Horace Gifford
Horace Gifford was a celebrated beach house architect of the Sixties, Seventies and early Eighties. He led the modernist transformation of New York's Fire Island, in a career that produced sixty three homes across Fire Island and fifteen more further afield. These beach houses were a lesson in sustainable design before green building was in vogue. They are generally modest in size, artfully wedded to their sites and wrought in now-weathered cedar and glass. Gifford died in 1992 of complications from AIDS. Though critically praised and published during his lifetime, Horace Gifford was nearly forgotten until 2013, when architect and historian Christopher Rawlins published "Fire Island Modernist: Horace Gifford and the Architecture of Seduction." Fire Island Modernist combines the genres of monograph, biogrpahy, and social history to describe the operatic arc of Gifford's life and times:
