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Candela apartments12/27/2022 ![]() 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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