I first became aware of the work of Peter Blake in 1984, when I was preparing an exhibition on the forgotten modernist houses of Long Island, New York. Combing through old magazines, I kept coming across these wonderful little gems: simple boxes on stilts with floor-to-ceiling glass walls, designed by someone named Peter Blake. His beach houses were the perfect antidotes to urban stress, little escape pods that were at once casual, open, inexpensive, and low maintenance, and that defined a certain moment in the history of American leisure. While he built houses elsewhere, it was Blake’s dozen or so vacation houses on Long Island, built between 1954 and 1962, that best captured the excitement and possibility of that moment. They were also among the purest expressions of a multifaceted career.
It was always the landscape of eastern Long Island—then still empty, still pristine—that intrigued Blake. Like the abstract expressionist painters, he was attracted by its unique, low-lying beauty, the high sky and sea-brewed light, and the great ocean void. “All the buildings I would do were an interpretation of that landscape,” he would later tell me. His houses reflected this passion in the way they were sited on the dunes or potato fields, and in how their modular plans sacrificed everything for light and connection to the outdoors. It seemed like a paradise, a place to peel back one’s soul and face down all inhibitions. Blake spoke about the landscape as if it were a painter’s canvas: empty, raw, and seductive, but also vaguely threatening.
He was introduced to Jackson Pollock through a mutual friend, and his visit to Pollock’s studio in the hamlet of Springs came as a revelation: “I was absolutely overwhelmed,” he recalled. “The sun was shining when I walked into his studio, shining in and into the paintings. It was like walking into the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles—dazzling, incredible!” Blake longed to make an architecture that wasn’t so cool, so Eurocentric, so clinically detached as the modern design of his generation. He may have also longed for the kind of reckless abandon that he witnessed in Pollock’s studio: The same energy, emotion, frantic movement—even rage—that was part of the artist’s temperament.
Blake took this as a calling: Young architects were obliged to push their work to entirely new levels. “What I and others saw in the new painting in the Hamptons was only the beginning,” he said. “We were sure that a similar architectural energy would soon manifest itself all around us. And we felt we were ready.” In retrospect, it seems to have been an auspicious moment: the best of avant-garde art converging with architecture to create a new dynamic, a new vision of American space. But how do you turn an “action painting” into a building? How do you introduce to architecture the kind of dynamism and all-over application that Pollock brought to his work?
In 1949 Blake designed a project called the “Ideal Museum,” in which Pollock’s large drip paintings were to hover within an all-glass pavilion and merge with the surrounding landscape. Basing the structure loosely on Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s unbuilt “Museum for a Small City,” Blake made a model with miniature reductions of Pollock’s canvases. The artist got involved too, fabricating several small-scale plaster sculptures for the model.
The Ideal Museum was never built, but the project led Blake to similar ideas, one of which came to fruition in the house he designed for himself in 1953, in the middle of a potato field in the village of Water Mill. The idea was deceptively simple, almost like a cartoon, but ingenious: a pinwheel configuration, 24-feet-by-24-feet square, with four barnlike walls, (8-feet high, 18-feet long) that would slide outward on metal tracks so that the home dweller could experience total oneness with the surrounding landscape. There would be no glass to interfere with the sensation; when the walls were open, the house would literally be in nature. (Mosquitoes turned out to be quite a problem.)
Blake asked Pollock to paint the inside surfaces of the walls, so that when they were closed one would be sitting inside an all-around painting, and when they were open there would be four Pollocks floating on air. By 1954, though, Pollock was too busy and too successful to accept the proposal. “You can’t afford me,” he said. Instead, Blake hung a large abstract painting by Alfonso Ossorio on one of the walls, fulfilling his idea of creating seamless movement between art, architecture, furniture (low-lying Noguchi tables), and landscape.
There is a photograph that shows Blake in motion, slightly blurred, pulling open one of the sliding walls of the Pinwheel House. It conveys the feeling of a kind of “action architecture,” almost as if he had built the proverbial box but was, at the same time, struggling to break free from it. (The shot happens to have been taken by Hans Namuth, the same photographer who took the iconic photos of Pollock working in his studio.)
The layouts for Blake’s other houses followed a similar logic, arranged and balanced in a variety of configurations: basic geometric forms, elevated, stacked, splayed, separated by a breezeway, and so on. There was the slablike Russell House (Bridgehampton, 1956), which was cantilevered on steel pilotis to gain water views. The Kent House (Water Mill, 1956) was propped on telephone poles to lift it safely above hurricane floods. The second Blake House (Bridgehampton, 1960) was a Mies van der Rohe–inspired expansion on the Pinwheel House, essentially two 24-foot-by-24-foot boxes connected by an open-air breezeway. The Hagen House (Sagaponack, 1960) consisted of a pair of pavilions connected by a deck, while the Armstrong House (Montauk, 1962) was a double stack that could be closed up for the winter
like a Chinese box.
Blake died on December 5, 2006, at the age of 86. Despite the fact that he was very much a part of the architectural establishment—he was architecture/design curator at MoMA, editor of Architectural Forum, and dean of architecture at Catholic University—he somehow retained the personality of a free-spirited outsider, some might say a loose cannon. It was as if he never really wanted to fit too comfortably in a world that he nevertheless appreciated and understood deeply.
Among his 17 books are seminal monographs on Marcel Breuer, Frank Lloyd Wright, Le Corbusier, Mies van der Rohe, and Philip Johnson. While he venerated the modern movement, he was always wary of the heroic architect role, the sweeping master plans, soulless equations, and what he called the “monumental arrogance” that some of modernism’s masters displayed. In God’s Own Junkyard (1964), he decried corporate modernism and the desecration of the environment by commercial interests. “This book is not written in anger,” he wrote. “It is written in fury.”
Whenever I asked him for a good image to use for an article or exhibition he would send me the same photograph, of his young son Casey and his cousin Elizabeth sitting in the breezeway of the Blake house in Bridgehampton. “Isn’t this wonderful?” he would
say. Although I didn’t get it at the time—surely there were better images of the architecture—I think I now understand why he liked it so much. It was a shot that portrayed youthful innocence within a perfectly ordered framework of Euclidian space.
2 / Blake was an intelligence officer in the U.S. Army and among the first Allied troops to enter Berlin after Hitler’s death.
3 / He studied with Louis Kahn at the University of Pennsylvania.
4 / In 1959, Blake curated a highly influential exhibition on new American architecture for a U.S.-Soviet trade show in Moscow. The famous Kitchen Debate between Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev and Vice President Richard Nixon took place in the exhibition’s model suburban house.
5 / Blake was the outspoken editor-in-chief of Architectural Forum from 1964 to 1972. Subsequently, he was the founder and editor of the short-lived but influential magazine Architecture Plus (1972 to 1975).
6 / Besides his innovative weekend houses, Blake designed a number of institutional buildings including an experimental theater at Vanderbilt University; a synagogue in Livingston, New Jersey; and a psychiatric hospital in Binghamton, New York.
7 / Blake designed the cabinets and kitchen counters for Philip Johnson’s Glass House.
8 / He designed a good number of his built projects in collaboration with the architect Julian Neski.
9 / When he wrote about fellow architect Edward Larrabee Barnes, Blake was also expressing his own lifelong conviction: “He seems to have grasped what few others understood as clearly or creatively—that a designed building in a participatory democracy should respond to a great variety of factors and that its ultimate form should express those conditions and demands rather than provide a memorial to its architect or
to those who paid the bill.”
10 / Subsequent owners of Blake’s Pinwheel House “remodeled” it beyond recognition and incorporated it into a much larger house. Blake devised a way to save the purity of
the original by building a tunnel to a new house, but the local zoning board wouldn’t approve it.
