Andrew Geller, Modernist Architect, Is Dead at 87

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Andrew Geller, Modernist Architect, Is Dead at 87

By FRED A. BERNSTEIN

Published: December 26, 2011

Andrew Geller, an architect who embodied postwar ingenuity and optimism in a series of inexpensive beach houses in whimsical shapes, many of them in the Hamptons, and who helped bring modernism to the masses with prefabricated cottages sold at Macy’s, died on Sunday in Syracuse. He was 87 and lived in Spencer, N.Y.

The cause was kidney failure, said his grandson Jake Gorst.

At the industrial design firm Raymond Loewy & Associates (later Raymond Loewy/William Snaith Inc.), where he worked for 35 years, Mr. Geller designed the “typical American house” shown at the American National Exhibition in Moscow in 1959. The house ignited the famous Kitchen Debate between Vice President Richard M. Nixon and Soviet Premier Nikita S. Khrushchev over the buying power of American and Soviet consumers.

The model shown in Moscow led to a line of vacation houses, sold in the 1960s under the name Leisurama. One of the houses, complete with picture window and carport, was displayed on the ninth floor of Macy’s in Herald Square; people came in to buy housewares and walked out owning houses. (A basic model required a down payment of $490, followed by monthly payments of $73.) Some 200 Leisurama houses were built in Culloden Point, a section of Montauk, on Long Island, and hundreds more outside Fort Lauderdale.

But for all his experimentation with mass marketing under the Loewy aegis, Mr. Geller was best known for one-of-a-kind houses that he designed on his own time in his studio in Northport, N.Y., whose distinctive shapes earned them nicknames like the Box Kite, the Milk Carton and the Grasshopper.

“On first impression, these beach houses seem like caricatures, one-liners,” the architectural historian Alastair Gordon wrote in a 1999 New York Times profile of Mr. Geller, but “they represented a kind of everyman modernism that was both playful and accessible, with most houses costing less than $10,000.” Critics have described them as sharing an underlying spirit with Abstract Expressionism, which flourished in the Hamptons of the 1950s.

The first of the houses was designed for Elizabeth Reese, a Loewy executive. Mr. Geller deflected complaints from building officials about its unusual A-frame design, saying it was derived from local potato barns.

After that house was featured in The Times in May 1957, a stream of cars drove down Daniels Lane hoping to get a closer look at it, and Mr. Geller received many more commissions. Among the houses he created in the next few years were the Pearlroth House, which looked like a double box-kite to some (and to others a wooden brassiere).

In 1958, on assignment for Esquire, he designed a portable house that could be towed to any beach and erected on stilts for $3,000. “Its refrigerator will not hold more than a weekend supply of tonic and soda,” the magazine reported. “However, the Esquire Weekend House has no lawns to mow, no sash to paint, and can be opened for the season in four minutes flat.”

In the 1960s Mr. Geller moved on to houses with oddly shaped windows cut into flat facades, like architectural versions of Cubist paintings. They included a house in Sagaponack, N.Y., that some said resembled a reclining nude by Picasso.

Andrew Michael Geller was born in Brooklyn on April 17, 1924, to Joseph Geller, an artist who earned a living painting signs, and his wife, Olga. They were both immigrants from Russia. The youngest of three children, he studied architecture at the Cooper Union.

During World War II he enlisted in the Army and, during basic training in Louisiana, was exposed to a chemical agent that caused him health problems for the rest of his life, his grandson said.

In 1944 he married Shirley Morris, who died last year. He is survived by a son, Gregg; a daughter, Jamie Dutra; three grandchildren, including Mr. Gorst, a documentary filmmaker specializing in architecture; and four step-grandchildren.

In recent years Mr. Geller’s playful houses were the subjects of books and articles, but most of those houses now exist mainly in memories and black-and-white photographs. Mr. Gordon recalled driving around the Hamptons with Mr. Geller in 1999, trying to find some of the scores of houses he had built there. Altogether, they located fewer than a dozen. Mr. Geller said he felt like he had lost his children.

A version of this article appeared in print on December 27, 2011, on page B14 of the New York edition with the headline: Andrew Geller, 87, Modernist Architect, Dies.