The show’s numerous reproductions of Candela floor plans offer a dual service-revealing the master’s hand and showing the scale on which New York’s most frightfully grand residents lived (and still do). This is gracious, thoughtful design that has the virtue of all good architecture: it looks a lot easier than it is.īut to focus on Candela’s exteriors is perhaps to overlook the architect’s primary talent in designing layouts. While competent, the structure lacks what might be termed the “Candela Look”-its red bricks, small windows, and stocky quoins give it solidity at the expense of sleekness.Īpartment entrance at 770 Park Avenue in 1930. His first East Side commission came in 1922 with 1105 Park Avenue, a neo-Georgian tower with a chunkily rusticated limestone base (not reproduced in this exhibition). He enrolled in the Columbia University School of Architecture, proceeded into the office of a fellow Italian builder called Gaetano Allejo, and struck out on his own in 1920. Despite later claims that he had been educated at the Institute of Fine Arts in Palermo, immigration records show that he was a laborer. Robert Mylne was the son of a master mason and John Nash was born to a millwright. Most of the great American architects of Candela’s age were gentlemen, but in Europe there was a long tradition of architects descending directly from tradesmen. The son of a Sicilian plasterer, Candela must have benefitted from his father’s artisan knowledge. But the show’s many other merits more than make up for that. This paucity of biographical detail is not rectified by “Elegance in the Sky: The Architecture of Rosario Candela,” now on view at the Museum of the City of New York. The Candela name is a fixture of Upper East Side broker-babble (tellingly, none of Wolfe’s “Good Buildings” are found on Manhattan’s West Side), but the man himself remains nebulous. The list includes twelve buildings by Rosario Candela (1890–1953), a name that to this day represents the apogee of architectural prestige in New York. Stern Architects, were responsible for the interior architecture, including the floor plans, interior elevations, base and crown moldings, casings, doors, and floor patterns, working in close collaboration with our client and with Steven Gambrel, who was responsible for the interior design, including color schemes, fabrics, furniture, and light fixtures.I n a 1985 essay for Esquire, Tom Wolfe identified the forty-two “Good Buildings” in New York-pre-war apartment buildings known more for their residents’ “decorous demeanor, dignified behavior, business and social connections, and sheer wealth” than for any architectural merit. Gary Brewer, Partner, and his team at Robert A.M. Essential to the project's success was the client's sophisticated taste, and the experience, knowledge and confidence she brings from her professional life as a developer. The apartment-previously owned by philanthropist Celeste Bartos and her architect husband Armand Phillip Bartos, and one floor above the former Brooke Astor apartment, famously decorated by Albert Hadley-was reconfigured to recapture the elegant logic of the original Candela plan, updated to reflect the contemporary lifestyle of our client and her family. Where the weekend house in East Quogue offers the charm of a Shingle-style summer cottage, our client wanted her Manhattan apartment to present a streamlined and urbane aesthetic her direction was traditional with a twist. Gambrel Inc., our client and her husband asked the same team to work with her on a very different opportunity: the gut renovation of her apartment in one of the best Rosario Candela buildings on Park Avenue. Following on the completion of a house in East Quogue designed by our firm and decorated by S.R.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |