In the postwar era, Long Island beach houses were, for the most part, architectural nonentities, basic boxes and inconsequential Cape Cods. Then along came Andrew Geller (1924–2011), a modernist architect who shook up the sand dunes with strikingly funky, low-cost vacation homes where bohemian lifestyles met geometrical explorations and unpretentious acres of plywood siding.
Written by Geller’s grandson, Emmy Award–winning documentary filmmaker Jake Gorst, Andrew Geller: Deconstructed(Glitterati, $40) explores an outstanding if undersung residential oeuvre that The New York Times called “eccentrically free-form and eye-grabbing.” One Geller house in Westhampton Beach looked like a box kite precariously set on edge. Two neighboring residences on Fire Island resembled pieces of a puzzle, the peaked roofline of one being a perfect fit for the concave angled roof of the one next door. A curious construction in the Long Island hamlet of Sagaponack recalled a hybrid between a lighthouse and a Civil War–era submarine, while the main façade of another getaway in nearby Amagansett looked precisely like a stylized cat’s face.
Freewheeling creativity notwithstanding, Geller also had a serious side. As a leading light at Raymond Loewy’s celebrated Manhattan architecture and design firm, he worked on everything from the interiors of Lever House, the Park Avenue modernist icon, to Montauk’s Leisurama houses, which were sold completely furnished, from china to toothbrushes. (Gorst’s documentary Leisurama tells this fascinating story.) Geller was also part of the team behind the 1,144-square-foot “typical” American house that was a centerpiece of the 1959 American National Exhibition in Moscow—and whose kitchen was the site of Richard Nixon and Nikita Khrushchev’s famously confrontational kitchen debate. Inevitably, given the house’s wide central hall and the world’s obsession with a certain Soviet space capsule, it was nicknamed Splitnik.
