Architecture: Checking In With Paul Goldberger

Thanks to the proliferation of creative minds, more than a little ego, and the infusion of vast sums of cash, the South Fork has always been a breeding ground for innovative and sometimes even garish examples of architectural design.

From Carl Fisher’s Montauk Manor to Ira Rennert’s 62,000-square-foot spread in Sagaponack, developments new and old can inspire controversy on many levels, ranging from artistic vision to questions of zoning. Residential architectural styles in the Hamptons can vary from historic shingled cottage to Italianate to modern to what is commonly called the McMansion, often on the very same block.

And probably no one is more of an expert on the consistently capricious landscape of South Fork architecture than East Hampton resident Paul Goldberger, whose iconic book “The Houses of the Hamptons” was published in 1986 and still rules coffee tables from Montauk to Southampton and beyond.

Getting a chance to discuss architecture with Mr. Goldberger is kind of like talking about the universe with Stephen Hawking. One might know a little bit about the subject matter—who doesn’t?—but clearly he is someone who has spent a lifetime developing the sort of expertise and knowledge about the topic that only comes from the depths of a passionate soul.

Mr. Goldberger is now a contributing editor at Vanity Fair, after more than a dozen years as the architecture critic for The New Yorker. He holds the Joseph Urban Chair in Design and Architecture at The New School, and was formerly dean of the Parsons School of Design. He began his career at The New York Times, where in 1984 his architecture criticism was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Distinguished Criticism, the highest award in journalism.

His first visit to the Hamptons in the early 1970s awakened something within him, he said. “I had grown up spending summers on the Jersey Shore,” said Mr. Goldberger, who hails from Nutley, New Jersey. “We would go every summer and I loved it.

But coming here, I realized for the first time that you could have the country and the beach in the same place. There were trees, landscaping, fields here—and the ocean. It really did feel like the country.

“And then there was so much wonderful architecture. My friends took me around on a tour. I remember seeing Charlie Gwathmey’s house, a Richard Meier house in the middle of the field, a few key things like that. It was exciting! Over the years, I came back sporadically. I really liked it here.”

Eventually he moved to the South Fork. His own home is a Frank Hollenbeck spec house that he and his wife, Susan Solomon, purchased in the late 1980s.

“Robert Stern did a big addition in the ‘90s,” Mr. Goldberger said. “It’s the only modern house he has ever designed in the Hamptons, and one of the only ones he has ever done anywhere.

"Then, this year, Bates Masi did a plan for us to reclad.” The plan became a bit more elaborate after a flood, “but it’s not a full-on Bates Masi house. It’s sort of a Bates Masi house, and sort of a Robert Stern,” Mr. Goldberger said with a smile.

Mr. Goldberger penned the introduction to “Bespoke Home: Bates Masi Architects," which was published this year, and he also released his book “Building Art: The Life and Work of Frank Gehry” just last month. Also recently, he served as architectural consultant for the Obama Foundation’s planned Presidential Library, to be located in Jackson Park in Chicago’s South Side.

But on an early October morning in East Hampton, it’s the local scene that is being discussed, in particular the resurgence of interest in good modern design.

“There were a lot of important modern houses built out here,” Mr. Goldberger said, “but many of them were quite small. People seemed to associate them with a kind of modesty. So as things got bigger and more pretentious, there seemed to be a disconnect between modernism and grandeur and comfort."

As a result, he said, “people were buying modern houses for the land, tearing them down, and building McMansions.” Many examples of modern architectural innovation have been razed in the past 30 years. “There was a house Pierre Chareau designed for Robert Motherwell in Georgica, that’s gone. There is a Philip Johnson house that I believe that is being torn down. There’s at least one Gwathmey house that’s gone. All they could see was the land and a McMansion in its place,” he said.

Also, in recent years there has been a re-emergence of architecture patrons—clients, much like art patrons, who bring in architectural artistes to show off to the Hamptons glitterati.

“Peter Bohlin – he worked on Bill Gates’s house and does some of the most beautiful houses in America—has never built a house out here before,” Mr. Goldberger said. “He’s now working on three of them.”

Leaving design aside, zoning and overbuilding have always been a sore point for Mr. Goldberger. “Good architecture can’t answer the problem of where you shouldn’t be building anything at all,” he said. “I wrote a piece in The New York Times magazine in 1983 called ‘The Strangling of a Resort.’

“It was like the first piece that said, What’s going on here? Architecture is completely beside the point if we’re building too much. People are pushing the square footage envelope as much as they possibly can. The houses are big and disproportionate to the lot.” He termed this condition “too-much-money syndrome.”

Meanwhile, Mr. Goldberger doesn’t dismiss the McMansion movement out of hand. “I think the shingle style design is one of the great movements in American architecture," he said. "It was rediscovered in the early ‘80s, but like so many things, we overdid it. We binged. Now we’re in a period of detoxing.”

“When I wrote ‘Houses of the Hamptons,’ a lot of the modern houses were beginning to seem like too much. They were kind of arrogant, weird shapes; the shingle style seemed almost refreshing. So going back to our roots, connecting to the tradition of the community—I was a huge enthusiast of that at the time.”

But what has happened in the recent times, he said, “is a recognition that modern can be very grand and comfortable and beautiful.”

Mr. Goldberger gives kudos to architects in the last two decades of Hamptons design who are bringing sexy back to the modern architecture movement. “They have a commitment to try to do modern houses well, at a more ambitious level of grandeur than the earlier versions," he said. "Bates Masi is one of the finest firms doing that. Stelle Lomont Rouhani, also doing very good stuff.”

Mr. Goldberger said he has always been a proponent of the traditional and the modern living side by side in harmony. An example is the 1842 Greek Revival-style Topping Rose House on Main Street in Bridgehampton, which also ensconces a modern addition by architect Roger Ferris, a design that sparked some controversy.

When asked, Mr. Goldberger said he liked it.

“It’s quiet and deferential to the main building,” he said of the addition. “If it were taller than the main building, or reflective glass, that would be different, but it complements. You can make the argument, let the old be what it is, let the new be what it is, and let them cohabitate,” Mr. Goldberger said.

“Scale and materials and texture and feeling are often more important than replication, and those come from proportion and light, not about style per se," he said. "The Hamptons have these parallel histories—farming and fishing, art, and summer resort," he said. "Sometimes they intersect or cross in funny ways.”

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