The Architecture of Seduction: how Horace Gifford built a modernist, queer paradise

Fire Island has been a focal point for New York’s gay community since the Jazz Age, with the small towns of Cherry Grove and Fire Island Pines evolving into coastal retreats from oppressive city life, a place where conventions and closets could be discarded along the sandy shores of the Atlantic coast.

Fire Island and Horace Gifford

The architect who gave aesthetic form to this hedonistic environment is now relatively well known, thanks in part to Christopher Rawlins’ 2013 book, Fire Island Modernist: Horace Gifford and the Architecture of Seduction. With the first edition long out of print and highly sought after, a new updated edition has now arrived, fleshing out the story of Gifford’s social and architectural history.

Horace Gifford was born in Florida in 1932. Despite his lack of formal architectural training, he had an innate understanding of form and material, often working with tiny budgets and small sites to create dramatic, light-filled, modestly-scaled open-planned houses that made the most of Fire Island’s climate and culture. Timber-framed, with large expanses of glass, his houses were both formally inventive and prototypical of a low-impact, sustainable design that’s still so relevant today.

In total, Gifford built 63 houses on the island, creating a framework and backdrop for a lifestyle that flourished in its seclusion and distance from ‘conventional’ society. Gifford himself found it hard to find work elsewhere once his own orientation was revealed, but even after his death, his legacy still resonates. Although by no means the only architect working on Fire Island - the likes of Andrew Geller were also prolific at this point - Gifford was perhaps the most influential, shaping an aesthetic that continues to be influential today.

The new edition includes an afterword by architect Charles Renfro of Diller, Scofidio and Renfro as well as five new featured houses and more photography, much of it richly evocative of a more carefree, hedonistic world in the pre-AIDS era. Gifford himself died of AIDS-related complications in 1992, but many of his houses survive and are celebrated in this essential overview of one of modernism’s most intriguing microcosms.

• From the archives: a history of Horace Gifford's Fire Island

Fire Island Modernist: Horace Gifford and the Architecture of Seduction, Expanded Edition, Christopher Rawlins, $65, Metropolis Books in conjunction with Gordon De Vries Studio, Artbook.com