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"Charles Gwathmey's Modernist Masterpieces\nFollowing the unveiling in our August issue of one of the architect's final homes\u2014a stunning hilltop compound on St. Barts\u2014we take a tour of his firm's best residences\nAt the age of 27, Charles Gwathmey designed this groundbreaking residence in Amagansett, New York, for his parents, Rosalie, a photographer and textile artist, and Robert, a social realist painter. (A studio building followed.) The architect conceptualized the 1,200-square-foot house as a composition of geometric forms, cylinders interlocking with a central cube. The New York Times called the completed building \"as poised as a chess piece on a green playing field.\" After his mother's death in 2001, Gwathmey used it as his weekend residence, with only one major change: he replaced the concrete floors with marble.\nLike the Gwathmey Residence and Studio, this gray-stained-cedar house\u2014built in Northwest Harbor, New York, for graphic artist Joe Sedacca\u2014had a small budget, a small footprint (only 1,100 square feet), and a surprisingly intricate floor plan. \"In so much residential architecture, there are separate rooms, and you design the rooms, and they are connected by hallways, and the only interesting space might be the center stairwell,\" Siegel says. \"We always thought about architecture in a different way. It was the intersection where those spaces come together\u2014where things interlock and connect volumes\u2014that was the most interesting to us.\"\nBuilt for investor Marshall Cogan and his wife, Maureen, this East Hampton commission was designed at a time when Gwathmey and Siegel, who joined forces in 1967, were grappling with expanding the possibilities of their geometric vocabulary to larger projects. In the end, they constructed a rectangular stained-cedar shell pierced with windows, and then artfully nestled their signature three-dimensional sculptural forms inside it. The result, according to a profile of Gwathmey, published in 1988 in the magazine Current Biography, was \"a poetic exploration of internal volumes.\"\nWhen Cincinnati client Lloyd B. Taft explained that he and his wife didn't want a large house, Gwathmey and Siegel proposed a series of wings linked together by freestanding walls. Behind the plain fa\u00E7ade was a network of discrete living areas incorporating a sheltered courtyard and a broad terrace. \"This is really what makes architecture,\" Siegel explains. \"What do you see of the residence, and how do you appreciate it when you are driving up to it and parking the car? What do you see within it during different seasons or times of the day? How do you move through it and how do you ultimately capitalize on that?\"\nKnown as Toad Hall, this residence in East Hampton\u2014built for Fran\u00E7ois de Menil and now owned by art dealer Larry Gagosian\u2014was Gwathmey's first palatial commission, clocking in at 10,000 square feet and resembling a white grid writ large. In this detail of the soaring glass-and-cedar house, a multistory composition of doors and rails is intersected by a large column made of glass cubes. \"Ours is not an architecture of making fa\u00E7ades as decoration,\" Gwathmey told AD in November 1983. \"It is an architecture of total integration of the formal elements.\"\nIn a Shelburne, Vermont, project for Julia and John R. Opel, Gwathmey debated whether the living room's focal point should be a fireplace or the property's breathtaking views of Lake Champlain. His solution? Create a glass fa\u00E7ade and embed the fireplace in it. The fireplace and chimney act as a vertical counterpoint to a horizontal gutter and dramatically curved roof.\nAt a Malibu house designed for Hollywood producer Jeffrey Katzenberg\u2014he also has a Utah dwelling from Gwathmey\u2014the sun-splashed living room spans two stories. At the rear of the room a zigzag staircase leads to public and private quarters, while a curved glass wall acts as a massive bow window, taking in the pool and the Pacific Ocean.\nArt collectors Thomas and Cristina Bechtler hired Gwathmey Siegel to design what would become the firm's only European residence. Stringent local building codes, however, meant the architects couldn't use their favored vocabulary of cedar, steel, and glass. Instead they created a primarily concrete house that lyrically blankets a sloped site in Zumikon, Switzerland, adjacent to Lake Zurich. \"It's very hard to work with concrete,\" Siegel explains of the 27,000-square-foot site. \"It's a special craft. But in the end it allowed us to get that series of spaces that climb up the hill. We topped the house with a zinc roof, which develops a beautiful patina with age.\"\n\"We are interested in the reality of materials\u2014their colors, their textures, their interaction with each other, their implications and references,\" Gwathmey told AD in November 1983. \"We use [color] as a coding, to make our intentions clearer and more intense.\" This Pacific Palisades, California, home created for Ilene and Jerry Kosberg reflects just that, and playfully. In the entrance hall, a combination of textured elements\u2014painted stucco, metal panels, and rough limestone\u2014produces a look akin to Cubist collage. The materials are repeated throughout the house, creating a richly integrated architectural composition.\nGwathmey's rigorous approach to design extended to even the smallest details of his houses. \"Everything\u2014from how the doors and frames were conceived to how the cabinets met the floors\u2014started fresh with every project,\" Siegel says. This customization is evident in a stairwell at computer magnate Michael Dell's 85-acre estate in Austin, Texas, where polished panels of wood and a gently bowed steel banister spiral upward, framing a Joel Shapiro sculpture.\nWhen Paul Goldberger wrote about this residence in Malibu, California, for AD in November 2000, he said there was \"something softer about Gwathmey Siegel's architecture this time, something much more serene.\" The firm envisioned the house as three lateral elements: a private entrance, a stairway, and a glass fa\u00E7ade, pictured here, overlooking the Pacific Ocean. \"You can see how everything is organized inside,\" Gwathmey told Goldberger. The pool, he added, \"looks like an extension of the interior, but at the same time it appears to float on the grass.\"\nAt this 18,000-square-foot mansion in California, stucco, teak, glass, and stainless steel coalesce into striking architecture Gwathmey compared to \"a magically versatile musical instrument. You almost feel that you can play its forms.\" Curiously the architect sketched the concept for the house at his first meeting with the clients\u2014and it ended up being built almost exactly the same. Shown here is its geometric three-story staircase.\nWhen hired to design this California house with a commanding view of the Golden Gate Bridge, Gwathmey said, \"I realized I had to make the building a kaleidoscope for that amazing construction, and at the same time I had a responsibility not to be obvious about it.\" What he wrought: a residence that spills down a hill, its four stories impeccably organized to exploit the panorama. \"[The view is] perceived sequentially and through multiple planes, as in a Japanese teahouse,\" Gwathmey\u00A0explained. \"You get it, you lose it, then you get it back again.\""^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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