Modern Residential Architecture of LBI

MODERN RESIDENTIAL ARCHITECTURE OF by Stephen C. Midouhas AIA LONG BEACH ISLAND

Above

The Gesemyer House Stephen C. Midouhas 1976 Long Beach Island, a barrier island on the coast of Southern New Jersey, has a rich and varied history of modern and post-modern residential architecture dating back to the 1930s and continuing to the present day. Though many of the best examples have been demolished and replaced by more pedestrian houses, many still are preserved and enjoyed by a cadre of knowledgeable and appreciative owners.

Although there are a few excellent examples of the modern tradition on the South End of Long Beach Island, the tradition is rooted on Long Beach Island’s North End where families from the Philadelphia area discovered the beautiful rolling, untouched sand dunes of North Beach, Harvey Cedars, Loveladies and Barnegat Light.

In 1953, Boris Blai, a sculptor, along with a small group of visionary residents, formed the Long Beach Island Foundation of the Arts and Sciences. At its inception, it was more of an artist colony than the institution it has become though the decades. The simple arched roof of the building enclosed art and ceramic studies, as well as a small stage for performances. Good modern architecture doesn’t just happen. It requires an understanding and educated client, who is willing to go on an architectural adventure. They have the courage to take chances and avoid the common. And, they are often willing to give a young architect the opportunity to build his or her first project. Usually, that is most often a vacation home. I began my practice that way, when my in-laws allowed me to build my first house in 1976.

Clients must also have the discernment to commission an architect with exceptional talent. Somehow, this group of North End people selected some of the best young architects, who went on to establish substantial careers.

William “Lud” Ullman and Gregory Silvermaster developed a large area of wetlands into Loveladies Harbor in the early 1950s. Seven fingers of land separated by dredged lagoons extended into Barnegat Bay. It was, and still is, the largest housing development on Long Beach Island.

For a reasonable price one could purchase a waterfront lot with a simple modern beach house, designed, not by an architect, but by Lud Ullman himself. The sales

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Aerial view of Loveladies Harbor 2021

Right top

Long Beach Island Foundation of the Arts and Sciences 1963

Right center

Lud Ullman Studio Loveladies, NJ 1954

Right bottom

A Japanese interior

office and design studio still stands on Long Beach Boulevard and has been the studio of Michael Ryan Architects for decades.

Lud was a very talented designer. He was not formally trained as an architect. However, he designed the largest body of modern homes ever built on Long Beach Island and maybe on the entire East Coast. The designs were simple, light and airy. They had cathedral ceilings and an abundance of windows to enjoy the salty ocean breezes. The exteriors were clad with T-111, a grooved plywood with a rough-sawn exterior veneer, that mimicked the vertical tongue and grooved natural red cedar siding of the Northwest coastal contemporary homes during that time. Lud had the ability to understand how to capture the essence of a modern home while building economically.

One must assume that Lud was attuned to what was being built by Paul Rudolf and others of the socalled Sarasota School on the Gulf coast of Florida. Those homes were built from 1946 through 1962. There were also the Case Study Houses of Southern California, of that same period. Those post-war houses were experimental and prototypical. The theoretical and precedential basis for the Case Study Houses were derived from the houses built by European immigrant architects Richard Neutra, Walter Gropius and Rudolf Schindler, amongst lesser know architects.

An example would be Richard Neutra’s Lovell Health House built in the hills overlooking Los Angeles. Another is Schindler’s own house in Santa Monica. Japanese architecture and craft also was also influencing young architects, many of whom were returning from occupied Japan.

Arts & Architecture Magazine sponsored the Case Study Houses. The editor, John Entenza, was a champion of post war contemporary architects. The vision of the Case Study Houses was to create prototypical, contemporary and affordable houses for the families of returning GIs.

One cannot overestimate the importance of the Case Study homes on post-war production housing throughout the United States in the 1950s, 1960s and on into the 1970s. Two of the bestknown Case Study houses are Charles and Ray Eames personal home built from “off the shelf” steel components, and Pierre Koenig’s Stahl house perched precariously on a cliff in the Hollywood Hills. That iconic house has been used in numerous fashion shoots, films, and advertising campaigns.

Art & Architecture magazine was a well-established trade journal that had a readership throughout the US while published. The Museum of Modern Art in New York actually had an Exhibition House by Gregory Ain (one of the Case Study architects) built in the Sculpture Garden in 1950.

Loveladies Harbor combined with the LBIF created a unique summer experience that became the springboard for the burst of iconic modern/post modern homes in the 1970’s. The 1960’s and 1970’s were times of freedom and experimentation culturally and artistically. Andy Warhol had “painted” his Campbell Soup cans and was into his portrait series (Marilyn Monroe et al).

The 1960s and 1970s were times of freedom and experimentation culturally and artistically.

He was continuing the break from pre-war modern art that the New York Action Painters had begun to disengage from. Other artists joined him like Roy Lichtenstein with his riff on the comic strips and David Hockney with his iconic LA pool paintings.

Meanwhile, architecture was in flux. It too, was breaking away from the restrictions of classical European modernism’s rigid architectural language. The University of Pennsylvania’s master, Louis Kahn, was building a body of work that would inspire a generation of Philadelphia architects to express themselves in new ways. Leading the vanguard was Princeton educated Robert Venturi. As Louis Kahn’s teaching assistant and eventually an associate professor, Venturi developed what many consider the theoretical basis for post-modernism in architecture. In 1966, he published his “gentle manifesto” Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture. Prior to its publication in 1964, Venturi had already built his first full expression of his theory; the Vanna Venturi House in Chestnut Hill, Pennsylvania.

In 1967, he built the Lieb House on the northern edge of Loveladies in Barnegat Light. I’ve always thought of it as the biggest little house ever built on Long Beach Island. There are more architectural thoughts and expressions packed into that humble asbestos sided building than in some cities.

Above left

Vanna Venturi House Robert Venturi Chestnut Hill, PA 1964

Above

Lieb House Robert Venturi Barnegat Light, NJ 1967

Far left

Blue Triangle House Richard Saul Wurman Harvey Cedars, NJ 1974

Near left

Giant Stair House Richard Saul Wurman Harvey Cedars, NJ 1967

Above

Sandcastles Richard Saul Wurman Loveladies, NJ 1970

Right

Lynn Sherman House David Beck Harvey Cedars, NJ 1972

Far right

George Daub House Harvey Cedars, NJ 1933

In many ways George Daub should be Long Beach Island’s father of modern architecture.

Better known than the Leib House were the four shingled homes, which sat on the top of a barren dune overlooking the sea, nicknamed the “Sandcastles”. They were the work of Richard Saul Wurman, also a Philadelphia architect and student of Louis Kahn at UPenn.

Now 85 years of age, Mr. Wurman is the creator of the TED conferences and has written, designed and published 90 books. His What Will Be Has Always Been (1986), the seminal collection of the words of Louis Kahn is a classic. Wurman also built both the Blue Triangle House (my name for it) and the Giant Stair House (also mine) on Bay Terrace in the Kinsey Cove neighborhood of Harvey Cedars.

David Beck, though not as well known, has one of the best collections of 1970’s homes on Long Beach Island. The pure white Sherman House, also on Bay Terrace, is probably the best known.

It’s another one of those big-little post-modern houses that are filled with many ideas... an Italian

hill town, scale distorting exterior stairs, oversized arches, etc. There are more examples of his work in Loveladies and North Beach.

While working as the maintenance man and general go-for guy at the Long Beach Island Foundation for the Arts and Science in the 1970’s, I had the privilege of drawing the map of the House Tour that included many of these homes. For a young architecture student, it was a course in beach house design like none other. That began a study of the Long Beach Island history of modern and post-modern housing design, which eventually became my Architectural Thesis for the final year of my formal architectural education.

I would be remiss if I didn’t acknowledge Philadelphia architect George Daub, 1901-1961, who built numerous buildings on Long Beach Island’s North End prior to the group of architects I discussed above.

In many ways he should be the Long Beach Island’s father of modern architecture. He paved the way for all of us who have followed.