Jake Gorst Deconstructs Andrew Geller

Andrew Geller (1924-2011), called a “leading light” by The Washington Post, worked at Raymond Loewy’s celebrated Manhattan architecture and design firm. His designs included everything from the interiors of Lever House, the Park Avenue modernist icon, to Montauk’s Leisurama houses, which were sold completely furnished, from china to toothbrushes. Geller was also part of the team behind the 1,144-square-foot “typical” American house that was a centerpiece of the 1959 American National Exhibition in Moscow—and whose kitchen was the site of Richard Nixon and Nikita Khrushchev’s famously confrontational kitchen debate. Inevitably, given the house’s wide central hall and the world’s obsession with a certain Soviet space capsule, it was nicknamed Splitnik. Hear from Geller’s grandson, award-winning filmmaker Jake Gorst, about his life and work.