Improving Upon A Quonset Hut

Grove Press publisher and East Hampton resident Barney Rosset once said that selling his house at the juncture of Georgica Road and Jericho Lane in 1980 was “the stupidest single act of my life.”

It’s hard to go against the sentiment suggested by such headlines as The New York Times’s “Trend-Setting Quonset Hut Is Demolished”—especially when a handsome, recently released volume, “Pierre Chareau: Modern Architecture & Design,” devotes five full pages to the house.

At the time the house was about to be demolished, the consensus seemed to be that the glass-and-cinderblock structure, helmeted with a galvanized metal roof, was an admirable example of hybrid modern domestic architecture. The release in hardback this past December of Mr. Rosset’s “My Life in Publishing and How I Fought Censorship” may prompt a reconsideration of the structure, even though when he wrote the memoir, Mr. Rosset was living elsewhere—on his 13.5-acre estate on Hands Creek Road, which recently sold for $5.5 million.

The Quonset Hut, cited as a rare example on the East End of the work of the innovative French designer Pierre Chareau, had been built as a home and studio for Abstract Expressionist painter Robert Motherwell in 1947. In 1952, Mr. Rosset bought the house from Mr. Motherwell, and he lived in it for close to 30 years.

On the eve of its destruction in 1985, The Times hailed the house as “a symbol of a new Hamptons trend,” away from “the traditional to an International, modernistic style,” as noted architect Robert A.M. Stern called it. Though Mr. Chareau built the house for Mr. Motherwell, it was really Mr. Rosset who took it on “for the long haul,” as the Yale publication points out.

Mr. Rosset made changes—shingling the roof and removing a wall that Mr. Motherwell had put up, because it “knocked out the fireplace’s usefulness and spoiled the craziness of the house.” Mr. Rosset also added a pool and tennis court.

Shortly after Mr. Rosset bought the house, Willem de Kooning rented the studio for a summer, and Samuel Beckett spent time there—Mr. Rosset was his American publisher. As the Chareau publication notes, “Virtually every painter, writer and architect in the artistic enclave of eastern Long Island was a guest or visitor at one time,” including Mark Rothko, Alexander Calder, Isamu Noguchi and Roberto Matta and, of course, Mr. Motherwell, who did major work there, even if he soon moved away.

The house sat on 2 acres that included two other buildings. Although Mr. Rosset sold the house in 1980 to David Dignan, a well-to-do member of East Hampton’s summer colony, it was the subsequent sale to Stephen and Judy Peck a few years later that resulted in the teardown—word of which prompted expressions of outrage. One particularly exercised voice was that of the architectural critic Alastair Gordon, who lambasted the Pecks for destroying a “landmark” and erecting an “Adirondack-style Hamptons McMansion.”

Mr. Peck reportedly said he invited interested parties to come by to consider moving the house, but nothing came of the suggestion, because the house was essentially “rusted steel held together by paint,” and at that stage could only be described as “a shack.”

Enter architect and teacher Eugene L. Futterman, whom Mr. Peck hired to build a new house on the site of the teardown. And enter—here—a different take on the Quonset Hut and its replacement.

According to longtime East End real estate broker and local legend (and walking encyclopedia) Donald Ferriss, Gene Futterman’s Adirondack-inspired design was “extraordinary,” one of the best examples of Adirondack Camp Style as originally created by William West Durant, several of whose Adirondack houses are National Historical Landmarks.

Mr. Ferriss traces his aesthetic preferences to days spent on the North Shore of Long Island admiring estates that had a “symbiotic relationship” to the land they sat on, a harmony that was, he says, missing from the Quonset Hut, which “inserted itself into the environment, rather than being sympathetic to it.”

“Glaringly assertive,” he says, “it’s as though you were walking around 42nd Street and suddenly come upon a rhino.”

The Futterman house, on the other hand, the last house he designed before he died, “nestles into the property, as opposed to some overly large houses built at the same time that could rightly be called McMansions on steroids,” Mr. Ferriss says.

As for Alastair Gordon’s praise, Mr. Ferriss suggests that it reflected an architectural enthusiasm of the time for modern residences that owed part of their influence to the early 20th century Bauhaus School, which favored severe, light and airy functional houses crafted economically.

Even granting efficiency of design, however, Mr. Ferriss wonders about the entrance to the Quonset Hut. To get in, one had to “go into the ground like a mole,” and then, once in, look up to appreciate the huge windows, which started a floor away. Mr. Ferriss suggests as an explanation for such “seemingly awkward elements” the Bauhaus School’s “priority to provide inexpensive, healthy worker housing, where design niceties or refinements were considered of secondary importance, and unusual building materials were intended to suggest the bright egalitarian future of the postwar period.”

Designers wanted such structures to be “visually dislocating” in order to underline their rejection of a class-obsessed past in which only the elite enjoyed any measure of comfort. The destruction of the Quonset hut house, Mr. Ferriss speculates, thus seemed to those who decried it “a counterrevolutionary act, as much political as aesthetic.”

Though Mr. Futterman designed in many styles, a common denominator in his work is his emphasis on using materials that show themselves as such—such as in the Peck house, which is crafted largely with logs. Unlike visually similar Great Camp houses up north, which had no contemporary comforts such as adequate electrical power or sufficient insulation for year-round occupancy, the logs in the Peck house are mostly cosmetic rather than structural.

The design challenge, says Mr. Ferriss, was “to provide all the advanced comforts of contemporary life and meet the requirements of a stringent and demanding modern building code.” He notes particularly “the jerkinhead, or clipped gable roof, to relieve wind stress and shelter both the structure and its inhabitants from inclement weather.”

As for the criss-cross log design on the exterior, and the use of colored (never white) trim—they were hallmarks of the Adirondack style. The result, says Mr. Ferris, was a structure that captured the “primitive purity of Durant’s vision” and was nothing less than “spectacular success.”

In short, Mr. Ferris thinks the Quonset Hut teardown advanced aesthetic design—though one may take issue with the late Dick Schust, an East Hampton architect, whom Mr. Ferris quotes as having once said, “There are few properties that are not improved by tearing down the house.”

True to form, however, Mr. Ferriss is the first to revise himself, pointing to the splendid Lee Avenue mansion in Georgica, recently restored and sold by the director of a family charity, which had inherited the property in a “terribly distressed condition.” He notes that while all the professional family advisors had urged the teardown, the owner refused, and her restoration preserved a “significant Queen Anne landmark.”

“I guess,” Mr. Ferris muses, “the lesson learned with both houses is to be skeptical about the opinion of experts.”