Southampton Arts Center Architecture + Design Tour July 14 Will Focus On Modernism

The Southampton Arts Center Architecture + Design Tour returns on Thursday, July 14, for its fifth edition, and this time the annual event celebrates modern architecture and landscape design in Southampton.

Before embarking on a self-guided tour of four homes, guests will attend a panel discussion with four local architects who will explore the context of modernism in Southampton and its relationship to the area’s historic fabric as well as how the individual panelists interpret modernism.

The focus on modernism locally is a change of pace for the Architecture + Design Tour, which saw modifications during the pandemic. Past editions of the tour included visits to traditional homes by Grosvenor Atterbury and Stanford White, a virtual tour of Palm Springs, California, and a sneak peek at the Peter Marino Art Foundation in the former Rogers Memorial Library next door to the Southampton Arts Center.

Event co-chair Mark Fichlander said the idea this year is to look at “the relationship of modern architecture and modern landscape design, and how the two interface and how they’ve been interpreted locally.”

The tour includes a 1980s residence owned by Todd and Lauren Merrill and decorated with items from their gallery, a Palladian-style residence in the estate section, a Cobb Road home with landscape architecture by Chris LaGuardia of LaGuardia Design Group in Water Mill and a new home on Jule Pond designed by Blaze Makoid of BMA Architects with landscape design also by LaGuardia.

LaGuardia and Makoid will be on the panel along with architect Viola Rouhani of Stelle Lomont Rouhani Architects in Bridgehampton and Southampton architect Siamak Samii, who will serve as moderator.

During an interview last week, Samii said Southampton Village has a great fabric of historic architecture but there are areas where modern architecture works very nicely, mostly on the oceanfront where there are vast expanses of space

Modern architecture has its roots in the early 1900s, when, with industrialization, aesthetics took a backseat to function, and a number of French and German architects were the vanguards of the movement, he said. It was known as the “international style” because function was looked at not as a regional thing, but as a response to specific needs, he explained.

Long Island’s history of modern architecture goes back to the early 1950s and 1960s, when people came out looking for simpler homes, he said, and after World War II, with more streamlined and simplified construction technologies, many architects explored the ideas of modernism.

Rouhani said modern architecture has come back in the last 10 to 20 years.

“While there were many examples of early modern architecture out here, with architects like Andrew Geller and certainly Norman Jaffe, sometime in the ’80s or ’90s that kind of fell out of favor, and things definitely became more postmodern,” she said. She saw people gravitate more toward shingle-style homes and references to the region’s original farming structures such as gambrel roofs.

Among the reasons Rouhani cites for modern architecture’s comeback are an embrace of the sensibilities of modernism again and the advances in technology in terms of bigger expanses of glass and better thermal controls. These things don’t sound very glamorous, she said, but they do allow architects the freedom to build in a more modern style. She explained that means the technologies allow for more open space. “And given that we are in this super beautiful area, with so much visual access to either water or nature, it makes sense to embrace that and be able to just really benefit from having that indoor-outdoor relationship,” she added.

Federal Emergency Management Agency requirements to raise up first floors and local codes that limit building height also contribute to the popularity of modernism in Southampton, according to Rouhani.

“In many cases, that means that you can’t have these houses — if you want a two-story house — with a pitched roof or a more kind of articulated roof shape,” she said. “And so the houses end up having the flat roofs, and once they do that, continuing on in that sort of modern language seems to make sense.”

Rouhani also spoke to the importance of landscape architecture in modernism.

“The house and the landscape are completely integral — like you can’t really design one without the other because they really need to work together,” she said. “And so we like to collaborate with landscape architects from the get-go on all of our projects. So everything can really be thought out and developed as seamlessly as possible. So neither one ever seems like it’s an afterthought.”

She noted that the approach hearkens back to early modernists, as seen in Sea Ranch in Northern California. “It was always a thought about how the house really sits in the land,” she said.

Site planning is not always about the view, she pointed out, and can often be about solar orientation, the prevailing winds, the natural grade or a particular feature worth emphasizing.

Makoid earned his Bachelor of Architecture at Rhode Island School of Design and worked as the design director for large firms before starting his own firm on the South Fork 20 years ago.

“I knew that I wanted to practice modern architecture exclusively,” he recalled. “… At that time, to go back 20 years ago, it wasn’t quite as popular as it is now.”

That allowed the firm to grow slowly — from one person to 22 employees, with offices in Miami, Lake Tahoe and Bridgehampton — in a strong way, staying in its lane rather than trying to be everything to everybody, he explained.

Makoid said a lot of the experimental work in modern architecture during the 1960s and 1970s was happening on the beach and the thread of that history remains.

Jule Pond II, his firm’s project that is featured on the tour, is only a few years old, but it is also an example of experimentation in modern architecture happening near the Atlantic shore.

“Fortunately, we had a very adventurous client who was all-in,” Makoid said.

He said the residence feels very sculptural, and the firm’s inspirations were more abstract than usual.

The team looked at the works of artist Richard Serra, who makes site-specific large-scale sculptures, and at Andrew Wyeth’s painting “Christina’s World.” Another idea, with tongue-in-cheek humor, was to look at the house like a barcode.

“Those were the three things that were creating the inspiration for the house,” Makoid said.

Vertical trellises, placed at varying widths, extend beyond the facade, blurring the edges of the structure.

Instead of having a regular, rhythmic series of punched openings, the plan was to make it look that the facade had been pulled apart and was being extended, accordion like, Makoid said.

This design allowed for better functionality indoors.

“It was responding to interior pressures more than exterior, so it gave us the ability to be almost random in a way from the outside,” Makoid said.

Though it appeared random, various iterations of the barcode design were tried in computer models and physical models to make sure the proportions felt comfortable.

It is the kind of risky design that modernism is ripe for.

Makoid said the landscape is very rustic, like a wild environment, and looking through the house is a multilayered vista and long-view perspective that includes the property itself, the pond, the beach and the ocean.

The Southampton Arts Center Architecture + Design Tour begins at 11 a.m. on Thursday, July 14, at the center at 25 Jobs Lane in Southampton Village with brunch and a panel discussion, followed by a self-guided tour of four Southampton properties. Tickets are $350 per person and limited to 125. Premium tickets that come with an end-of-day champagne reception are $750. Visit southamptonartscenter.org for tickets and more information.