April 17, 2025 12:00pm EST
Architect Christopher Rawlins presents his book, Fire Island Modernist: Horace Gifford and the Architecture of Seduction, a hybrid work of biography, monograph, and cultural history. First published in 2013, a new expanded edition is being released this April. His talk chronicles Horace Gifford and the utopia he shaped on New York’s Fire Island, where he led a Modernist transformation across this popular, car-free barrier island off the southern coast of Long Island, designing over sixty houses.
About the Presenters
Christopher Rawlins
Christopher Rawlins is an architect, a historian, and the Principal of Rawlins Design, an award-winning architecture and interiors practice based in New York City. Christopher’s architectural practice and his Fire Island scholarship began as separate endeavors, but his firm is currently restoring five of the homes featured in the book. His Fire Island research continues with a non-profit organization called Pines Modern, which documents, advocates for, and leads guided tours of the modernist architecture of Fire Island. In 2020, DoCoMoMo awarded Pines Modern its Modernism in America Award.