That Modernist houses of distinction — from the midcentury period when the best American architects were creating all sorts of innovative geometries in the dunes and fields of the South Fork — are urgently in need of preservation should be evident to, well, everyone by now. Even the Ladies Village Improvement Society of East Hampton, hardly a bastion of radical activism, has been working to broadcast the message that the best Modernist houses have great value to our built heritage and to our community.
But the demolition of these important houses continues apace.
This week, East Hampton Village lost a rather remarkable Norman Jaffe house at 100 Further Lane. Low-slung, 6,000 square feet on three acres (a stone’s throw from a more famous estate, the Bouviers’ Lasata), it hugged the ground and echoed the contours of the once-surrounding farmland. Jaffe designed it in 1979 for Joel M. Stern, an authority on financial policy who died in 2019. According to the recorded deed, it sold two years ago for $15 million.
Alastair Gordon, a critic, cultural historian, and expert on Modernist architecture (and in particular the beachside work of Jaffe, Charles Gwathmey, and their contemporaries) confirmed on Tuesday that bulldozers had taken down the Stern house only days before, with no forewarning to those, like him, who may have wanted to document it more extensively. It can reasonably be assumed that the new owners wanted to avoid an uproar like the one that erupted in Southampton Village in 2023 over an application for demolition permits for Jaffe’s so-called Bliss house on Meadow Lane. The Bliss house, unlike the Stern property, is in a historic district, but down it will come nevertheless.
Just what can be done to protect the East End’s remaining Modernist landmarks — un-landmarked as most of them are — is a puzzler.
But halting the destruction should start with an awareness in the community at large that the work of Gwathmey, Jaffe, Ward Bennett, and Myron Goldfinger is, it could be argued, possibly even more important in the history of architecture than the many Shingle Style summer piles and 19th-century farmhouse timber frames that are already protected under Southampton’s and East Hampton’s various covenants and historic district designations.