Practicing ArchitecturePracticing Architecture

A new book tells the largely untold story of a New York Modernist mecca and its leading practitioner

By Mike Singer

New York’s Fire Island was a theater for Modernist architectural innovation in the 1960s and ’70s every much as groundbreaking as Palm Springs was decades before. For a variety of reasons, though, Fire Island’s architecture has not been the focus of nearly as much attention.

That may change soon with publication of the new book Fire Island Modernist: Horace Gifford and the Architecture of Seduction. Its author, Christopher Rawlins, AIA, was in Palm Springs for Modernism Week to talk about Fire Island’s leading Modernist design pioneer—Horace Gifford (1932–1992)—an openly gay architect who has largely been forgotten until now.

Rawlins’ richly illustrated work combines architectural and social history to describe how Gifford went from a Depression-era childhood in Vero Beach, Fla., to mastery of modern domestic architecture in the New York oceanside enclave that helped shape a slice of modern culture, particularly gay culture.

Fire Island, a 31-mile-long barrier island off the South Shore of New York’s Long Island, developed cachet as an artistic refuge. It’s where Truman Capote wrote Breakfast at Tiffany’s, Diane Von Furstenberg showed off her latest wrap dresses for Halston and Calvin Klein, and Jerry Herman composed Broadway show tunes on his ocean-facing piano. Writers Christopher Isherwood and W.H. Auden were weekend visitors as far back as the ’30s. Film celebrities such as Elizabeth Taylor, Montgomery Clift, and Marilyn Monroe stayed in modest homes alongside middle-class vacationers captivated by the seashore’s natural beauty.

Rawlins spent three years assembling hundreds of vintage images, sketches, and drawings that document many of the 63 small, innovative Modernist homes Gifford built on Fire Island between 1961 and 1981. An average Gifford house was 1,000 square feet, expanded outward with oversized windows, decks, sun courts and walkways. It was often an architecture of seduction, with floor-to-ceiling mirrors, sunken living rooms and conversation pits, and exposed outdoor showers. He pursued the mysteries of light, shadow, concealment, and exposure practically and metaphorically. Rawlins’ book remarkably shows how Gifford’s design work paralleled the birth of the gay liberation movement, from 1960s pavilions that provided refuge from a hostile world to exuberant post-Stonewall, pre-AIDS masterpieces that were, in the author’s words, “orchestrated bacchanals of liberation.”

Gifford’s designs transcended prefabricated 1950s cottages with tiny windows that were delivered on barges and dragged across the fragile dunes to rest upon skinny wooden pilings. Rejecting prefabrication for this delicate coastal landscape, Gifford insisted that all materials be carried by hand to undisturbed sites. He composed and clad his structures in naturally weathering cedar inside and out, a choice that encouraged a light touch upon the earth, an easy low-maintenance lifestyle, and an aesthetic that blended into the sassafras trees.

Princeton-trained Rawlins said that encountering Gifford’s work was like meeting a kindred spirit. “Writing this book has definitely opened my eyes to the importance of architectural preservation. I used to view architecture in largely formal terms, but now I have a greater appreciation for the cultural forces at work in its creation.”

In Palm Springs, Rawlins spoke with AIArchitect about Gifford and his Modernist legacy. 

The vacation homes Gifford built between 1961 and 1981 were created for primarily gay clients. What role did Gifford's “architecture of seduction” play in America’s gay liberation movement?

Gifford housed the first generation of gay Americans who dared to make themselves visible. It is a bit tricky to speak of a “gay aesthetic” in monolithic terms, but if you look at the older adjacent Fire Island gay community of Cherry Grove, its prevailing artistic and architectural expressions—drag, high Victoriana, camp, a coded language of double entendres—spoke to the profound alienation of a gay man or lesbian circa 1947. A little later, in the Pines community where Gifford built most of his homes, you have a more assimilated generation seeking its own forms of expression. Those haunted houses in Cherry Grove no longer moved them. Gifford embraced the popular movement of Modernism, while imbuing his work with a particular dialect that mirrored the freewheeling physical and cultural landscape of its inhabitants. His stripped-bare structures of cedar and glass, with prurient lines of sight and an amusing lack of closets, resonated with a generation that had finally emerged from the shadows.

I think the book amply demonstrates that there is such a thing as “gay architecture” in a number of expressive forms, but when it comes to the singular term “gay aesthetic,” I am trying to avoid the error of essentialism—assuming that a particular cultural or ethnic group behaves in a monolithic fashion. In the same vein, one would describe a “black aesthetic” or a “Jewish aesthetic” with a measure of modesty and care. There are often multiple “gay aesthetics” occurring at one time. It’s not as if the Pines’ aesthetic entirely displaced the Cherry Grove aesthetic the world over. But Gifford’s work spoke to an emerging, upwardly mobile New York demographic which was one subset of the gay world.

Paul Rudolph, FAIA, and Louis Kahn, FAIA, were his mentors. What did Gifford learn from these eminent Modernists?

Paul Rudolph, while still in his 20s, began producing a remarkable series of beach houses in Sarasota, Fla. Today, we often associate Rudolph with the Yale School of Architecture building that bears his name and other works of Brutalism, but his earlier Florida work possessed a remarkable lightness and feel for the landscape. Rudolph’s Sarasota renaissance was Gifford’s model. He also realized, from Rudolph’s example, that he didn’t need to work in someone else’s office for 20 years before making his mark. By his early 30s, Gifford was the most sought-after architect on Fire Island. On a personal level, they were both gay men from small Southern towns who found their way to New York City. 

Gifford won a scholarship to the University of Pennsylvania where Kahn taught, yet he inexplicably dropped out a semester shy of getting his master’s degree there. Nevertheless, Kahn seems to have been almost a father figure to Gifford, and he spoke reverentially of his former professor. In fact, the first house Gifford built for himself on Fire Island was modeled after Kahn’s Trenton Bath House. Gifford combined Kahn’s feel for materials, his obsession with light, and his method of composing floor plans with Rudolph’s cross-sectional prowess and theatrical sensibilities.

Interestingly enough, unlike the AIA Fellows who inspired his work, Gifford had a public indecency arrest that he believed would preclude him from getting an architectural license, so he never got one. How did this evidence of a self-conscious “outsider” status shape him?

Gifford was out of the closet as a college student in the South during the 1950s. And he successfully worked around his lack of a license, yet he never expanded the scale of his practice in the 1970s and ’80s, as we might expect of a successful midcareer architect with an impressive portfolio. I think this has less to do with his sexual orientation and more to do with his actual secret: He was bipolar. Gifford feared losing control of a large practice during his periods of depressive oblivion. This disease was damaging enough. But the onset of AIDS, which killed Gifford [in 1992 at age 59] and much of his audience, and the rise of Post-Modernism were the knockout punches that consigned him to obscurity. Until now.

You characterize him as a "happy hippie Modernist tending his own garden, but not lacking in larger visions.” Back then, nobody was talking much about sustainability as it’s conceived now. Was Gifford ahead of his time? 

Growing up on the beaches of Florida, Gifford developed a deep connection with coastal landscapes, and a healthy respect for the tenuous nature of inhabiting them. I think he also retained a Depression-era notion of thrift that the postwar generation was sometimes too quick to abandon. So yes, he was ahead of his time, but a lot of the ideas that inform the sustainability movement were always there, but [were] submerged under a tidal wave of cheap oil and consumerism.

You spent two summers in 2007 and 2008 living in a house Gifford designed on Fire Island for himself. How did that shape your appreciation of Gifford's design aesthetic and your desire to write about him?

It was actually Gifford’s second personal home on Fire Island, which he built in 1965 and tinkered with over the next 10 years. While it held an obvious appeal—what architect wouldn’t like a beach house with lofty ceilings and disappearing glass doors?—it also kept surprising me with quieter virtues. When I measured the space, I discovered that all of the rooms were laid out with the “golden [ratio]” proportion. When I slid the cushions off the sofa, they perfectly filled the pit in front of the fireplace. He layered a lot of intelligence into seemingly simple structures. Every weekend held a new discovery. I remember thinking to myself, “I wish I had worked for this man.” Writing the book was, in a sense, my apprenticeship with Horace Gifford. And now, as a practitioner, I am engaged in the preservation and restoration of his work. 

What is the most important aspect of Gifford's Modernist legacy?

I appreciate how Gifford managed to be simultaneously modest and provocative. His houses are small, and they touch lightly upon the earth. Yet they are sexy and artful, without resorting to the aesthetics of waste. They are part of a broader Modern movement, but [are] highly inflected by local circumstances.  So his beach houses are not merely interesting artifacts of an earlier era. They are models for the future.

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