One of the best things about growing up on Long Island was spending summers working on Fire Island where the commute typically involved coffee (“light and sweet”), my best friend and a ferry ride across the Great South Bay to Ocean Beach, NY. I worked for a flower shop and landscape company, with the best days spent as the extra set of hands for the landscape crews. I would deliver and/or plant flowers at the second homes of Manhattan’s prominent and intriguing inhabitants (looking at you Zabars and Lobel’s). The houses ranged from the expected - quaint beach cottages with clever names and a salt air patina - to the unexpected and, for me, immensely magnetic - the bold, modern, sculptural objects that I needed to know more about. Enter, author Christopher Bascom Rawlins, some 30 years later, with his epic ode, Fire Island Modernist, detailing the modern architecture and culture on Fire Island through the eyes of architect an architect I wish I knew about sooner.
Rawlins crafts this comprehensive look at the often overlooked architect Horace Gifford (1932 - 1992), his approach to design, portfolio of seaside pavilions and houses with in the broader context of personal challenges, social and cultural movements.
“As the 1960s became The Sixties, architect Horace Gifford executed a remarkable series of beach houses that transformed the terrain and culture of New York's Fire Island. Growing up on the beaches of Florida, Gifford forged a deep connection with coastal landscapes. Pairing this sensitivity with jazzy improvisations on modernist themes, he perfected a sustainable modernism in cedar and glass that was as attuned to natural landscapes as to our animal natures. Gifford's serene 1960s pavilions provided refuge from a hostile world, while his exuberant post-Stonewall, pre-AIDS masterpieces orchestrated bacchanals of liberation.” Christopher Rawlins.
Please read this book for an exact insight (both colorful and heartbreaking) into Horace Gifford’s world, American architectural history and the mid-century modernist movement. "The injustice of Horace Gifford's early death was compounded by the fact that his important contribution to American domestic architecture of the 1960s and 70s has been overlooked by history.” Paul Goldberg