Nissenblatt House: Edgy design finds a home at Jersey Shore

Ask a child to draw a house and the result will invariably feature a triangle over a square. No matter what the artist's level of ability, or the background of the viewer, most people will easily recognize this five-sided form. The crude outline communicates "house" as effectively as a Chinese character.

In real life, of course, houses rarely look anything like a child's drawing, and certainly not when they're designed by architects. But the simple shape functions as a powerful visual cue, triggering our most elemental feelings about home.

Maybe that's one reason the modest Long Beach Island summer house designed by Steve Midouhas and Ben Galbreath tugs at us like a strong ocean tide. Known as the Nissenblatt House, it features two of those childlike house forms - one floating high off the ground, the other rooted firmly in the earth. The two are arranged perpendicularly, and they come off looking like jousting Monopoly pieces.

But while their forms may be familiar, their colors preschool bright, and their sides clad in traditional cedar shingles, don't assume for a minute that the pair represent a sentimental return to '80s-style postmodernism. As if to dispel the notion, the architects ram a classic, flat-topped modernist house through the house's central axis.

Are they suggesting that postmodernism rides on the back of modernism? Too pat, perhaps. But it's clear that this little Shore house has bigger ambitions than merely offering good ocean views.

The Nissenblatt House in Loveladies may well be the edgiest design to appear on the Jersey Shore in many a season. The project has already won a top honor from the New Jersey chapter of the American Institute of Architects.

And that was in 2009, before it became apparent that the Nissenblatt would prefigure a global trend-let in architecture: In the last few months, such widely regarded designers as the Swiss duo Herzog & de Meuron and the Japanese wunderkind Sou Fujimoto have indulged a similar penchant for cantilevering simple house shapes and stacking them up like piles of logs.

Herzog & de Meuron's VitraHaus and Fujimoto's Tokyo apartments are more complex than the Nissenblatt, with multiple cantilevers flying off in different directions. Yet even with a single protrusion, the Nissenblatt's sun-drenched saltbox offers up a startling interior mix of single and double-height spaces, warmed by wood-paneled ceilings. The mystery is how all this got started on Long Beach Island.