Houses of the Sundown Sea: The Architectural Vision of Harry Gesner

For more than 60 years, passersby have strained to catch a glimpse of maverick architect Harry Gesner’s houses in Southern California. This is the first book to examine Gesner’s architecture, tracing his career from 1945 to the present and opening the doors to 15 of Gesner’s intriguing homes, all located in or near Los Angeles and built in the 1950s and 1960s. An insightful and revealing text accompanies new photography by Juergen Nogai along with historical photographs and Gesner’s own drawings, floor plans, and blueprints drawn from his remarkably rich archive. Gesner’s utterly unique, often eccentric and unorthodox designs are outside the canons of doctrinaire modernism, yet he is undoubtedly a Modernist, and one whose romantic, quixotic nature has caused his truly extraordinary body of work to be overlooked by many—until now.