An Architectural Melting Pot

Think of the East End as the ultimate American melting pot -- not of ethnic groups yearning to breathe free, but of architecture unrestricted by modesty or budget, in a setting redolent of age and history.

California may have the contemporary verve, but it doesn't have the 1660 East Hampton saltbox that inspired ``Home Sweet Home,'' that haute corny lyric of the Victorian age. In California, architecture can be barricaded behind the privacy of winding roads and steep hills. On the East End there is nowhere to hide. The landscape is so flat that borders between sight lines are marsh, woods or man-made.

The 1680 Hand House, with its 12-over-12 window panes and its hand-hewn beams, is separated by a matter of miles from the melange of modernist and postmodernist preening that lines the dunes from Hampton Bays to Montauk. The Victorian bric-a-brac of Shelter Island Heights gives way to the sprawling Shingle Sttages'' that the architectural firm McKim, Mead & White perfected for Southampton just before the turn of the century. The catalog kit Arts & Crafts bungalows of Peconic, on the North Fork, become the 1950s builders' capes of Southold.

It was really after World War II, when a Southampton house could still be bought for $8,000, that the explosion in new houses and new ideas began. Given the history of artists who have homesteaded the area - from Homer, to Jackson Pollock and the abstract expressionists to the painters and sculptors of today - it ought to come as no surprise that an artist instigated the modernist era on the East End. But then, Robert Motherwell was an aberrant artist for his time, not only because he was rich when a lot of his friends were starving, but because he got away with being rich -- something his East Hampton contemporary Alfonso Ossorio never quite could get the hang of.

Motherwell was worldly in the European manner, which meant the French Surrealists who came to visit him sunbathed nude, to the consternation of the locals. In 1946, the year after World War II ended, he commissioned the French architect Pierre Chareau to design him a house that would be cheap because it made use of war surplus materials, but also startling. The glass Quonset house that resulted certainly raised eyebrows, but cheap it was not. Industrial waste, as it turned out, took a great deal of handwork to adapt to domestic uses.

Since then, artists have generally shied away from commissioning competing egos to design for them, preferring to buy old and rehab or do it themselves. Willem de Kooning had worked as a carpenter and a decorator and he knew exactly what he wanted in the studio he completed in the early '60s. He wanted it spacious and rectangular and big - a studio that wagged the living quarters, with north light in the studio itself, no-nonsense steel girders, a balcony from which to look down on paintings, and, to the side, a vast sitting-eating-TV room around a free-standing fireplace to the side.

In 1964 the painter Robert Gwathmey gave his 27-year-old son, Charles Gwathmey, the chance to build his parents a house and studio on the Amagansett dunes. The son obliged with an assemblage of circles and cubes that looked simple, in wood, functioned indoors as expansive and complex and became something of a pattern for less talented architects. (As did the habit of getting parents to fund your first building.) The bond traders, media moguls, Lexus dealers and Hollywood transplants who have since moved into second homes out East have wanted their houses, too, to be celebrated statements of their time.

In 1969 that meant the white sculptural purity of Richard Meier's Renny Saltzman House in East Hampton, with an interplay of light and shadow that forecasts the virtual white city on a hill that Meier has designed for the new Getty Museum campus, which opens this year in Los Angeles. By the '60s a great many of the noted names of the '80s were perfecting their styles. The locally celebrated architect Norman Jaffe had begun to evolve his luxurious collages of sybaritic space and materials in intricate landscaping, which have since spread houses of stone walls and curving glass all over the Hamptons. Robert A.M. Stern, who became to the grand house of the 1980s what Stanford White was at the turn of the century, began in the '60s with the Wiseman House in Montauk to make a modernist version of the Shingle Style he translates with far more fidelity and wit today. When Stern renovated his own generic 1930s East Hampton bungalow in 1993, he wanted to avoid what he called the one-story ``ranchburger'' effect, and so he added a tower with a Palladian window Thomas Jefferson would have approved, and classical revival porches in the rear.

The '80s were the era of excess in architecture as in everything else. In that decade the Hamptons replaced the Riviera as the international playground of the rich and climbing. For architects it became an outdoor group exhibition of American architecture in which to prove themselves or jockey for position. Myron Henry Goldfinger, in his 1984 Conason House in Southampton, set out to dominate the landscape with what seems a giant machine of pistons and engines and levers. But Mark Simon, in the 1984 Crowell Studio in Quogue, had caught the postmodernist fever for pastiche, and he mixed and matched what amounted to a Victorian cupola with two boardwalk wings.

When Steven Spielberg settled in on the shore of East Hampton's Georgica Pond in the early '80s, he asked Charles Gwathmey to design a contemporary house with the look and feel of a barn. By 1995, he and wife Kate Capshawhad Gwathmey add four more buildings to the complex, the latest a guesthouse whose only relationship to the big house -- though it is big enough to house most mere mortals, thank you - is its bleached gray shingle skin and the landscaping of gardens, riding rings and a generic red stable between. The zinc roof of the guesthouse curves like a bridge, though inside, the atmosphere is rural. In the vaulted, two-story living room, the beams are exposed - no matter that these are beams in a design that mocks a barn raising. The fireplace is brick, so eccentric as to look fake; the bedroom windows have shutters indoors. This is a complex that bears the same relationship to a New England horse farm as a Ben & Jerry's cow to the real thing, and it has the sly wit to mock itself.

As architectural statements have replaced potatoes in the fields, and the Hamptons edge toward the glossy end of suburbanism, increasingly new houses are nostalgic for the simpler times they have replaced. Details look back for inspiration and a sense of place. It is different on the North Fork, where rural traditions are still the stuff of daily life and farm stands and vineyards are replacing the potato fields. There the money has never been big, and architectural ambitions have been so conservative and so modest that a house that dares the sculptural forms of modernism becomes the stuff of disapproving village gossip.

But it is in that traditional ground that a new house bursts from a potato field with the protean vitality that made the Gwathmey house a messenger from the future in the '60s. The house that Hideaki Ariizumi and Glynis Berry have built for themselves at the eastern edge of Southold Town is as layered as a mountain view in a Chinese scroll painting, as eccentrically assembled as a Japanese village. The angles of the exterior towers are in contradictory dialogue, particularly as some are clad in aluminum that reflects the light and some in cedar shakes that swallow it. Light is the poetic theme indoors, but so is a delicious sense of play. There is no reason at all why the free-floating portal over the door that perfectly frames a view of an old red truck in a field should end where it does, except that it simply seems right. The risers on steps at the side of the two-story living room open like chests, windows are where they are least expected. The sense of serious fun extends to a tiny third-story hideaway with a stairway that lifts up and a balcony at widows-walk height that overlooks the surrounding fields.

Ariizumi and Berry's next assignment is an addition to a typical modernist house on the South Fork. By now, both the cubes of modernism and the historical yearnings of post-modernism have become tradition there and are ready for an update.