Norman Jaffe: Revisited

(END Magazine, June 2018)

This summer marks twenty-five years since the death of the renowned architect Norman Jaffe. It was at a high point in his career that—on a warm August day in 1993—Jaffe went for his usual morning swim off Ocean Road beach in Bridgehampton and never returned to shore. His sudden death left his family and colleagues heartbroken and cast a mysterious pall over his already enigmatic body of work. He is best known for the many contemporary houses he built on the East End, several of which have become icons of Hamptons architecture. Jaffe’s designs look more like sculptures than residences, weaving together Modernist proportions and rustic materials to reflect the natural landscape.

A Chicago native, Jaffe first visited Bridgehampton in the late 1960s while working for Philip Johnson’s studio in New York. He would come out on weekends to escape the city, staying with friends or sometimes sleeping on the backseat of his car. It was a different time; much of the real estate on the East End was still under potato fields. From the moment he pulled off the Long Island Expressway, the landscape spoke to him. The slanted summer light, the gaping sky, the seemingly endless expanse of open space were, for the young architect, a call to arms.

He was not alone. Major experimental projects by Johnson, Pierre Chareau, and others in the 1940s and ’50s had put the South Fork on the architectural map. That history, combined with the beauty of the area, drew the attention of Robert A.M. Stern, Richard Meier, and Charles Gwathmey, as well, all of whom began designing houses out here around the same time.

After working on several small-scale commissions, Jaffe got his first major project in 1967, when he was hired to design a beach house Sascha Burland, a jazz composer. Inspired by the simple sloped roofs and shingled exteriors of barns and other agricultural buildings, Jaffe’s early designs echoed the structural idioms of the East End. Sourcing natural materials—stone, wood, and glass—he created elevated compositions that echoed, and didn’t overwhelm, the area’s rustic character. The house he built for Burland featured a plain canted roof, barn doors, and an open interior. It was the first of many oceanside dwellings he would build in the following decades, and, with it, he began to establish his aesthetic.

Though often described as Modernist, much of Jaffe’s work defies traditional categorization. While incorporating clean, bold, shapes—what he called “shapes that wake up the mind”—he rejected the harshness of some of the more reductive Modernist profiles.

“He wasn’t into the white box look,” his son, Miles, says.

Jaffe favored using native materials that complimented the land and helped to soften and add texture to his buildings. He was always careful to make sure the eye had something to grab ahold of. When asked about his relationship to Modernism, Jaffe would insist that he did not have an allegiance to one particular style, asserting, instead, “My loyalties are only to space, light, texture, and a dialogue with the site.”  

It was always important to Jaffe that his houses have a sense of place. His always paid minute attention to the specific location, considered everything from the movement of the sun to the character of the soil and surrounding flora. Landscape design was a significant part of his work; he used berms and plantings to create a tableau for his architectural forms. This interest in place is also visible in his sketches, which are uncommonly detailed, their color and shading evoking the mood and atmosphere of a particular site. He frequently drew the houses from impossibly low vantage points, against a dark backdrop of stormy skies, to lend a mood of austerity and prominence to the designs.

In 1973, Jaffe moved to Bridgehampton with Miles, who is now an accomplished artist and designer in his own right. Miles traces his interest in design back to days spent playing at his father’s construction sites. Norman was an eccentric man with an artistic philosophy that bordered on mysticism. He once described his houses as “deep, rich, sonorous, stirring, melodic, dreamlike, romantic journeys.” He loved Kabuki theatre, meditated daily, liked to eat a slice of apple pie before dinner, and was known to do headstands on construction sites (claiming this was to get a sense of the space from a fresh vantage point). The older generation of Bridgehampton locals remember him as a slight, handsome man who drove a beat-up old Mercedes and haunted the Candy Kitchen and Karen Lee’s (now World Pie).

When asked about his father’s character, Miles—named after Miles Davis, whom Norman admired—described him as being “always mentally engaged in multiple things at the same time.” He was prolific and hardworking, but he could be disorganized. Preliminary designs might be scribbled onto the back of a receipt or a Candy Kitchen placemat. “He would throw me a napkin with some tiny sketch on it,” says Miles, who spent years working alongside his father, “and just say, ‘Do something with this!’ He was an infuriating person to work with, but always fun, always thinking and problem-solving.”

Norman’s childhood in Chicago at the height of the Depression had instilled in him a sense of self-reliance and a drive to be successful. He was often reclusive and could be obsessive about his work, spending hours a day at his desk drafting and redrafting ideas.

“Design was an escape for him,” Miles says. “He would hide from his demons by focusing on his work, and he had some pretty big demons, so he really focused on his work.”

This focus manifested itself in perfectionist tendencies. Over his career, Jaffe developed a reputation for making last-minute changes, constantly tweaking details and proportions during construction to the extent that contractors would use thinner shingling nails in expectation of having to pull them out when he inevitably changed something. “Nothing was ever finished. Nothing was ever good enough,” Miles says. “One of Norman’s problems was that he never really knew when to stop.” His perfectionism was frustrating to colleagues and even to his clients, many of whom grew weary of his nitpicking.

As time went on and Norman’s reputation grew, requests for large-scale houses, which he dubbed “pig-outs,” became more common. At the start of the 1980s, the East End saw a massive spike. Everything seemed to be bigger, louder, more. Gone were the days of the humble 1,500-square-foot cottage in the dunes. Clients began to see their homes as financial investments and showcases rather than seasonal escapes and, in keeping with that culture, mansions came into style.

, but only up to a point. Jaffe’s style continued to develop through the 1970s and ’80s as he started getting larger commissions and had the opportunity to experiment with more ambitious forms and scales. A far cry from from the shingled barn houses of his early days, the Turetsky House in Old Westbury and the Lloyd House in East Hampton clearly illustrate an interest in more dramatic silhouettes. Jaffe was particularly fond of the design for the Lloyd’s house which featured a Wright-inspired sliding plane composition, glass atrium, and battered stone walls. Angled floor-to ceiling windows enclosed an open-plan kitchen, dining room, and lofted master bedroom, allowing ample natural light and balancing the brawny weight of the rock. What the modest one-acre site lacked in vista or seascape, it made up for with an elegantly landscaped lawn, which Jaffe kept simple and well-manicured to better highlight the sculptural quality of the house. An interior courtyard with a custom swimming pool was carved to fit the irregular contours of the house, the water appearing to swallow the massive stone wall. Described by one Brown Harris Stevens agent as “a piece of modern art that it is suitable to live in,” the house was almost more sculpture than in it was residence, indicating Jaffe’s movement toward more exaggerated forms and a California-style use of stone.

But eventually Jaffe grew frustrated by his clients’ desire for opulence and became eager to design a space that could serve a higher purpose and be enjoyed by the public. Looking to branch out beyond residential work, as well, he learned that the Jewish Center of the Hamptons was looking for an architect to design its new synagogue, and he jumped at the opportunity. After years of negotiation and meticulous construction, the Gates of the Grove synagogue was completed in 1988 to international acclaim.

Many have called the synagogue Jaffe’s masterpiece. It certainly proved that he was capable of more profound work than his beach houses, however beautiful, might have suggested. The synagogue’s entrance, low in scale, is intended to foster humility and help worshippers to shed their daily concerns in preparation for prayer. The stone floors are laid in an irregular pattern, with minimal joints, recalling the limestone blocks of the Walls of Jerusalem. The interior space opens up to a series of interlocking porticos separated by skylights, which allow an abundance of natural sunlight to enter the sanctuary. Much of the design is based on a numerological symmetry around the number ten, which has significance in the Kabbalah. Angular columns, which bend upward, recall the curve of Hebrew script, and the repetitive shapes make reference to a steadfastness of prayer.

Jaffe had become quite spiritual in the later part of his life, and he believed that a design, if executed with the perfect balance of light and weight and space, had the power to elevate experience. Alastair Gordon remembers: “Talking to Norman about his work, you got the sense that he was a man in search of something way beyond architecture.”

That Jaffe was chasing something sacred might offer some insight into his character. His perfectionism, endless revisions, and fanatical attention to detail were all in the service of that “something way beyond.”

It was at this height of creativity that Jaffe went for his morning swim and never returned. While many have speculated about the nature of his death—was it suicide?—the truth of what happened will never be known. Some time later, a bone determined to be Jaffe’s was found on the beach, and the case was unsatisfactorily closed.

While some of Jaffe’s houses are still visible along the shoreline—most significantly the Perlbinder House, which is still owned by the same family—many have fallen victim to changing times and changing values. “These days, when a ‘Norman’ comes up for sale, it is pretty much a tear-down,” Miles says. “In the last five years, I have seen at least a half-dozen that have been completely erased.” Especially tragic was the bulldozing of the Lloyd House in 2016. In its place stands a 5,300-square-foot house indistinguishable from the others on the street. This urge to tear down is partly due to economic pressures—with newer, more traditional constructions fetching higher prices—but it is also about a change in sensibility. “It all comes down to how you define luxury. Luxury used to mean simplicity. An escape from the noise of the city. But now, the noise is here, too.”

While it is true that many Modernist gems have been lost in the race to build bloated, 10-bedroom lookalike mansions, there are notable exceptions.

Several firms, including Deborah Berke Partners of Manhattan and Martin Architects of Sagaponack, have recently partnered with clients to renovate Jaffe houses. And just last year, Miles himself renovated and restored one of his father’s designs from 1975, a 2.5 bedroom on Mecox Bay in Bridgehampton. Originally designed to be a prototype for a modest vacation home that could be replicated elsewhere, the 1,800-square-foot house features a dramatic triangular roofline and stunning water views, harking back to the beach shacks of the 1950s and ’60s. The interior was remodeled during the renovation, and an addition with two bedrooms was built. “It was a challenging project for me,” Miles says. “Not only did I have to meet my own standard, which I’d like to think is astronomically high, I felt like I had to meet Norman’s standard, which is out of this universe.”

The clean angles and natural wood tones of Miles’s addition are perfectly integrated and classic Jaffe, highlighting the delicate slopes of the surrounding dunes. The craftsmanship and simple beauty of a house like this serve as a reminder that that the legacy of Jaffe’s work is not only architectural, but cultural—recalling an era in South Fork history when everything was a little less noisy.