Harry Gesner, the dashing, surf-loving architect whose towering designs celebrated California’s dramatic landscape in homes that straddled canyons, perched on beaches and cantilevered from cliffs, died June 10 at his Malibu, California, home, a whirl of a place. called the Sandcastle. He was 97.
The cause was complications from cancer, said Casey Dolan, his stepson.
Mr. Gesner, who grew up in California, was able to ski and surf like a pro. He flew his first plane at 14. The actress June Lockhart was his first love, during his senior year at Santa Monica High School – she went to Westlake, they met water skiing – but their romance was interrupted by his service in World War II.
As an architect, he was largely self-taught, although Frank Lloyd Wright invited him to study at Taliesin West, his estate and school in Scottsdale, Ariz. His ship-like houses, often built by Norwegian shipbuilders, were distinctly, excitingly Californian, with walls of glass, round, sunken living rooms, fire pits and pointed A-frame roofs. They would define the landscape and aesthetic of Southern California and its free-spirited ethos as much as the homes of John Lautner, another eclectic modernist, who designed the Chemosphere, otherwise known as the flying saucer house, which rises above the North Hollywood Hills. floats.
Mr. Gesner sketched his most famous house as he bobbed on his longboard for its final Malibu location. Built for his friend and fellow surfer Gerry Cooper, the Wave House sits on the beach of a secluded cove and looks like a winged creature or crested wave. The hand-carved round copper clapboards on the vaulted roof are like the scales of a fish.
The Wave House was built in 1957, the same year that Swedish architect Jorn Utzon won the competition to design the Sydney Opera House, and many stated, and continue to insist, that the Wave House had been his inspiration. Mr. Gesner said the resemblance was a coincidence – although he did remember Mr. Utzon calling to compliment him on his design, which had been published around the world.
“I wish people wouldn’t claim that something looks like something else, but they do,” he told Lisa Germany for her book “Houses of the Sundown Sea” (2012), an overview of Mr. screeching. “It’s human nature and annoying. An inspiring concept comes from a collection of parts and pieces of everything we experience in everyday life and that delicious sauce, ‘imagination’.
Harry Harmer Gesner was born on April 28, 1925, in Oxnard, California, west of Los Angeles. His father, Harry M. Gesner, was an inventor, engineer, and adventurer who, at age 16, rode with the Rough Riders, the voluntary cavalry led by Theodore Roosevelt in the Spanish-American War; surfed with Duke Kahanamoku, the early Hawaiian surfer; and flew his own biplane. Harry’s mother, Ethel (Harmer) Gesner, was an artist, the daughter of Alexander Harmer, a noted Southern California landscape painter. A great-great-grandfather was José de la Guerra, a wealthy Spanish military commander and landowner in Santa Barbara, known as El Capitan, and one of Mr. Gesner’s uncles was Jack Northrop, the aircraft designer, engineer, and industrialist who developed the prototype for what the B -2 stealth bomber.
Mr. Gesner was 19 when he landed on the beach of Normandy and dove through the waves from the side of a landing craft. The experience marked him forever; he was, he said years later, “in about a minute, brutally turned from a boy to a man with the wounded, dying and about to be dead members of my team.”
He survived D-Day but nearly lost his legs in freezing battles along the German line. He sketched as he marched, capturing the aqueducts, churches and castles of Europe, noting their Gothic details.
After his discharge, he spent six months at Yale taking an architecture class taught by Frank Lloyd Wright, who was then a visiting professor. Wright invited Mr. Gesner to study with him in Taliesin, but Mr. Gesner instead boarded a freighter and left for Ecuador, where he dug up pre-Inca artifacts. He then went to Mexico City, where he ran into Errol Flynn at a bar. Flynn asked him to bring his yacht, Sirocco, back to California, but the departure date kept getting postponed, so Mr. Gesner went home.
He worked for another uncle, an architect, as an apprentice to the builders and then started designing his own houses.
For his parents and an aunt, Mr. Gesner designed houses made of adobe bricks laid at an angle. Nestled in their landscapes, they looked like they were growing out of the ground. He built a glass-like window for a developer on a ridge above the Malibu coast. For a family with a small property in a gorge, he built a house like a bridge – or an aqueduct – spanning two slopes.
For Fred Cole, the swimwear mogul, he designed a double A-frame bachelorette party with Tahitian accents—for the glass walls, Mr. Gesner designed “curtains” made of bamboo and glass beads—and set it up in a meager spot overlooking Sunset Boulevard that engineers had claimed it was impossible to build.
Mr. Gesner would become the architect of many well-to-do Hollywood bachelors. John Scantlin – whose company invented the Quotron, the first magnetic tape-based stock exchange system, which replaced the old ticker tape machines – only asked for a bedroom, living room, small kitchen and wet bar (as well as a garage for three cars and tennis courts). The bathroom was a cave, with the toilet tucked away in a grove of ferns, and the house was surrounded by a pool from which one could swim into the cave.
One project that never got off the drawing board was a compound for Marlon Brando to be built on the French Polynesian atoll he bought after filming “Mutiny on the Bounty” in the early 1960s. It would be powered by windmills and solar panels and cooled by a giant aquarium that Brando wanted to fill with sharks and moray eels. Giant palm trunks would be flying buttresses for several roofs, which would be covered with pandanus leaves. Brando also wanted a mini version of this island fantasy for his Beverly Hills property. As Mr. Gesner told Architectural Digest in 2008, it was difficult to keep the actor focused.
“He was very bedroom oriented and everything evolved from there,” he said. “Suddenly in the middle of a discussion a beautiful Asian model walked in and Marlon disappeared for half an hour. I would just sit there and read a book.”
Mr. Gesner used sustainable materials long before it was fashionable. Built for himself and his fourth wife, actress Nan Martin, in remote Malibu Bay right next to the Wave House, the Sandcastle was made of wood salvaged from a burnt-down high school and marble from public baths that stood on about to be demolished. He used old telephone poles to support the tower – Mrs. Germany, the author of ‘Houses of the Sundown Sea’, described the place as ‘a Dutch windmill, a Spanish lighthouse, a Hobbit’s home’. Mr. Gesner called it a home for “two creative and deeply enamored adults, a baby boy and a Labrador retriever.”
In addition to his stepson, Mr. Gesner leaves behind his daughter, Tara Tanzer-Cartwright; two sons, Jason and Zen; and five grandchildren. His marriages to Audrey Hawthorne, Patti Townsend and Patricia Alexander ended in divorce. Mrs. Martin died in 2010.
In the 1990s, Mr. Gesner converted his beloved 1959 silver Mercedes 190 SL convertible into an electric vehicle. He held three patents for a system to convert solid waste into fuel, and in his later years he worked on designs for poured concrete and wood structures designed for extreme weather. ‘Houses that survive’, he called them.
“They can withstand the worst of the elements,” he told DailyExpertNews in 2012. Hurricanes, of course. Tornadoes. Tsunamis. Termites and sunspots. Apart from withstanding a volcanic river of molten rock, I think we can solve all our problems through good design, sensible, practical design that puts all the elements in operation. sets.”
