Rosario Candela, Architect
Researched and written by Craig Purinton
It all began here at The Clayton, when Rosario Candela first established new standards of chic urban living for some of New York’s wealthiest citizens that still rank among the most prized in the city a century after they were built. The origins of high-rise, prewar luxury lie with the thoughtful, elegant designs of this relatively unsung Sicilian immigrant.
His designs were grounded in the confident wealth of Jazz Age New York, and with some 75 buildings to his credit, Candela played a major role in shaping the architectural legacy of 20th century New York—the distinctive “prewar” streetscapes of Park and Fifth Avenues and Sutton Place in particular. His buildings established new standards of chic, and it started with our home at 215 West 92nd Street.
Rosario Candela was born the son of a plasterer in Sicily in 1890. At 19, he emigrated to join his father in the construction business and study architecture at Columbia University. Graduating in 1915 with a legend already in place of a young man so talented that he put a velvet rope around his desk to keep the other students from copying his work. Whatever the truth behind that story, Candela went straight from Columbia to work with a fellow Sicilian architect, Gaetan Ajello, and within five years had established himself as an architect. Ajello hired him as a draftsman shortly after he graduated, but by the 1920s, Candela started to take on his own major design projects, The Clayton, his first independent commission, was constructed in only eight months – March to October 1922.
Rosario Candela, as a residential architect, never worked on an office building and only rarely on commercial spaces. He stuck to a few basic principles about how everyone preferred to live. He believed it was essential to create a clear separation in an apartment between areas for living and sleeping. Keeping these areas distinct allowed an apartment to retain the feel of a private home.
Candela worked for most of his career with a close-knit network of Italian immigrants, on projects financed either by the developer Anthony Campagna or the Paterno Brothers firm, with whom Candela built 40 buildings. (Two of the Paterno sisters married Anthony Campagna and his brother.) The Clayton was a project with Campagna— a 15-story building on land Campagna had purchased from the William Waldorf Astor estate—a symbolic, as well as literal, transfer of power from the old Gilded Age elite to the modern immigrant strivers of the 1920s. In the late 1920s, Candela began to remake the upper reaches of Park and Fifth Avenues into the ultimate in high-rise splendor and excess.
The Wall Street crash in October sent his business plunging to only two commissions in 1930 and just one the following year.
Candela’s interests took an unusual turn in the late 1930s and into the Second World War with writing and code-breaking. The kind of spatial problem-solving so valuable in an architect translated surprisingly well to more abstract puzzles, and Candela wrote two books on cryptography and taught a class at Hunter College in cryptanalytics, the study of information systems. During the war, he worked for the OSS—the forerunner of the CIA—and according to another family legend, most of his papers were later removed and destroyed by government agents.
Candela died in 1953. In his own time, he wasn’t a name-brand architect. Curator Donald Albrecht calls him an “unsung hero” of the New York cityscape. It’s only in recent decades, as preservation and heritage have become bargaining chips in the real estate marketplace, that he has become synonymous with everything gracious and desirable in the designation “prewar,”
Credits:
“Elegance in the Sky: The Architecture of Rosario Candela” The Museum of the City of New York. exhibition designed by Peter Pennoyer Architects
Joanna Scutts: Rosario Candela and the Invention of High-Rise Luxury; Sara Polsky, editor.
His designs were grounded in the confident wealth of Jazz Age New York, and with some 75 buildings to his credit, Candela played a major role in shaping the architectural legacy of 20th century New York—the distinctive “prewar” streetscapes of Park and Fifth Avenues and Sutton Place in particular. His buildings established new standards of chic, and it started with our home at 215 West 92nd Street.
Rosario Candela was born the son of a plasterer in Sicily in 1890. At 19, he emigrated to join his father in the construction business and study architecture at Columbia University. Graduating in 1915 with a legend already in place of a young man so talented that he put a velvet rope around his desk to keep the other students from copying his work. Whatever the truth behind that story, Candela went straight from Columbia to work with a fellow Sicilian architect, Gaetan Ajello, and within five years had established himself as an architect. Ajello hired him as a draftsman shortly after he graduated, but by the 1920s, Candela started to take on his own major design projects, The Clayton, his first independent commission, was constructed in only eight months – March to October 1922.
Rosario Candela, as a residential architect, never worked on an office building and only rarely on commercial spaces. He stuck to a few basic principles about how everyone preferred to live. He believed it was essential to create a clear separation in an apartment between areas for living and sleeping. Keeping these areas distinct allowed an apartment to retain the feel of a private home.
Candela worked for most of his career with a close-knit network of Italian immigrants, on projects financed either by the developer Anthony Campagna or the Paterno Brothers firm, with whom Candela built 40 buildings. (Two of the Paterno sisters married Anthony Campagna and his brother.) The Clayton was a project with Campagna— a 15-story building on land Campagna had purchased from the William Waldorf Astor estate—a symbolic, as well as literal, transfer of power from the old Gilded Age elite to the modern immigrant strivers of the 1920s. In the late 1920s, Candela began to remake the upper reaches of Park and Fifth Avenues into the ultimate in high-rise splendor and excess.
The Wall Street crash in October sent his business plunging to only two commissions in 1930 and just one the following year.
Candela’s interests took an unusual turn in the late 1930s and into the Second World War with writing and code-breaking. The kind of spatial problem-solving so valuable in an architect translated surprisingly well to more abstract puzzles, and Candela wrote two books on cryptography and taught a class at Hunter College in cryptanalytics, the study of information systems. During the war, he worked for the OSS—the forerunner of the CIA—and according to another family legend, most of his papers were later removed and destroyed by government agents.
Candela died in 1953. In his own time, he wasn’t a name-brand architect. Curator Donald Albrecht calls him an “unsung hero” of the New York cityscape. It’s only in recent decades, as preservation and heritage have become bargaining chips in the real estate marketplace, that he has become synonymous with everything gracious and desirable in the designation “prewar,”
Credits:
“Elegance in the Sky: The Architecture of Rosario Candela” The Museum of the City of New York. exhibition designed by Peter Pennoyer Architects
Joanna Scutts: Rosario Candela and the Invention of High-Rise Luxury; Sara Polsky, editor.
Illustrations from "The New York Apartment Houses of Rosario Candela and James Carpenter" by Andrew Alpern.
