Masc Modernism

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 long after settling on the blissful barrier isle in the early 1960s, Gifford began adapting bulky Kahnian geometries to the scale and lifestyle of the sandbar. Rawlins describes the sixty-plus cedar-faced bungalows and cottages he built in the area as “butch,” and yet, in their muscular austerity, an architectural drag emerges: architecture performing masculinity so exaggerated it becomes camp. After Gifford died of complications from AIDS in 1992, aged fifty-nine, he fell into obscurity—until Rawlins, an architect and historian, rescued his legacy. The dwellings that once sheltered a sexual revolution are now collateral in a real estate one, as preservation and precarity compete on the same narrow stretch of scrub. Renfro is himself the owner of a Gifford house; as the local custom goes, he added a deck and pool.

Rawlins’s treatment exudes scholarly rigor and site sensitivity—but it’s the bulky geometry of a more anatomical kind, revealed on page 193, that proves especially memorable. Expanded edition, indeed.