Julian Neski (1927–2004) was an American architect whose modernist houses, designed in collaboration with his wife and professional partner Barbara, helped to define a new direction in domestic architecture in the 1960s and 70s. Over the course of four decades the Neskis combined functional simplicity with sculptural form to design more than 35 distinctive houses on eastern Long Island, Cape Cod, and Fire Island.
Neski was born in Brooklyn and attended Stuyvesant High School and Vanderbilt University before enlisting in the Navy in 1945. After working as a marine designer while still in high school, he studied architecture at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, NY, where he completed his degree in 1950.
While working in the New York office of Jose Luis Sert, Neski met his future wife and business partner, who had recently graduated from the Harvard Graduate School of Design. They married in 1954 and started working together in the office of Marcel Breuer.
While their work made explicit reference to the early European modernism of Le Corbusier and Breuer, the Neski houses were very much products of their time, symbolizing the urban style that characterized the Manhattan/Hamptons axis of the 1960s and 70s. Their Chalif house in East Hampton (1964), which put the Neskis on the map as an innovative design team, was featured in Look magazine and Architectural Record and was exhibited at Expo ’70 in Osaka, Japan.
The Neskis also worked on nonresidential projects in and around New York City, including the Tivoli Towers housing complex in Brooklyn (1973) and the interiors of the Foundation Center at 79 Fifth Avenue (1985). During the late 1960s Julian Neski was a design studio critic at The Cooper Union.