LI architect Andrew Geller, 87, dies

Andrew Geller, a noted designer and architect whose whimsical, modernist beach cottages built mostly in the 1950s and '60s became a vital part of Long Island's architectural heritage, has died.

Geller, who for decades lived in Northport, died Sunday in Syracuse. He was 87 and suffered kidney failure, said his grandson Jake Gorst of Northport, a documentarian who for several years has been working on a film about Geller's life and work.

"He was just an amazing man, instinctively brilliant," said Gorst, 42. "He was just a master at communicating through paint, a pencil, a line."

Geller was born in Brooklyn to Russian immigrant parents in 1924 and graduated in 1939 from the High School of Music and Art in Manhattan. In the early years of World War II, he worked for the U.S. Maritime Commission designing tanker hulls and interiors. Later, he served in the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and studied fine art at the Cooper Union in Manhattan.

While at the Cooper Union, he met a fellow student, Shirley Morris, and the couple married in 1944. Geller and Morris, a gardener and painter, settled in Northport in 1951.

By this time, Geller worked in Manhattan at Raymond Loewy Associates, where he spent 35 years, serving as a principal designer and vice president. He was involved in interior design work at landmarks such as Lever House and the World Trade Center.

He also helped design a typical American home shown at the American National Exhibition in Moscow in 1959 that served as backdrop to the "Kitchen Debate" between Nikita Kruschev and Richard Nixon.

In his time away from the office, Geller had begun designing small beach houses about a decade before. Many of them were for middle-class war veterans from the city. These weekend retreats were "beautiful," inexpensive, unique and unpretentious, said Alastair Gordon, a journalist, critic and author of "Beach Houses: Andrew Geller."

"The guy was a creative genius, he was lyrical and sculptural in the work that he did," Gordon said.

In 1999, Geller and Gordon sought out the gems still standing on Long Island, some having been lost to the elements or development. Gordon recounted the experience in a New York Times article in which Geller lamented what the modern beach home had become.

"Bigger is not always better," Geller said. "Most of these new houses are ridiculously oversized for their lots, with no relationship between the house and the property. A house ought to occupy no more than a fifth of the given surface. What they're creating now is an instant slum."

Gorst, Geller's grandson, said he designed his last real vacation home around 1980 and in recent decades had been an avid painter, a medium he had studied as a young man. Geller and his wife, along with friends in Northport, would regularly spend days painting together.

Last April, as their health declined, the couple moved to Spencer, N.Y., where their daughter, Jamie Dutra, lives. "Even though he was sort of this powerful personality, he was also very gentle," said Dutra, 62.

Geller's wife died last summer. In addition to Gorst and Dutra, he is survived by son Greg Geller of Manhattan; seven grandchildren; and nine great-grandchildren. Memorial plans are pending.