Andrew Geller, the architect known for quirky, site-specific houses in New England in the 50s and 60s, gave playful names to his eccentric beach house designs: the Bra, the Box Kite, the Cat, the Milk Carton, the Reclining Picasso. These whimsical vacation homes reflected the idea of summer leisure for a generation more concerned with fun on the beach than ostentatious display. In this excerpt from Beach Houses: Andrew Geller, author Alastair Gordon writes about Geller’s beach house work with Esquire.
While Geller continued to delight clients with his one-off experimental houses, he was also working on solutions for the mass housing market. Like other architects and developers of the period, he was eagerly in search of the Holy Grail of postwar building: the perfect prototype for an affordable, factory-produced house. Even in his most eccentric, one-off creations, Geller kept his eye on this goal. There was a second-home boom going on in America at the time. Construction of vacation houses in the United States had increased dramatically since the 1940s, when a second home was still considered the exclusive provenance of a wealthy elite. By the 1960s, however, marketing surveys put the second-home inventory at three million plus. Many of the same individuals who had received mortgages on the GI housing bill could now afford to build a second home far away from the noisy city. “Families have more real income,” explained one building journal, “consequently more discretionary income; financing is easier. There’s more leisure time and better highways to desirable locations” (American Builder, July 1968: 19). Builders and developers recognized a lucrative new market among middle-class families who might have saved a bit, but not enough to afford a custom-designed vacation home.
In 1958 Esquire magazine commissioned a beach house for swinging bachelors ($3,000 Week-End House, Esquire, July 1958). Geller came up with the “Esquire Weekend House,” a small, portable unit that could be towed to any beach and erected on stilts for only $3,000. “It does not have room for more than one guest,” read the accompanying text. “Its refrigerator will not hold more than a weekend supply of tonic and soda. However, the Esquire Weekend House has no lawns to mow, no sash to paint, and can be opened for the season in four minutes flat. A ship’s ladder can be drawn up through the house’s trap door in case of prowling wolves or unwanted guests.”
The Esquire unit was designed as a six-foot-square module built on concrete foundation points. It was held together with wire bracing, and could be closed and opened like a box with sliding panels. Each panel was painted in a different primary color. The front panel could be folded down to become a small porch and “shade shelf.” The house also contained a tiny kitchen unit and a foldaway toilet. A bed roll could be pulled out for sleeping; canvas shades were designed to be pulled up instead of down. There was also a small storage compartment with enough room for “two changes of clothes, a portable typewriter, a hi-fi, and two sets of water skis or surfcasting gear.” The Esquire Weekend House was a reductio ad absurdum version of the postwar weekend aesthetic.
As cartoonish as it was, the house can be seen as an early investigation of prefabricated construction. It was originally designed as a kit-of-parts prototype for an expandable housing system. In a series of unpublished drawings, Geller depicted how the basic unit could be expanded in the event that the Esquire bachelor suddenly settled down and found himself with a growing family: “If the marital status of the owner changes and more room is required in the house, similar cubicles can be attached to the nucleus of the basic unit, either at ground or crow’s-nest level.” The fully expanded version would have a broad glass facade, its interior divided by a sequence of square panels finished in a variety of textures and colors. The panels were suspended from a grid of slender steel columns not unlike the Case Study structures of Pierre Koenig and Craig Ellwood that were being built during the same period in California.
If family life began to cramp the Esquire man’s sense of style, there was yet another solution: “when the cluster of contiguous units becomes too populous, [he] can build himself still another unit, separated from the cluster, to recapture his bachelorhood solitude and quiet.”
The publication of the Esquire Weekend House caused a minor flap in Esquire’s editorial offices. The architect and critic Peter Blake accused Geller of plagiarism, claiming that the Esquire House was a copy of his own Pin Wheel House, built in Water Mill, New York, in 1954. “I am gratefully flattered to see from your May issue that Mr. Andrew Geller likes our house,” wrote Blake to the magazine. “Photographs of the house were in your offices for several weeks; if you later changed your minds in this matter, then it would have seemed only fair to go to the original source of the design-idea, rather than commission someone else to exploit it for you.” In his own defense, Geller scribbled off a humorous note to editor-in-chief Ralph Ginzburg: “I am shocked by Peter Blake’s reaction to our tiny beach capsule. Quite probably I have been affected by every example of architecture I have ever seen, from the Crystal Palace to the late lamented Third Avenue El. There is only so much one can do with $3,000. . . . I can assure you that no plagiarism was intended nor can I honestly relate what I have designed to Mr. Blake’s very handsome and refined Water Mill House,” (Correspondence from the collection of Andrew Geller).
Around the same period, Geller drew plans for another prefab beach house that was also to be built with a steel frame. He called it the “Minimum House,” and it appears to have been intended as a buildable prototype, not just another humorous illustration. It was similar to the Esquire House in plan, with sliding doors on a track frame, but it had a barrel-vaulted roof instead of a flat one. The Minimum House, however, never found a patron. But Geller would soon find himself designing vacation homes on a scale he had never dared to imagine.
Beach Houses: Andrew Geller by Alastair Gordon is available from:
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Alastair Gordon is contributing editor for architecture and design at the Wall Street Journal magazine.
