Peter Blake, Architect, 86, Designed Houses in Hamptons
Hyfler/Rosner
NY Times
Robin Pogrebin
Peter Blake, Architect, 86, Designed Houses in Hamptons, Is
dead
Peter Blake, an architect, critic and former editor of
Architectural Forum who was known for his lively critiques
of Modernism and his friendships with artists, died
yesterday at a hospice near his home in Branford, Conn. He
was 86.
The cause was complications from a respiratory infection,
said his son, Casey Nelson Blake.
One of Mr. Blake's most-discussed designs was never built:
an "Ideal Museum," conceived in 1949 for Jackson Pollock, a
friend. Mr. Blake envisioned a spare building behind the
artist's house in East Hampton in which Pollock's paintings
would be set between mirrored walls, creating a sense of
infinite views. The design was included in a Pollock
exhibition in the Betty Parsons Gallery in Manhattan and, in
the 1980s, at the Centre Pompidou in Paris.
Born into a Jewish family in Berlin in 1920 as Peter Jost
Blach, Mr. Blake fled with his parents to England after the
Nazis came to power. He attended schools in London until
World War II and then moved to the United States, where he
enrolled in the architecture school at the University of
Pennsylvania and worked briefly for the architect Louis
Kahn.
He became a citizen in 1944 and changed his name to Blake.
By then he had struck up an acquaintance with a wide and
often rambunctious circle of artists, architects and
writers, from Pollock to Charles Eames.
In 1948, he was named curator of architecture and design at
the Museum of Modern Art, where he remained for two years,
writing a monograph on the architect Marcel Breuer. Books
exploring the legacy of Frank Lloyd Wright, Le Corbusier,
Mies van der Rohe and Philip Johnson followed.
From 1950 to 1972, he was the editor of Architectural Forum
(now defunct), which attracted a wide following with its
articles on the home-building industry as well as
architectural currents. Mr. Blake then founded his own
magazine, Architecture Plus, where he worked until 1975.
Although an enthusiastic chronicler of Modernism, he
rebelled against some of its manifestations in books like
"Form Follows Fiasco: Why Modern Architecture Hasn't Worked"
(1977). Inveighing against the sterility and ugliness he
perceived in so much postwar architecture, he reminded his
audience of the reformist principles in which the movement
was rooted.
"He hated the term 'Modernism,' which he thought reduced
modern architecture to a style," his son, Casey, said in an
interview this week. "He thought the Modern movement was
bound up with reform."
Mr. Blake also had a passion for the Hamptons and designed
many houses there, including dwellings for his own family.
The Blake House, built in 1960 on the edge of Mecox Bay,
featured a passageway with a view of the sea that divided
the living and sleeping areas and a 12-foot-long skylight
framing the sunset.
His other beach homes included the nearby Russell House in
Bridgehampton, designed with Julian Neski in 1956, and the
Armstrong House on the Montauk Cliffs, built in 1961. Both
were organized, as Mr. Blake put it, "upside down," with the
living areas on top to make the most of the views. The
architect Robert A. M. Stern, dean of Yale's architecture
school, described Mr. Blake's collaborations with Mr. Neski
as houses that "sat very lightly and lovingly on the land."
Preferring simple combinations of wood and glass, Mr. Blake
lamented the development that had overtaken Long Island's
South Fork by the 1980s. "That whole area, before all the
twits came in, was all about landscape, views of the water,
and so on," he said in a 1999 interview.
Mr. Blake colorfully described his encounters with many of
his illustrious contemporaries in his 1993 memoir, "No Place
Like Utopia: Modern Architecture and the Company We Kept"
(Alfred A. Knopf). "Whether he is recalling the miasmic
musings of Louis Kahn, the grunts from Mies or the 'semi
stammer' of the designer Charles Eames, the portrait is
vivid," Jane Holtz Kay wrote in The New York Times Book
Review.
He also taught architecture at several schools and served as
chairman of architecture and planning at Catholic University
in Washington from 1979 to 1986.
Three marriages ended in divorce. In addition to his son, of
New York, Mr. Blake is survived by a daughter, Christina
Blake Oliver of Newton, Mass.; a sister, Madi Blach Lanier
of New York; three grandchildren, two stepgrandchildren, two
great-grandchildren and four stepgreat grandchildren.