7/26/2023 0 Comments Candela park![]() In New York, the great apartment houses of the 1920s, buildings the cognoscenti know so well that they identify them only by numbers such as “834” (834 Fifth Avenue), “778” (778 Park Avenue), “1040” (1040 Fifth Avenue), and, the noblest of them all, “740” (740 Park Avenue), which happens to have been built by James T. The Zeckendorf brothers liked to build one thing at a time, and after making a lot of money erecting a brick-and-limestone tower at 515 Park Avenue, to which the architect Frank Williams had given a superficial gloss of architectural detail vaguely reminiscent of traditional, pre–World War II apartments, the brothers realized that there was gold to be mined in looking back, not forward, especially when you were building for the very rich, and that the somewhat clunky cornices and pediments at 515 Park were only the beginning of what they might do if they devoted themselves totally to the idea of re-creating a Manhattan apartment house of old. His son, also named William Zeckendorf, revived the business, but his success has been eclipsed by the grandsons, who have ridden the condominium boom by reaching for ever larger portions of what seemed, for a while, like a market that could only keep on going up. Pei his start, was notoriously leveraged, and his architectural adventures ultimately brought him down. Zeckendorf the First, who put together the deal for the United Nations site and gave I. The Zeckendorfs had purchased the land from the Goulandris shipping family for $401 million in 2004-an amount that at the time seemed so outrageous that people wondered if the Zeckendorf brothers didn’t have some strange death wish, some desire to follow their celebrated grandfather, the original William Zeckendorf, into bankruptcy. They were putting up a building on the most expensive site in Manhattan, a full block facing Central Park between 61st and 62nd Streets, half of which contained the faded Mayflower Hotel, and the other half, facing Broadway, a vacant lot. The Zeckendorfs were going against the grain, but they believed they had a reason to. ![]() Stern, who told them that what he thought New York really needed was a luxury building that looked more like the old-fashioned ones, not less. Stern stands on the concierge desk at 15 Central Park West.Īs all of that was happening, the developers Arthur and William Lie Zeckendorf hired Robert A. And then, as if inspired by the work of these celebrity architects, a whole other group of real-estate developers, the kind who like to refer to buildings as “product,” started turning out their own glass apartment towers, much more mundane but in such quantity that you could easily think that glass, which once signified an office building, had now become the material of choice for luxury apartment living in New York.Īrchitect Robert A. There have been round towers, square towers, blue towers, and green ones, not to mention towers that swirl and towers that look as if they were disintegrating, each of them known as much by its architect’s name as by its address. ![]() Most of the buildings that have gotten attention lately have been in the first category, sleek glass condominiums by the likes of Richard Meier, Jean Nouvel, Charles Gwathmey, and Herzog and de Meuron that nobody could mistake for anything but new, one-of-a-kind creations, the sorts of places where apartments sold for unbelievable amounts of money to people who live in them maybe a few weeks out of every year. During the frenetic building spree of the last decade, when architects and developers seemed willing to try just about anything to get their projects noticed in the hyperactive Manhattan luxury-condominium market, buildings tended to fall into two categories: either they were based on the premise that an architect’s job is to invent something that you have never seen before, or they were not. ![]()
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