Rippling wave-loving architect Harry Gesner celebrated the dramatic landscape of California with houses straddling canyons, sitting on the beach and cantilevered from cliffs. On June 10, he died at his home in Malibu, California. Sandcastle. He was 97 years old.
The cause was a complication of cancer, said his stepchild, Casey Doran.
Growing up in California, Gesner was able to ski and surf like a pro. He flew his first plane at the age of 14. Actress June Lockhart was in love for the first time in her third year at Santa Monica High School. She went to Westlake and met water skiing, but his service in World War II interrupted her romance. ..
Frank Lloyd Wright invited him to study at his mansion and school in Taliesin West, Scottsdale, Arizona, but as an architect he was mostly self-taught. Glass walls, round sunken living room, fire pit, pointed A-frame roof. They explore the landscape and aesthetics of Southern California, and their bohemian spirit. John LautnerAnother eclectic modernist who designed ChemosphereAlso known as the Flying Saucer House, it floats above North Hollywood Hills.
Gesner sketched his most famous home while bobbing a longboard in front of the final location in Malibu. Located on the beach of a remote cove, the Wave House was built for his friend and fellow surfer, Jerry Cooper, and looks like a winged creature or a wave. The hand-cut round copper shingles on the arched roof are like fish scales.
Wave House was built in 1957. That same year, Swedish architect Jorn Utzon won the contest. Sydney Opera House, And many continue to declare and maintain Wave House as his inspiration. Mr. Gesner said the similarities were a coincidence, but recalled Utzon calling for his praise for his designs published around the world.
“I hope people don’t claim that something looks like something else, but they do,” he told Lisa Germany in her book “The House of the Sea at Sunset” (2012), Gesner. He talked about researching his work. “It’s human nature and boring. The inspirational concept comes from a collection of all the parts and pieces we experience in our daily lives and its wonderful source, the” imagination. ” “
Harry Harmer Gesner was born on April 28, 1925 in Oxnard, California, in western Los Angeles. His father, Harry M. Gesner, was an inventor, engineer, and adventurer who rode the Ruff Ryders, a volunteer cavalry led by Theodore Roosevelt during the Spanish-American War, at the age of 16.Surfing in Duke Kahanamoku, An early Hawaiian surfing star. And he flew his own biplane. Harry’s mother, Ethel (Harmer) Gesner, was the daughter of an artist and prominent Southern California landscape painter, Alexander Harmer. Her great-grandfather is Jose de Lagera, a wealthy Spanish commander and landowner in Santa Barbara, known as El Capitan, and one of Gesner’s uncles is Jack Northrop, an aircraft designer, engineer, and industrialist. did. B-2 Stealth bomber.
Mr. Gesner was 19 years old when he landed on the beach in Normandy, bending over from the side of a landing craft. His experience of him marked him forever. A few years later, he said, “I was injured, dying, and dying as a member of my team, and after about a minute I changed from boy to boy rudely.”
He survived D-Day, but was about to lose his leg due to frostbite along the German front. He marched and sketched, capturing European aqueducts, churches and castles, and paying attention to Gothic details.
After leaving the hospital, he audited an architecture class taught by then-visiting professor Frank Lloyd Wright for six months at Yale University. Wright invited Mr. Gesner to study with Tariesin, but Mr. Gesner instead boarded a freighter and headed for Ecuador. There he unearthed pre-Inca relics. Then he headed to Mexico City, where he came across Errol Flynn at the bar. Flynn asked him to help return his yacht, Sirocco, to California, but the departure date continued to be postponed, so Mr. Gesner went home.
He worked as an architect apprentice for another uncle, an architect, and then began designing his own home.
Gesner designed a house made of diagonally arranged sun-dried bricks for his parents and aunt. Surrounded by their landscape, they seemed to grow from the ground. For the developer, he made a glass rhombus installed on a ridge on the Malibu coast. For a family with a small site in the canyon, he built a house like a bridge (or aqueduct) that straddles two slopes.
For swimwear mogul Fred Cole, he designed a double A-frame bachelor pad with a Tahitian touch. On the glass wall, Gesner designed a “curtain” made of bamboo and glass beads and sat in a narrow space overlooking Sunset Boulevard. Engineers claimed it was impossible to build.
Gesner will be a reliable architect for many of Hollywood’s wealthy bachelors. John Scantlin — invented Quotron, the first magnetic tape-based stock market system to replace the old ticker tape machine — bedrooms, living rooms, small kitchens, wet bars (and three-car garages and tennis courts). ). The bathroom was a cave, the toilet was pushed into a fern forest, the house was surrounded by a pool, from which I could swim into the cave.
One of the projects that never left the drawing board was a Marlon brando compound to be built on the atoll of French Polynesia, which was purchased after shooting the “Mutiny on the Bounty” in the early 1960s. It was to be powered by windmills and solar panels and cooled by a huge aquarium that wanted the brand to be filled with sharks and moray eels. The giant palm trunk was a flying buttress with multiple roofs and was covered with pandanus leaves. The brand also wanted a mini version of the island’s fantasy for his property in Beverly Hills. As Gesner told Architectural Digest in 2008It was difficult to concentrate the actors.
“He was very bedroom oriented and everything evolved from there,” he said. “Suddenly during the discussion, a beautiful Asian model came in and Marlon disappeared for about half an hour. I just sat there and read a book.”
Gesner used sustainable materials long before he became fashionable.Sandcastle he built for himself and his fourth wife, the actress Nan MartinIt was made of timber recovered from a burnt down high school in a remote Malibu cove, right next to the Wave House, and marble from a public bath that was about to be demolished. He used an old utility pole to support the tower — Germany, the author of “The House of the Sea at Sunset,” resembles the location to “a Dutch windmill, a Spanish lighthouse, and a Hobbit dwelling.” I explained. Gesner called it the home of “two creative and very loving adults, a boy and a Labrador retriever.”
In addition to his stepchild, Mr. Gesner survived by his daughter, Tara Tanzer Cartwright. Two sons, Jason and Zen. And five grandchildren. His marriage to Audrey Hawthorne, Patty Townsend and Patricia Alexander ended with a divorce. Martin died in 2010.
In the 1990s, Gesner converted his beloved 1959 Silver Mercedes 190SL Convertible into an electric vehicle. He has three patents on a system that converts solid waste into fuel, and in his later years he worked on the design of concrete and wooden structures designed for extreme weather events. He called them “the surviving house.”
“They will endure the worst elements,” he told the New York Times in 2012. “Of course, hurricanes. Tornadoes. Tsunamis. Termites and sunspots. Besides withstanding the rivers of melted rock volcanoes, good design, wise and practical design that enables all the elements can solve all problems. think.”
