Houses At Sagaponac Architect Wins Award

Shigeru Ban, who with Dean Maltz designed one of the modernist Houses at Sagaponac, has won this year’s Pritzker Architecture Prize.

The prize is awarded annually to a living architect whose work demonstrates talent, vision and commitment and who has made “consistent and significant contributions to humanity and the built environment through the art of architecture,” according to the Hyatt Foundation, which sponsors the award and announced the winner last week.

Traveling to disaster sites around the world, Mr. Ban has aided relief efforts by designing simple, low-cost shelters using materials such as cardboard tubes. Among his commissioned works in Japan are Naked House, whose walls are clad in clear corrugated plastic to evoke the light effects of shoji screens, and Curtain Wall House, with two-story-high curtains along the home’s perimeter that can be opened or closed as desired.

Development of the Houses at Sagaponac, in northern Sagaponack near the East Hampton Airport, was announced in 2001 as an antidote to a growing overabundance of “McMansions.” The late Harry “Coco” Brown and the architect Richard Maier envisioned 32 unique modernist homes on 70 acres, each one designed by an architect of note.

Completed at the development in 2006, Mr. Ban’s Furniture House uses floor-to-ceiling modular furniture units as structural elements that also divide space and provide storage. The design was based on the plan for Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s unbuilt Brick Country House but reinterpreted in wood, according to the website of Mr. Ban’s architectural firm, which has offices in Japan, Paris and New York City.

Ultimately, only about nine modernist homes were completed at the Houses at Sagaponac, which changed hands over the years. Houses more recently built in the development have taken an apparently more popular turn back toward more “traditional” designs.