Giorgio Cavaglieri, Urban Preservationist, dies at 95
By Douglas Martin05/18/07
(Photograph by Don Hogan Charles, The New York Times, 1999).
Giorgio Cavaglieri, an architect who took his fascination with how buildings and cities change over time from his native Italy to New York, where he helped start and define the city’s preservation movement, died on Tuesday in Manhattan. He was 95.
His nephew Andrew Tesoro announced the death.
Mr. Cavaglieri designed airfields for Mussolini’s army; worked with Rosario Candela, the renowned designer of luxury Manhattan apartment buildings; and won many awards. But his best-known work is probably the Jefferson Market Library in Greenwich Village, which he restored in the mid-1960s.
That building was saved after preservationists had been unable to stop the demolition of Penn Station, and the project is generally regarded as the first real instance of successful historic preservation in New York City. The battle to convert what had been a courthouse, considered the city’s premier High Victorian Gothic building, was led by Margot Gayle and other preservationists.
But it was Mr. Cavaglieri’s work to restore — he used the word refresh — the building that made the dream reality. He began with four years of preliminary study, then integrated modern library facilities, like air-conditioning, elevators and furniture, into the turreted Victorian fantasy.
He carefully differentiated old details and new ones. He took countless photos to ensure accuracy in replacing a stained-glass window and carved black walnut doors. But features he designed as new — rather than copied — were contemporary in material and style. The new entrance to the old circular stair tower, for instance, was through a sleek glass door set into the old carved limestone. The most striking addition was a stark catwalk above the main reading room.
During the time he was working on the Jefferson Market building, Mr. Cavaglieri also altered the old Astor Library at 425 Lafayette Street into Joseph Papp’s Public Theater.
He opposed freezing the past in time, and some of his solutions were innovative: his 1983 renovation of a row of town houses on Madison Avenue, for example, involved a dramatically stylish red granite front. Christopher Gray, who writes the “Streetscapes” column in the Real Estate section of The New York Times, wrote that today’s preservationists would almost certainly see this as an insult to the original design.
Mr. Cavaglieri told Mr. Gray, “I don’t think it would be wise or right to interpret the opinion of a dead man.”
Mr. Tesoro, also an architect, said his uncle was inspired by the way buildings have gone through successive transformations over centuries in Italy and spoke of actually seeing layers of time as he strolled the streets of Rome. The term he coined for this phenomenon — adaptive reuse — has become a watchword of many preservationists.
“Michelangelo didn’t repeat Bramante’s drawings, and Bernini left his own imprint, too,” Mr. Cavaglieri said.
Giorgio Cavaglieri was born in Venice on Aug. 11, 1911, and in his early 20s became head of his household when his father, an insurance executive, died. He graduated with honors in engineering and architecture from Milan Politecnico and worked as an in-house architect for the Italian government’s insurance company, which had employed his father. He designed airfields for the Italian military.
When Fascist law prohibited Jews from working and living freely in Italy, he left with some of his family for New York in December 1939 and sent for other members later. Mr. Tesoro said Mr. Cavaglieri was irritated about having to leave because he relished his architectural work and thought European design led the world.
The Italian government had seized the family’s assets. The family found a $15-a-month apartment on Madison Avenue, and Mr. Cavaglieri found design work in Baltimore. There he met Norma Sanford, whom he married in 1942. They soon moved to New York, where he worked briefly with Mr. Candela. He and his wife had no children, and she died in 1971. Mr. Cavaglieri is survived by Natalie Meadow, his companion.
Mr. Cavaglieri joined the United States Army and traveled with American troops from Normandy to Berlin. His professional skills were put to use testing bridges for safety and adapting German barracks for Allied use. He won a Bronze Star.
After his discharge, he formed his own firm. His reputation for creatively altering buildings developed in the 1950s, after he turned two older Midtown buildings into union halls.
He was president of the Municipal Art Society in 1963 and helped lead the fight against the proposed drastic alteration of Grand Central Terminal. He was also chairman of the National Institute of Architectural Education and president of the New York chapter of the American Institute of Architects, among many other leadership posts. One of the last awards he won was the Lucy G. Moses Preservation Leadership Award, presented by the New York Landmarks Conservancy in 2002.
One of Mr. Cavaglieri’s battles was for preserving not just great buildings designed by great architects, but also those by “the Joe Blokes.” Similarly, he railed in a letter to The Times in 1985 against preserving just the facades of landmark buildings as a way to “delude the public into thinking that they are preserving the appearance of the environment while still satisfying the greed of the investors.”
Mr. Cavaglieri worked every day until he was 93, when he badly injured his right arm in a fall. He then learned to paint watercolors with his left hand, fulfilling his first ambition, to be a painter.
Denis Kuhn, 65, Dies; Restored New York Landmarks
By Stuart Lavietes
05/18/07
(Photograph by Eric Liebowitz, 2004)
By Stuart Lavietes
05/18/07
(Photograph by Eric Liebowitz, 2004)
Denis G. Kuhn, an architect who oversaw many major restoration and reuse projects in New York City, including the transformation of the Alexander Hamilton Custom House into the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian and the conversion of the old Police Department headquarters in Little Italy into elegant apartments, died on May 10 in the Dominican Republic while touring a project site. He was 65 and lived in Manhasset, N.Y.The cause was a heart attack, his firm, Ehrenkrantz Eckstut & Kuhn Architects, announced.
The Custom House, a Beaux-Arts building at Bowling Green on the southern tip of Manhattan, was Mr. Kuhn’s most notable work. Designed in 1900 by Cass Gilbert, it had been empty since the mid-1970s when Mr. Kuhn began restoring its elaborate facade and grand, elliptical rotunda and reconfiguring its interior as a museum.
The building, which also houses the Federal Bankruptcy Court, reopened in 1994. Its Diker Pavilion, which opened last fall, was also one of Mr. Kuhn’s projects.
Before working on the Custom House, Mr. Kuhn had revived another downtown landmark, the police headquarters, which had fallen into disuse and been abandoned in 1973. Mr. Kuhn’s restoration of that 1909 Beaux-Arts palace resulted in what The New York Times architecture critic Paul Goldberger, writing in 1990, called “probably the grandest Manhattan apartment residence south of the Dakota.”
Mr. Goldberger praised Mr. Kuhn’s work as “one of the rare renovations that leave a landmark building better off than it was before,” explaining that “everything added to the interior is sympathetic to the original building, but little of it replicates the original architecture.”
Denis Glen Kuhn, whose first name is pronounced Dennis, was born on Feb. 17, 1942, in Queens. He received a bachelor’s degree in architecture from Pratt Institute in 1964 and joined Ehrenkrantz Eckstut & Whitelaw in 1979. He was elected a fellow of the American Institute of Architects in 1993, and his name was added to the firm’s four years later.
He is survived by his wife, Gudrun, of Manhasset; his sons Chris, of Larchmont, N.Y., and Daniel, of Mamaroneck, N.Y.; his daughter, Rebekka Kuhn, of New Haven; his mother, Mildred, of Woodside, Queens; and four grandchildren.
Mr. Kuhn’s work was not limited to Manhattan or New York City. In 1987 he transformed a dreary 1950s junior high school in Flushing, Queens, into a much-admired center for the law school of the City University of New York.
In the late 1990s Mr. Kuhn restored the historic Union Station in Kansas City, Mo., adding a new wing to house Science City, an interactive museum and theme park. At about the same time he designed Hollywood and Highland, the huge entertainment and retail development in Los Angeles that includes the Kodak Theater, designed by David Rockwell, which is home of the Academy Awards ceremony.
Not all Mr. Kuhn’s projects look to the past. Earlier this year his firm received an award from the American Institute of Architects for his master plan for a proposed suburban community in Gaithersburg, Md., outside Washington.
The institute praised Mr. Kuhn’s blueprint for the development — which would include residences, stores, a high school and parks — as “an excellent model to be used for the redevelopment of worn suburban sprawl” and a strategy “for the creation of the 21st-century sustainable city.”
