Peter Blake

Peter Blake is remembered mainly as a writer and editor — curator at the Museum of Modern Art, editor of Architectural Forum, author of God's Own Junkyard and Form Follows Fiasco. On the South Fork he was also a builder of small, experimental houses. The first was his own: the Pinwheel House on Rose Hill Road in Water Mill, built in 1954, whose four walls slide open to the sun and breeze.

Between 1954 and 1962, Blake designed houses in Water Mill, Bridgehampton, Montauk and Amagansett, several with his partner Julian Neski. They were inexpensive, inventive and published in House & Home and Life. Most have since been remodeled or enlarged.

Who he was

Blake (1920–2006) was born in Berlin as Peter Jost Blach, studied architecture at the University of Pennsylvania, and worked briefly for Louis Kahn. After army service he settled on Long Island and was a close friend of Jackson Pollock. He was curator of architecture and design at MoMA from 1948 to 1950 and later edited Architectural Forum. He designed around 50 buildings in a long career. His memoir, No Place Like Utopia (1993), describes the East End modernist circle; his archives are at Columbia.

The documented South Fork houses

The Pinwheel House, Rose Hill Road, Water Mill (1954). Blake's own house, all four of whose walls slide open to catch sun or breeze. Published in House & Home, July 1956. Blake designed renovations for two later owners. In 1998 the house was enlarged from two bedrooms and one bath to about 3,000 square feet with five bedrooms. What stands today is a substantially larger house built around the 1954 core.

The Water Mill Sliding-Wall House, Jobs Lane (1958). With Neski, near Mecox Bay. Wood sliding walls hung from piles could be pulled across the glass in minutes to protect it from blowing sand and storms; closed, they patterned the exterior, open, they turned the center of the house into a breezeway. The floor and roof did the structural work, so the walls were only an envelope. The contract price was $8,300. Published in House & Home, March 1959.

Other Water Mill houses. A 1956 house on Huntington Lane, with Neski, featured in Life in 1959; and a house of about the same date on Flying Point Road, since remodeled several times and added to.

Bridgehampton, Montauk, Amagansett. A 1960 house and studio on Sagaponack Road in Bridgehampton; a 1961 house on Surfside Avenue in Montauk, which Blake himself renovated around 2001; and a 1962 project in Amagansett in which an old barn was moved to the site and converted to a house. All three with Neski.

What to look for

• Movable walls and panels — sliding, hung or folding — used as the main idea of the house, not as a feature.
• Small footprints, simple structure, and glass protected by wood rather than by overhangs alone.
• A plan that turns the house into a pavilion in summer and a closed box in winter.
• See postwar modernism and beach-house modernism.

Alteration history

The Blake houses show the typical South Fork arc for small postwar modernism: published as an inexpensive experiment, then remodeled by successive owners, sometimes by Blake himself, and in the case of the Pinwheel House enlarged to several times its original program. Ask specifically whether the sliding or hung walls still operate; they are the design, and the hardest part to keep working.

How to verify an attribution

Start with the period publications (House & Home, Architectural Record, Life), Blake's papers at Columbia and his memoir. Then read the Southampton or East Hampton Town building department file for the original permit and each enlargement. Where Neski is credited as co-designer, the attribution is to the partnership, not to Blake alone.

Considering a Blake house?

Request a property brief from The Roebling Research Desk that separates the original Blake house from later enlargements, checks whether its movable walls survive, and documents its legal footprint.