![]() Some clients may not know the name Rosario Candela, but they recognize the quality when they get there. “As the head of a real-estate firm, I can say that people feel that when they walk in. ![]() “When you enter an apartment, there is a harmonious flow, a graceful movement,” says Elizabeth Stribling, chairman of Stribling & Associates. “You know you’ve arrived when you get into a Candela building,” observes curator Albrecht. Virtually all of Candela’s 75 apartment buildings still stand, many now protected with New York City Landmark status. "I’m working on a Candela apartment now and we are knocking out two maid’s rooms to create an eat-in kitchen, but the public spaces are perfect as they are," she says. There are no awkward moments." Williams observes that the way people live today has changed so that a housekeeper’s wing is no longer de rigueur-yet Candela's spaces retain their appeal. "You have a freedom because they are so lovely. “They’re easy to furnish because you have such great-shaped, balanced rooms," she says. The most interesting feature of the MCNY show that breaks new ground in explaining the ingenuity of his architecture is a digital film dissecting the sectional diversity of 960 Fifth Avenue, showing the dovetailed apartments with wildly different ceiling heights which make this, in my opinion, his most interesting building.For a decorator, designing such a space is a pleasure, notes interior designer Bunny Williams, who has worked in many Candela buildings. Perhaps this exhibition will be a step on that path. But the great Candela book everyone really wants has not yet been written. The first mention of Rosario Candela in an analytic vein was by Paul Goldberger in his 1979 book, The City Observed, in which he described the towers of 770 and 778 Park Avenue as “great gateways to Central Park.” Andrew Alpern’s co-monograph on the architect of 2001 (which I helped research and wrote the foreword) provided a catalogue raisonné of Candela’s body of work of about 75 buildings, and Michael Gross’s genre-busting 740 Park Avenue: The Story of the World’s Richest Apartment Building delivered the riveting social history (it’s really a biography of an apartment building). ![]() ![]() Planner, innovative form-giver, urbanist. The series of buildings representing Candela’s best-known work are where he developed, in the late 1920s, the now familiar (but then totally innovative) New York residential form: the terraced setback crowned with a penthouse water tower. This sensuous trait is expressed externally by the sensitive detail of his buildings at street level, something the MCNY show takes trouble to document, but more dramatically by their massing into terraced setbacks in the higher stories, usually above the 11th or 12th floor. But Candela was also one of the great romantic givers of form to New York. As with all great architects, he dealt in logic, and using this metric he was the most gifted apartment-house planner there has ever been, with organizational powers to create room arrangements that expressed themselves in a parallel life as an amateur cryptographer (he later wrote two books and taught a course about cryptography during World War II). His legacy and his somewhat mysterious genius as a designer are examined in a new exhibition at the Museum of the City of New York designed by Peter Pennoyer and curated by Donald Albrecht.Ĭandela’s work can best be understood by looking at his buildings in two parts: first inside, then out. They are the architecture by which we know the great residential neighborhoods of the Upper East Side and Sutton Place the crown jewels of Park and Fifth Avenues. It would be impossible to dream the dreams we have of New York without the apartment buildings of Rosario Candela.
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