Long Island Modern: Infinity Machines (Oct 5)

Step inside the radical, mind-bending spaces of the 1960s and ’70s with author and design historian Alastair Gordon on Sunday, October 5 at 3:00pm. Starting with Charles Forberg—architect of LongHouse and the Electric Circus nightclub—Gordon takes us from psychedelic nightclubs to communes, geodesic domes, and beyond, in this vivid talk inspired by his book Spaced Out: Radical Environments of the Psychedelic Sixties.

Anchored in LongHouse history, the journey begins with Forberg’s womb-like interior for the legendary Electric Circus in New York’s East Village, where the Velvet Underground played beneath swirling light projections by Tony Martin. From there, Gordon spins outward into crash pads, sensoriums, head shops, yurts, geodesic domes, and back-to-the-earth communes—radical environments that captured the utopian, free-spirited energy of the era and still reverberate in design today.

Alastair J. Gordon is an award-winning critic, cultural historian, author, and filmmaker. For more than twenty years, he wrote on art, architecture and the environment for the New York Times and in 2008 became Contributing Editor on design for WSJ, the Wall Street Journal Magazine. Gordon’s essays have been published in many other publications including Architectural Digest, Vanity Fair, Le Monde, Architectural Record, New York Observer, House & Garden and Dwell. In addition to his critical journalism, Gordon has published more than 28 books on art, architecture, and environment, including such critically acclaimed titles as Weekend Utopia, Naked Airport, Spaced Out, Theater of Shopping, Arquitectonica, Romantic Modernist, Island Follies, and Wandering Forms. In 2016, he launched “Poetics of Place,” a critical writing program at Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design and has taught and lectured at many other institutions. Alastair is Co-Founder and Editorial Director of Gordon de Vries Studio, a publishing imprint that specializes in books about the human environment. As Publisher’s Weekly wrote "Gordon's eye for the convergence of art, architecture and commerce is unerring."

Earlier in his career, Gordon was General Editor of The Princeton Papers on Architecture. He received an MFA from Yale and has won numerous prizes for his critical writing and scholarship, including fellowships from the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts, the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation, Yale University, and a special citation for ‘Excellence in Criticism’ from the American Institute of Architects. Alastair grew up summering in Amagansett and started his journalism career writing a design column for the East Hampton Star. In addition to creating our Long Island Modern series he has curated exhibitions at both Guild Hall in East Hampton and the Parrish Art Museum in Southampton and is currently making a feature documentary about east-end architect Norman Jaffe.