While Peter Gumpel has been practicing architecture since the 1960s and established his own firm in New York City, PMG Architects, in 1991, he has had a parallel career as a painter, resulting in exhibitions in New York, Philadelphia, Boston, and Miami, as well as on the East End. His two callings have led to the presidency of the Artists Alliance of East Hampton and the vice chairmanship of the town’s Architectural Review Board.
Born in London, Mr. Gumpel and his parents left for Ireland during the Blitz, and eventually made their way to New York in 1949. “I always drew, always painted, from when I was very young,” he said during a conversation in his Springs studio. “I had enough of a portfolio that I got into the High School of Music and Art.”
The school had a “Beaux Arts” program, he recalled, involving the study of a different medium each semester, including watercolor, oil painting, ceramics, and sculpture.
“In your senior year you had a choice of picking what you wanted to major in. I realized that I didn’t think I was a good enough painter to make a living at it. So I took a course in architectural drafting.”
He went on to Pratt Institute’s five-year degree program in architecture, but said that after graduation he still felt insecure enough in the field to continue for a master’s degree. He was accepted at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design, but had to drop out in the second semester, unable to afford his studies.
Back in the city, Mr. Gumpel landed a job in a Pratt professor’s architectural office. “I worked for three years, earned enough money to go back to Harvard, and got my degree.”
Three more years of working for a licensed architect remained before he was able to take the required license exam. The firm he joined, he recounted, had “five partners, six associate partners, four or five associates, and me. I was the only one who was not a named member of the firm, but I was hired because I had been continuing with my art and could draw and paint so well.”
The years that followed included work on Donald Trump’s first hotel in Manhattan, converted from the Commodore to the 1,400-room Grand Hyatt next to Grand Central Station. After that, said Mr. Gumpel, “We wound up doing the Royalton Hotel for Ian Schrager,” a noted hotelier and developer. “Ian said to me if I opened my own firm he would give me work.” That marked the start of PMG Architects, and among the projects that followed were Morgans in New York City (said to be the world’s first boutique hotel) and the Delano in Miami Beach.
His track record led to an invitation from the Trump Organization to correct the design of the not-yet-built Trump International Hotel and Tower in Chicago, the original design proposed by a Chicago firm having been found wanting. Mr. Gumpel was first retained to design the interior of the 10-story hotel, and then, after he submitted designs for its 70-story residential portion, for that as well. (“They said, ‘These are pretty good. We can sell these.’ ”)
PMG Architects has since worked with most of the major developers in New York, among them Harry Macklowe and William Zeckendorf.
During the entire time he’s been a practicing architect, Mr. Gumpel has continued to draw, paint, and sketch. He and his wife, Marcia Previti, who is also an architect and an artist, travel widely, and he always takes a sketch book and sometimes a travel set of watercolors.
A visit to his website, pmgwatercolors.com, reveals an extraordinary range and quantity of work, including portraits, seascapes, botanicals, landscapes, travel, architecture, nautical, and a miscellaneous category that includes everything from dancers to machinery.
He did paint in oils for a while, but found he wasn’t challenged enough. “If I didn’t like what I was doing, I could paint over it. With watercolors, you can’t. The challenge is that with watercolors you essentially get one chance to do it.”
Each watercolor starts with a pencil drawing, which becomes the base for the painting. “Also, because I’m a realistic painter, I’m always fascinated by the quality of light. The light and shadows you can get with watercolors are unique to that medium.”
He has a particular fondness for portraits, as evidenced by the almost 50 on the website, still only a portion of his overall output. That predilection has led him to his current project.
“I’m putting together at the moment a book I hope to self-publish, of the people on the East End I’ve been exposed to that make the East End function,” he said. The 24 he’s chosen so far include portraits of his landscaper, his auto mechanic, a restaurateur, a writer and critic, a botanist, a physical therapist, and an exterminator.
In addition to an abundance of watercolors, one shelf of Mr. Gumpel’s studio is lined with clay portrait heads. “I reached a point where I wanted to stop painting for a while,” he explained. “I’d always liked sculpture. In fact, my homeroom teacher at Music and Art was a ceramicist, and to this day I can remember coming in to the homeroom class and having the big vats of clay and the smell of clay and she would make me and a few others churn up all the clay with baseball bats. I decided to try it, go back to it.”
Mr. Gumpel and Ms. Previti first came to East Hampton in 1981 on a boat that took them two years to renovate. Because they owned it with another couple, they also bought a house in Springs (with a second couple). They were here every weekend, alternating between the boat and the house.
After their son, Alex, was born, the couple decided they needed a house of their own, and searched for over six months with no luck, until their broker told them of wooded acreage on Old Stone Highway. They were wandering the grounds when the next-door neighbor came out to chat. “He turned out to be Paul Damaz, one of the first architects I worked for.”
Designing a house was a challenge, Mr. Gumpel said, because it involved two architects with different views. “So we took turns. For two weeks Marcia would be the architect and I would be the client. Then we would switch. Between the two of us, we came up with this house.”
The house and gardens, which have been written about in The Star, have since been the site of many garden tours and a series of summer performances by the Amanda Selwyn Dance Theatre.
