House Parti: Generosity of spirit has its limits. Usually, it’s the front door.
New York Review of Architecture
Antonio Pacheco - March 21, 2025
Myron and June Goldfinger Residence by C. W. Moss
On the first Friday of every month, the Modulightor Building (1989) on East 58th Street comes alive. An all-ages crowd streams through the interlocking galleries and duplexes of the sleek, elusive six-story structure, the last of Paul Rudolph’s to be built in New York. Notable for its wayward staircases with cantilevered treads and prodigious thresholds, the architecture pulls people in and out of view. Children marvel, historians quietly observe; former associates of the architect trade stories; downtown designer types take notes. Rudolph, I imagine, would have been tickled by the scene.
This past winter, the specter of a different architectural eminence has presided over these mixers, put on by the Paul Rudolph Institute, which (along with the Modulightor lighting company) is located on the premises. Circle, Square, Triangle: Houses I Never Lived In showcases the inventive vacation homes built by the recently departed architect Myron Goldfinger in Hamptons beach towns and upstate hamlets. First, the obvious: These artful constructions, being real estate, enable the fashionable display of wealth and status. But might they also attest to deeper commitments? In the gratifying slowness of iteration, perhaps. Over decades, the spare Santorinian volumes Goldfinger celebrated in his 1969 book Villages in the Sun were poked and prodded, protuberating into palatial villas like the so-called Luxury Liner (1981) for Weight Watchers CEO Fred Jaroslow on the North Shore of Long Island. “I don’t think I’ve ever been in a house this big before,” Margot Robbie, playing Jordan Belfort’s future ex-wife, remarks in The Wolf of Wall Street (2013), where the mansion makes an appearance as a Southampton party pad.
At the open house I attended, June Goldfinger, an interior designer who doubled as her husband’s publicist, played down this tendency toward dilation. She talked of a house the architect did live in—the couple’s Waccabuc residence (1970), the very opposite of a luxury liner, where modestly sized bedrooms take a backseat to an ample living room, kitchen, and solarium. These are spaces where people come together, where geometric larks are tantamount to generosity.
Generosity of spirit has its limits. Usually, it’s the front door. For those of us without holiday homes, the Friday nights at the Modulightor remain the place to be.
Go to the original article here.