the target, the ultimate destination of the happy consumer. It was even patriotic. As one editor of the Cold War period put it: “A vacation house should create an atmosphere of complete relaxation, where the cares and tensions of everyday living can be forgotten. During the past few years, its growth has been phenomenal, proof perhaps that this urge to escape is basic and necessary to the national welfare.”
The Kitchen Debate
Last edited by jparchitectus; 21-02-2006 at 03:36.
But what exactly was this “urge to escape” that was so necessary? How did this idea of doing nothing evolve from the Calvinist work ethic that helped make America such a global power? Was leisure just a reward for good behavior, for fulfilling one’s work quota, or was it something that ran even deeper in the human spirit—the unalienable right of every individual who lived in the free world?
In its 3 August 1959 issue, Life magazine announced rather boastfully that two-million American families owned second homes. (This item ran beside reports of Chinese Communists overthrowing Tibet.) The editors of the magazine also estimated that 75,000 more weekend homes would be built in the coming year. “Rising incomes, longer vacations, more holiday weekends, and constantly improving highways all tempt the wage earner to seek out a change of scene for his leisure time,” wrote Life’s editors. They continued:
The second house usually has certain distinguishing features. The setting is one that gives particular pleasure to the owner and his family, whether it be the mountains or the seashore, and the house itself is designed to take maximum advantage of the site. It is easy to maintain on weekends that are devoted principally to leisure and pleasure. Most owners do not want to invest heavily in their seconds homes, but they have found that simplicity and ingenuity of design, as shown on these pages, can provide comfortable quarters for little money.
Peter Blake, Blake House,
Bridgehampton, 1960
And there, filling most of one page, was evidence of the phenomenon: a photograph of a modernist weekend house in Water Mill, Long Island. It was a stark looking tableau—far removed from any conventional image of home and hearth, but compelling in its own way.
Blake House 1960
There was no sense that the house was grounded to its site; it seemed as if it had flown there on its own power, Jetsons-style. There were no trees or shrubs around the house, just a barren lawn sloping to the water’s edge where the owners sat reading in the sun while their children repaired the family rowboat. It was a perfectly modern and peculiarly American version of Arcadian bliss.
Andrew Geller, Hunt House,
Fire Island, 1959
“A House Away From Home,” read a large-type caption. “This marvel of ingenuity,” explained the editors, was built for only $13, 750, a sound financial investment, not a frivolous excess: “Many families have found that a second home, properly financed, costs less than annual summer vacations, with a tangible asset left after the loan has been paid.” In other words, it paid to take long weekends. It paid to lie in the sun. It paid to have fun.
What better proof could there be of the success of free-enterprise capitalism? American citizens worked hard and had something to show for their labors at the end of the week. Millions of Americans could now afford not one but two houses for themselves, and most of these individuals weren’t even millionaires. Meanwhile, Soviet citizens waited for years to get their foot in the door of a cramped little socialist apartment.
I recommend this book on the matter:
Weekend Utopia: Modern Living in the Hamptons
The book by Alastair Gordon, published by Princeton Architectural Press is now available in stores.
"For a younger, braver generation, 'Weekend Utopia' offers an alternative to home sweet home."
The New York Times
Are there still Peter Blake houses around?
Peter Blake, Blake House,
Bridgehampton, 1960
And there, filling most of one page, was evidence of the phenomenon: a photograph of a modernist weekend house in Water Mill, Long Island. It was a stark looking tableau—far removed from any conventional image of home and hearth, but compelling in its own way. [/COLOR]
Blake House 1960[/QUOTE]
Last edited by beach_rose; 2 Days Ago at 23:47.
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