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MASTERY OF THE CRAFT
Jackie O.
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pleted. That year the Times predicted that 1929 would be “the greatest of all building construction years,” and a new multiple-dwelling law went into effect in New York, allowing apartment houses to rise to nineteen stories. In a mere eight months, Candela would design and file plans for six more buildings - 740, 770, 778, and 1220 Park Avenue and 834 and 1040 Fifth Avenue - that are “the most magnificent assemblage of extraordinary apartments ever produced by any architect,” according to Andrew Alpern, “the final display of fireworks before the Depression descended.”
Candela’s innovations, listed singly, may seem mundane, but they added up to something extraordinary. As the architectural designer David Netto has noted, Candela thickened walls to hide columns, structural framing, plumbing risers, and building mechanical systems. In his buildings, protruding radiators disappeared beneath deep windows, and rooms and windows were re-proportioned, “endowing [them] with a feeling of greater space and balance.”
The architect Donald Wrobleski, who has made a lifetime study of Candela, praises his use of visual axes, diagonals that “produce a panoramic view upon entering” a Candela apartment. “This gives complete orientation of the sort that one might expect in a great country house,” Wrobleski writes. Thanks to Candela’s genius, windows are perfectly framed in doorways, daylight is maximized throughout, and not only the public rooms but also the hidden sleeping quarters on the second floor of the duplexes are immediately perceived as elements of an integrated whole. Yet uncannily, privacy is maintained.
Jackie O: A Candela Girl
There were two blessed events in James T. Lee’s family in the summer of 1929. A granddaughter Jacqueline Lee Bouvier, Janet and Black Jack’s first child was born on July 28, 1929. A few days in early August, the 740 Park Avenue Corporation (where Jackie was raised) was born. The handsomely printed prospectus for 740 Park made Lee’s audacity clear. He’d set out to build a stack of mansions, four triplex mansionettes and another twenty grand duplex apartments…it was a beehive of apartments , each fit for its own queen. Candela proposed (and built) a 506-room fortress occupying twentytwo thousand square feet covering half a block on Park Avenue and most of Seventy-First Street.
Jackie and Lee (Jackie’s younger sister) had a blissful life, doted on by servants in a Park Avenue apartment, each with her own room and a playroom besides. “I lived in New York City until I was thirteen,” Jackie later recalled. “I hated dolls, loved dogs and horses, and had skinned knees and braces on my teeth for what must have seemed an interminable length of time to my family. I read a lot when I was little, much of which was too old for me. There were Chekhov and Shaw in the room where I had to take naps and I never slept but sat on the windowsill reading, then scrubbed the soles of my feet so the nurse would not see that I was out of bed.” P
Adapted from “740 Park” by Michael Gross. Copyright © 2005 by Idee Fixe Ltd. Published by Broadway Books, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Jackie O. at the Met Gala
