I’m not currently on Fire Island, though if I were, I’d likely be at Dystopian Ecstasy, the 2025 BOFFO Performance Festival, contemplating art in the sand while half-naked strangers offer me poppers. Instead, I sulk in the utopian misery of my apartment, pining for the Pines. It is, undeniably, a beautiful place: a sandy slip of land where gay New Yorkers, free of cars and consequence, can “play house.” In his afterword to a new, expanded edition of Fire Island Modernist: Horace Gifford and the Architecture of Seduction (Metropolis Books/Gordon de Vries Studio), resident design playboy Charles Renfro, of Diller Scofidio + Renfro, extols the community’s “productive escapism.” It’s an apt phrase for a place where class and social hierarchies persist—just with better lighting and fewer clothes.
Christopher Bascom Rawlins’s thirst trap of modernism in a Speedo does what many monographs don’t: He situates the work of his subject, who was born in Florida and studied under Louis Kahn at the University of Pennsylvania, within a cultural ecology of desire and community. Not l…