Houses of the Sundown Sea: The Architectural Vision of Harry Gesner. For more than sixty years, casual observers and architectural aficionados alike have craned their necks to catch glimpses of Harry Gesner houses of Southern California. There's one hovering on a mountaintop above Malibu, as it poised to take flight over the Pacific. Another is bolded to a cliff so that the site can support a home before the next 60 -foot cliff drops off. And yet another is tucked away on the grounds of the Getty Museum centre in Los Angeles. Maverick architect and inventor Harry Gesner was always drawn to unusual, challenging sites, which called for dramatic architecture and living environments. Houses of the Sundown Sea: The Architectural Vision of Harry Gesner will open doors to these and twelve other intriguing homes, all located in and round the Los Angeles area, accompanied by magnificent photographs by Jurgen Nogai. The book's scope will be broad, using archival photographs, documents and a rich collection of Gesner's own spectacular design drawings, blue prints and floor plans to trace his career from 1945 to the present. Even in Southern California, a region that has been a catalyst for great Modern architecture for more than a century, Gesner's utterly unique designs are outside the canons of doctrinaire modernism. Rather, his sensibility springs from his interpretation of the landscape and the messages it communicates to him after days of sketching on a new pristine site. Inevitably, for a man born an raised in Southern California, his sculptural designs are imbues with the vision of an almost primeval California, derived from his parents memories of the relatively undeveloped paradise of his youth. He is a Modernist, but one whose romantic, idealistic nature has caused his truly extraordinary body of work to be overlooked. Until now.
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