![]() In fact, the principles of Candela’s layouts for luxury Park Avenue apartments were first worked out in more modest buildings such as a 1924 walkup he designed in the Bronx neighborhood known as Marble Hill.Īlthough Candela ended his architecture career with an impressive résumé, he began studying cryptology during the Depression to offset the slowdown, and ended up writing two books on the subject while simultaneously designing a few apartment buildings and theaters in the city. If, for example, a resident wanted to turn his apartment’s library into a bedroom, it would be big enough to do so.Īlpern said that another architect, James Carpenter, was designing homes with the same three-part plan before Candela came on to the architecture scene, but that Candela’s apartments were more imaginative.Ĭandela was able to take his layout and adapt it to different sizes and styles of homes. While existing buildings followed a standard model that dictated a large dining room, smaller bedrooms and an even smaller library, Candela evened out the sizes of the rooms to give residents more options. He also changed up the typical allotment of space that most apartment buildings employed at that time. Servant spaces, like kitchens and pantries, were in between the reception and private spaces so that they would have access to both.Ĭandela also ensured that anyone entering the apartment had a view of a window or fireplace when walking into the apartment. ![]() He made reception spaces accessible to bathrooms without having to go through a private space, like a bedroom. Candela, he said, saw apartments in three parts: reception spaces, private spaces and servant spaces. The goal was to ensure that residents and their staff would not mix in communal spaces - a controversial concept now.Īlpern noted, however, that it was Candela’s floorplans that singled him out among the architects of his day. For example, at 770 Park Avenue, built in 1931, there were front elevators for residents and a back elevator for service personnel, as there were in most buildings of the time.īut according to Alpern, Candela put his own twist on that model by adding a middle elevator for the residents’ staff. In the book “740 Park: The Story of the World’s Richest Apartment Building,” author Michael Gross said that when Candela, who designed 740 Park, was at Columbia, he “was already so sure of his talents that he placed a velvet rope around his drafting table to keep other students from copying his work.”Ĭandela also started positioning buildings’ radiators lower to the ground, which allowed him to create taller windows, giving the illusion that an apartment’s ceilings were higher.Įven in a building’s more minor details, he tried to ramp up the luxury. In 1910, he moved to the United States and was admitted into Columbia University’s School of Architecture. According to the New York Times, the stock market crash of 1929, and the Depression that followed, meant that only 12 of the 27 planned projects he had in the pipeline at the time of the slump were finished.Ĭandela, the son of a plasterer, was born in Palermo, Italy, in 1890. ![]() Still, while Candela’s career was prolific, it was not all smooth sailing. Many of those commissions came from fellow Italian immigrants who had already made it in the real estate world here. The buildings are two of roughly 50 that Candela, who died in 1953 at age 63, designed in New York in the late 1920s.
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