Customer Reviews

American Dream: The Houses at Sagaponac: Modern Living in the Hamptons

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I purchased this book over a month ago and I have picked it up every night since. Being an architect myself, I have found the designs of these homes intriguing, and more importantly, state of the art - Not only are they creative in style but, unlike many "modern" houses of this nature - they seem very much livable. You can visit the website www.housesatsagaponac.com for more information and for updates on the project's construction - with photos.
I praise this project - Coco Brown and his "in-house team" for fighting the odds (working with all these renowned architects and the building dept cannot be easy)and realizing it - I look forward to seeing it through. By far the most avante-garde architectural project happening today.

Everything in this book is conceptual in design. One would think that with progress in time and technology, people would opt for advanced method and cutting-edge design to be applied in their homes. On the contrary, the rich and the renowned are building themselves huge Georgian & Palladian homes at the Hamptons. Those homes have no relevance to its surroundings, no bearings to the lifestyle of occupants & that they don't capitalise upon the views. It's simply an avenue for the homeowners to flaunt their richness & their status. The book explains further that the Hamptons of present days is a far cry from the olden days when the liberal and the intellectuals come to congregate to engage in arts discussion. Sagaponac is within easy reach of the Hamptons and Coco Brown, both the author & the developer decided to do a development that is a breath of fresh air, a development that challenges the people to be non-conformist, a development that is going to polarise people's opinion. Whilst the book said that the houses here are to be liveable and affordable, it is rather a subjective point to define the word affordable. I have been reading about Sagaponac regularly and US$1.8 million to US$2.1 million for a house there is not relatively cheap for common people. There is also a contradiction about what we read in books and what we find out for ourselves in reality. One good example, I referred to Shigeru Ban, the architect from Japan. He worked with CoCo Brown on this project but upon consulting him about his willingness to work together for a speculative project, he commented that he doesn't work on speculative project at all. There's also talk about the reality that Sagaponac is within airport zone and that detracts a lot of buyers from this project especially when the developer is expecting people to part company with a substantial amount of their lifetime savings. However, what shines in this book is not the egos and the personas of the architects but the merits of their works. Some are over-the-top, some are user-friendly, some are environmentally-friendly, some are understated but useable, and the list goes on. There seem to be a home for every tastes imaginable. Richard Meier, Zaha Hadid, Richard Rogers, Dean Matiz, Michael Graves are some of the big names here. Overall, a very satisfying book to read and a book that I have come back to again & again for reference purpose. Highly recommended.

These houses are all still in the development stage, and what you get are presentatations that are reminiscent of the WTC proposals, showing the sorts of things possible with CAD programs these days. The book concentrates on these illustrations, and usually includes only a floor plan. For those with a couple million dollars to spend, it provides the lastest in cutting-edge design.

This review is not about the written content of this book, or the concepts and designs of the houses, but what is, to me, a downside of computer technology. Virtually none of the houses has been constructed, so what the reader sees, with a few exceptions, are computer-generated images of what the houses will look like, if and when built.

Rather than the renderings that were once drawn to depict what the finished house will look like, the reader is given cold-looking images that have an odd opacity and, sometimes, what strikes me as a lack of depth. Those put in a natural setting look particularly creepy, and, yes, I think that is the right word. Yes, these images are exact, whereas the renderings of old often bordered on the impressionistic, but I think that's just my point - in that abandon was life and vibrancy; the images given us often look like summer homes for the Borg. Compare what drawn renderings there are to the cgi, even though none of these renderings is exceptional.

As depicted, I don't find these houses so compelling. When people are included in the image they look so white and so bored and too precious, but then, maybe that's just the the point.

As I write this I find myself thinking of Kubrick's "2001," a film that, forty-three years on, looks completely fresh, able to compete with any forgettable cgi-chocked flick today. Hard to believe "2001" was an analog film that was all but handmade.