In the 1950s and '60s, architect Andrew Geller transformed our shores with stark, sculptural houses designed to be virtual light-boxes and the model homes of the future.

by Julia Nasser

At a time when his contemporaries were fixated on designing the modernist cube, Andrew Geller set about doing "something new." Our coasts were still largely undeveloped at this time, and accordingly they made ideal canvases for brave, new design. And so Geller unsquared the cube, building bold, angled boxes, and tumbling them up against the dunes. He created A-frames on stilts, octagonal towers, angular hangars, the "Square Brassiere" and "Reclining Picasso." The reaction among critics and the media was startling. It was widely said that he liberated the American vacation home. Last week, Geller just waves it off: "I just needed a break from my day job. I built these houses on weekends."

"I wanted this house to relate to the land. I was always taught to interpret nature honestly. The vacation home was becoming more common then, and these were accessible to middle-class people."

That he should devote his creative powers and free time to structures that worship light, the beach and the sun is ironic considering a bizarre tragedy that befell him early in life. During training camp in World War II, Geller explains, he was exposed to a chemical agent. His gas mask was faulty and as a result he cannot expose himself to direct sunlight. "I made those houses on the beach and found a way to play with light in that way."

His homes had floor-to-ceiling windows in bizarre shapes, entire glass facades, slits and flaps angled according to a certain slants of sunlight. There were sun-decks that straddled the dunes, multi-level porches, breezeways, outdoor showers and walkways reaching into saltwater ponds. Everything about his houses reached up to the sun or beckoned it in with breakthrough shapes and angles.

When asked about things that influenced his design, Geller claims he's never aligned himself with any particular school or theory of architecture. "I was designing for individuals more than ideas. I wanted to make something playful."

Upon hearing that one of his houses, is becoming a national landmark, he just chuckles, "I'm a fixture." And then, "So I'm a fixture?"

The Pearlroth House, perhaps his most famous, is under threat, and Geller's grandson, Jake, has taken up the cause, as well as making a documentary about his life and work. Many of Geller's seminal beach houses are now gone--some torn down and replaced by trophy homes, others altered beyond recognition or swept away in hurricanes. They endure, however in the fastidious scrapbooks this legendary architect compiled over the years and opened up to Hampton Style, revealing the onetime landscapes of the coastlines we all thought we knew.

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