‘Rosario Candela & The New York Apartment’ Sheds Light on the Life of the Italian-born Architect

To many architects and historians, Rosario Candela remains an unknown name. Little was written about him during the interwar years when he was most active, yet the Italian-born architect designed many of New York’s most coveted apartment houses. Replete with black-and-white archival images, contemporary photography, and plans of the units he was best known for laying out, Rosario Candela & The New York Apartment is a welcome addition, given the current dearth of scholarship about him, as well as a kind of social genealogy of those who took up residence in his buildings, from Jackie Onassis to John D. Rockefeller, Jr. Following is an excerpt from Paul Goldberger’s essay.

In between 720 and 770 stands 740 Park Avenue, one of Candela’s masterpieces, completed at the same time as 770 and sheathed entirely in limestone. It is New York’s Gibraltar, not only because of the financial wherewithal of most of its residents but because of the way in which the limestone facades make the building feel so solid that you would think that a bomb set off in one apartment could not be heard in the next. There are hints of Art Deco here, but they are tame, for nothing would have been worse than to have the gentry of Park Avenue think they were being given the style of Central Park West or the Grand Concourse. The front door is magnificent: it is cut through a marble slab topped by finials, and it contains lettering that announces the address with Roman affectation as 740 Park Avenue. (There is also a secondary entrance around the corner with the address of 71 East 71st Street, and, true to the tradition of understatement, this side-street entry leads to many of the largest and finest apartments.)