Sagaponac Beacon - housing design in the Hamptons - Long Island, New York - Brief Article

Architectural Review, The, July, 2001 by Paula Deitz

Since the 1960s, the cluster of beach towns on eastern Long Island known as the Hamptons has been a hotbed of domestic architectural innovation positing modernist glass and steel next to rambling shingled houses indigenous to the traditional summer communities. Fashionable to the hilt with an infusion of international celebrities and new millionaires, the region has more recently produced a line of overblown mansions that many consider a social mistake by status seekers.

To correct this trend, property investor Harry J. Brown, Jr, himself owner of a nineteenth-century shingled carriage house in Bridgehampton, is seeking like others before him to create an ideal community through enlightened architecture and landscape initiatives (Columbus, Indiana, with its public buildings by a Who's Who of architects comes to mind). The Brown Companies purchased 150 acres of woodland in Sagaponac three miles from ocean beaches and, advised by Richard Meier, the firm has selected 32 well-known and emerging architects to design spare, elegant and witty houses in an environmentally responsible subdivision (1.5 to 3 acres per house and 13 acres of parkland) that will re-establish the Hamptons as the bellwether and laboratory of contemporary domestic architecture.

In his belief that good art and design is achieved as much through discipline as through liberation, Brown, sole client so far, set constraints in his brief that force innovation and creativity, particularly with regard to the simplicity of Hamptons' style indoor/outdoor summer living. Characteristics of the early designs demonstrate lessons learned about the enticing shipboard compactness that added allure to, say, Frank Lloyd Wright's 1955 Usonian Automatic House or Le Corbusier's 1924 'Petite Maison' designed for his parents along the shores of Lake Geneva.

No homogeneous Seaside community this, for each design projects its own personality and demonstrates how houses have always been a microcosm of an architect's experimental ideas. In addition, there are the de rigueur swimming pools, like the narrow lap pool Lindy Roy designed to enter the house as part of a water zone incorporating a steam room, sauna and private sun deck. Tsao & McKown sunk the pool below grade at the bottom of a green embankment. A corner of the house, a partially glass cube, protrudes over the pool area; additional subterranean rooms around the pool are lit by round skylights flush with the lawn.

Heeding Brown's wish for a traditional roofline, Stan Allen and James Corner, architect and landscape architect of Field Operations, devised pitched skylights recalling angled salt box houses. A long slant of wooden decking at the entrance looks like a boat ramp. Similar to the houses of recycled materials Samuel Mock-bee designs with his students for Alabama sharecroppers (AR March 2001), his Hamptons version derives its hominess from horizontal and vertical elements set askew with a swimming pool angled out from the house. More complex is Peter Eisenman's 1971 never-yet-built House IV, a labyrinth of straight-angled interiors, or Eric Owen Moss Architects' fortress-like tower of stacked masses belted with a glassed-in stairwell and horizontal sun room overlooking the pool.

In the sisters Hariri & Hariri's Miesian house, glass walls disappear behind a system of metal shutters for a more secure domestic enclosure at night though during the day the pool appears like a continuation of interior surfaces. And the system of ramps in Reiser & Umemoto's house climaxes as a cantilevered shelter over the pool. Still to be heard from are Michael Graves, Charles Gwathmey, Richard Rogers and others as Brown imagines life in a contemporary way to achieve the broader purpose of setting a new standard for modest, organic country houses. Above all, he