Julian Neski, Brought Modernism To Beach Houses, 76
DGH
julian Neski, an architect whose modernist houses among the fields and
dunes of the Hamptons were landmarks in weekend living, and who lived
in Manhattan, New York, and Water Mill, New York, died on January 8,
2004, at the Kateri Residence in Manhattan, at the age of 76.
The cause was complications of Alzheimer's disease, said his wife,
Barbara, with whom he collaborated professionally for 40 years.
With colleagues like Peter Blake, Richard Meier and Charles Gwathmey,
Mr. Neski helped to define a new direction in domestic architecture in
the 1960's and 70's.
"He showed a passionate, hands-on commitment to the design
process,"said James Stewart Polshek, who worked with Mr. Neski in the
early 1960's. "He always drew every detail himself. He didn't want to
give that up to anyone else."
All of his houses were relatively inexpensive to build and, unlike the
high-maintenance trophy mansions of recent years, easy to maintain.
Functionalist simplicity was combined with sculpturally expressive
form.
The Neskis designed more than 35 distinctive escape houses, rarely
repeating themselves. Some were built on Cape Cod and Fire Island and
at the Jersey Shore, but most were built on eastern Long Island. The
Chalif house in East Hampton (1964) put the Neskis on the map as an
innovative design team. Its fin-shaped roofs cut sharply against the
sky, opening and closing like scissor blades as one approached. The
house was featured in Look magazine and Architectural Record and was
exhibited at the World's Fair in Osaka, Japan. The New York Times
Magazine said it was like "the matching halves of a traditional
one-gable house turned at right angles."
Julian Joseph Skrzynecki (he later shortened the name) was born in
Brooklyn, New York, on March 17, 1927. He attended Stuyvesant High
School and Vanderbilt University before enlisting in the Navy in 1945.
He showed an early talent for draftsmanship and began working as a
marine designer while still in high school. His interests turned to
architecture while he attended Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in
Troy, New York, where he completed his studies in 1950.
It was while working in the New York office of Jose Luis Sert that he
met his future wife and business partner, who had recently graduated
from the Graduate School of Design at Harvard. They married in 1954
and started to work together in the office of Marcel Breuer.
Later, the Neskis undertook projects like the Cates house (1968), a
white cube that hovers atop a bluff in Amagansett, New York, and the
equally pristine Sabel House in Bridgehampton, New York. (1970). While
their work made explicit reference to the early European modernism of
Le Corbusier and Breuer, the Neski houses were very much products of
their time, symbolizing the urban style that characterized the
Manhattan/Hamptons axis of the 1960's and 70's.
The Neskis also worked on nonresidential projects in and around New
York City, including the Tivoli Towers housing complex in Brooklyn,
New York (1973) and the elegant interiors of the Foundation Center at
79 Fifth Avenue (1985). But it was the small, lyrical weekend house
that remains Mr. Neski's enduring legacy.