When Alastair Gordon’s “Weekend Utopia: Modern Living in the Hamptons” was published in 2001, Book Tech Magazine said, “This beautifully stylized book was not only an instantly successful seller, but laid the foundation for a modernist architectural renaissance,” while Publishers Weekly noted that “Gordon’s eye for the convergence of arts, architecture, and commerce is unerring.”
On the book’s 25th anniversary, a new and expanded edition has just been published by Chronicle Books in conjunction with Princeton Architectural Press. The revised edition includes never-before-seen images and newly researched stories, an updated introduction, and an extensive new concluding chapter that brings the narrative into the present
Gordon, whose “Long Island Modern” lecture series has been a mainstay of the programming of East Hampton’s LongHouse Reserve, will be there on Sunday at 3 p.m. to talk about and sign copies of the book.
While the new edition is a significant update and expansion, it doesn’t neglect the past, nor will his talk. Indeed, in an email, Gordon said that in his talks he usually concentrates on the postwar scene, “and how the avant-garde art of the period inspired and drove the architecture,” citing, among others, Jackson Pollock’s collaboration with Peter Blake and Costantino Nivola’s relationship with Le Corbusier.
The May 31 talk, he said, “will focus on how strains of European modernism arrived on Long Island in the 1920s with early projects by Percival Goodman, William Muschenheim, Frances Breese Miller, and Kocher and Frey, all of whom were first exposed to the modern movement in Europe and then brought ideas back to America.”
He also plans to look more closely at the pre-World War II period, when modern developments “followed incrementally with the coming of the highway system, beginning with the Vanderbilt Motor Parkway in the 1920s, Moses’s parks and parkways of the 1930s and 1940s,” and, eventually, the Long Island Expressway.
Gordon is an award-winning critic, curator, cultural historian, artist, and writer, as well as the co-founder and editorial director of Gordon de Vries Studio, an imprint that specializes in books about the human environment.
Tickets to Sunday’s talk are $35, $25 for members.
For those unable to attend, Gordon will be at the East Hampton Library on June 11 at 5 p.m. to talk about “Prosperous Bohemians: The Rise and Fall of Weekend Utopia.” His talk, part of the library’s Tom Twomey series of lectures on local history, is free. Afterward, he will sign copies of the revised book, which will be available for purchase.
