'Long Island Modernism' Still Standing On East End

There is a forsaken era of architecture previously hidden away here on Long Island.

It began in 1930—the golden age when land was available and cheap—and for the next 50 years, a monumental movement flooded Nassau and Suffolk counties. Marked by futuristic architecture, open-plan living rooms and a shying away from old European conventions and house staffs, the epoch became known as “modernism.” Until recently, the fledgling modern movement had been abandoned and even shunned in some circles, particularly on the East End where traditional, shingle-style manses have ruled.

But Montauk part-timer Caroline Rob Zaleski saw more to the story while working on a Nassau County field study for the Society for the Preservation of Long Island Antiquities in 2002, having just graduated from Columbia University’s Architectural Preservation Program. She realized many of the internationally renowned architects she learned about in school—Antonin Raymond, Marcel Breuer, Gordon Chadwick, Philip Johnson, Paul Rudolph and Richard Meier—also built in Suffolk County, and so she expanded her study.

She spent several years as an “architecture archeologist,” driving up and down Long Island in search of modern-era buildings and their stories. In the end, she found 501 of them.

The master list, which is published in the back of her debut work, “Long Island Modernism: 1930-1980,” includes buildings of all types—movie theaters, factories, public housing, college campuses and houses of worship—but the majority of the buildings included from the East End are houses. The coffee-table book is divided into 25 essays and features more than 300 archival photos, all designed to document and preserve the period in which the structures were built.

“We say in preservation, ‘The most endangered past is the recent past,’” Ms. Zaleski said during a telephone interview from her hotel room in London earlier this month while taking a break from sightseeing. “When I look at this complete book and I look at the inventory of 78 architects—key figures I studied at Columbia when I took Introduction to Modern Architecture—I couldn’t believe they built on Long Island. It was just shocking to me, that so much of this work had been forgotten, even neglected or demolished.”

There are some modernist ghosts still standing, including the circa-1941 Charles Briggs and Raoul Carrerà House in Montauk by Czech-born architect Antonin Raymond, who ran a practice with his wife, Noémi, in Japan until increased militarism and anti-American fervor during the late 1930s forced the couple to relocate to the United States and set up shop in Pennsylvania. One of their first commissions was to design the East End beach house atop a bluff overlooking the ocean.

It had to be constructed with basic, low-cost materials from the domestic market because all else were claimed by the American military as it mobilized for war. But that did not deter the Raymonds from designing an “extraordinary” modern house, Ms. Zaleski said, which is now home to fashion designer Ralph Lauren and his wife, Ricky.

“The walls are paneled in plywood and then there’s tree trunks used as posts in the living room framing, holding up the roof. That’s a Japanese feature,” she explained. “This is at a time with wartime restrictions. Today, building materials are trucked in from around the world to Long Island. People want marble from Italy and granite from Sweden. I think one of the lessons is it’s not necessary—from looking at the architecture in the book—to transport materials from afar.”

While poring over hundreds of home magazines and architecture journals, Ms. Zaleski made a few discoveries of her own. Among them, Frank Lloyd Wright, most famously known for designing the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in Manhattan, had one Long Island commission in Great Neck in 1938. And Richard Meier, who earned the nickname “Mr. White” for his signature white façades, extensively used color within his interiors. He designed two homes in East Hampton.

“Before he became a star architect, he used color to create planes and depth and interest, beautifully, absolutely marvelously,” Ms. Zaleski reported, “whereas today, he’s known as an architect of whiteness. That was a surprise,” she laughed.

But one of the biggest shocks took a lot of digging, Ms. Zaleski said. It revolved around architect George Nelson—editor, writer and founder of the design firm George Nelson & Associates. A preeminent representative of American modernism from the early 1940s through the end of the 1970s, he wrote several books about product and industrial design, and with his team, he created practical yet witty furniture, household products, office systems, textiles, lighting and graphics.

Building was the least significant of his many pursuits, so he left much of that responsibility to the lesser known Gordon Chadwick, who joined Nelson in 1950 after working as an apprentice under Wright from 1938 to 1942.

On Long Island, the duo was responsible for four houses—three on the East End. All of them, at times, had been previously attributed to Nelson alone. In every case, Chadwick played the primary role, if not the sole architect.

In 1950, jobs began to slow for the firm. Determined to get business rolling again, Nelson convinced Holiday magazine to commission a prototypical vacation house that would put into practice modern design ideas that the architect had developed.

The Holiday House, which still stands across from the Quogue Field Club, was a hit—though, over the years, various owners have heavily adapted it to unrecognizable versions of the original design.

“It was very well visited,” Ms. Zaleski said. “People would drive out from the city and all over Long Island, marvel at the electric blinds, electric garage clicker, very modern furniture and they would be awed, really, by the convenience of the kitchen. The concept of the fitted kitchen was completely new.”

By 1956, Chadwick’s architecture began to point away from Nelson’s modernism and toward elements of the post-modernism design that began to emerge in the 1960s, Ms. Zaleski explained, as seen in the Spaeth House overlooking Two Mile Hollow Beach in East Hampton. It features a shingle-style roof alluding to old, wooden, American farm buildings, but with a distinctive modern twist. The home’s beach side has a large deck with subtle curves and an oval sand pit for children, and the façade has “eyebrow” bulges that shade each of the bay windows, creating a gentle rippling of the surface that evokes waves and adds a playful touch to the design.

“The house magazines of the ’50s, ’60s and ’70s promulgated a modern way of living, but by the ’80s, if you look at the ads, there’s this nostalgia for traditional styles, and modern furniture is no longer shown,” Ms. Zaleski said. “They promoted a sense of grandeur and luxury again that we hadn’t seen since the time of the great estates.”

She sighed. Post-modernism had taken over, she explained.

“People would talk about modernist boxes in a pejorative sense. Eccentric, crazy, ’70s architecture, and I’m not sure why,” she said. “But I think the sensibility is still with us. Modernism in architecture is certainly coming back into fashion. And I’m seeing that architects who build in a modern way are getting commissions, certainly on the East End.”