A Museum of his Own
Ali Tayar treated his Midtown apartment like a career retrospective
Peter Webster -- Interior Design, 9/1/2009 12:00:00 AM
"I remember when I first came to New York, more than 20 years ago," Turkish-born architect Ali Tayar says. "Standing in the Museum of Modern Art sculpture garden, I looked up at the building across the street and thought, That's where I want to live." It's a scene of primal aesthetic desire experienced by any number of design aficionados on first eyeing the Rockefeller Apartments, a modernist co-op with curvaceous brick facades on both sides of a block in the middle of Midtown. So when Tayar was able to buy one of the coveted apartments, he calls the event "a case of answered prayers."
Developed by John D. Rockefeller, Jr., and Nelson Rockefeller during the Great Depression as sophisticated pieds-à-terre for well-heeled suburbanites, the 1937 building was designed by Harrison & Fouilhoux's Wallace Harrison, a young architect then in the grip of the International Style, which he practiced with a skilled and humanizing hand. (He subsequently lost that knack. Exactly 30 years later, his firm Harrison & Abramovitz designed the Metropolitan Opera House in a style that critic Pauline Kael wickedly but accurately dubbed Monumental Temporary.) Not only are the Rockefeller Apartments probably Harrison's finest work, but many architectural connoisseurs would agree when Tayar says, "This, to me, is one of the most beautiful buildings in New York."
The apartments' open layouts and less-is-more details were as fastidiously designed as the building's soigné exterior. Tayar's 1,000-square-foot one-bedroom had survived mostly intact, with a semicircular bay-windowed dining alcove, a white tiled bathroom, herringbone parquet, flush doors, and chrome hardware, but everything was obscured by a disfiguring layer of decorative pancake makeup. "Wallpaper, coats and coats of paint, chintzy drapes and swags, 'neo-traditional' library shelves—you couldn't see the bones through all the muck," he says. "But I knew exactly how it was going to look."
Working with a general contractor that Tayar describes as "almost a partner on the project," he ripped out the folderol and restored the apartment to its pristine prewar state. Perfectly even white plaster walls have an elegantly practical picture rail in the form of a simple groove cut 4 inches below the ceiling. Doorknobs' flat chrome disks look as up-to-the-minute today as they did in the hands of their swellegant owners back in the '30's. And the living area's window frames, stripped and repainted, form a grid with a skybox view of the MoMA sculpture garden.
The mantelpiece in the living area wasn't original, so Tayar used three cast-aluminum boxes—a lintel on two pedestals—to create a new one. It looks right at home with the jigsaw-puzzle rug, a nod to a game that seemed quintessentially American to him as a child in Istanbul. Likewise, nothing remained of the original galley kitchen, a sliver clearly intended as a place for some slim-hipped hostess to mix cocktails, not cook a rack of lamb. In that spirit, he designed a completely new kitchen with a two-burner cooktop, a half fridge, and a compact dishwasher. Cabinetry is faced in sunny yellow or wood-grain plastic laminate, while hardware and the ceiling fixture are nickel.
Almost all the apartment's furnishings were designed by Tayar, and they represent a time line of his career, which began with architecture studies at Germany's Universität Stuttgart and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. "After graduating from M.I.T., I worked on airplane hangars, so my background is engineering design," he says, adding that he then became the project architect on FTL Associates's portable band shell, used for symphony concerts in parks. "I started sketching little structures, including something I thought was a gazebo." When he left in 1992 to open the firm now known as Parallel Design Partnership, he found himself without any building projects—and the gazebo became the base of the side table now in his living area. With four graceful bent-plywood vaults, the base in fact resembles an architectural maquette. He had found a way of putting the engineering principles that intrigued him into practice on a smaller scale. For the next few years, furniture design became a large part of the nascent firm's business. Additional examples in the apartment include Nick's Trivet, a tripartite mahogany table base that folds flat for storage; the Rasamny chair, three identical sections of extruded aluminum held together by a teak frame; and the blocky Paola's lamp, named for MoMA curator Paola Antonelli, whose apartment Parallel Design renovated.
Several of his other pieces have appeared in exhibitions at MoMA. And there's a further connection. His bedroom is dominated by a large white modular cabinet designed in 1963 by Fritz Haller, whose "systems" approach has been a big influence on Tayar. Equipped with disk drawer pulls similar to Harrison's doorknobs, the cabinet is a classic that's part of MoMA's permanent collection as well as part of the furnishings in all the curatorial and administrative offices. USM Modular Furniture, which manufactures the Haller system, also owns a Swiss hotel that Tayar renovated. "I told them I have a view of perhaps the biggest installation of their furniture in the world," he says with a laugh. It's the modernist spirit, gleefully triumphant.
Photography by Eric Laignel.
PROJECT TEAMNICK NEW; MARIA VILLAMIL: PARALLEL DESIGN PARTNERSHIP. DEAN & SILVA: GENERAL CONTRACTOR.
PRODUCT SOURCESFROM FRONT TRIPYRAMID STRUCTURES: CONNECTOR (ENTRY), NIGHTSTAND (BEDROOM). ARTEK: SOFA (LIVING AREA). KNOLL: SOFA FABRIC. DAVID WEEKS STUDIO: FLOOR LAMPS. GENEVA LAB: SPEAKER, STAND. HARRY ALLEN DESIGN: COLUMN LAMP. TOM KIM: CUSTOM BENCHES. ERICH THEOPHILE: CUSTOM COCKTAIL TABLE, PLATE, BOOKENDS (LIVING AREA), CUSTOM CEILING FIXTURE (KITCHEN). GENERAL ELECTRIC COMPANY: REFRIGERATOR, DISHWASHER (KITCHEN). DE'LONGHI: COOKTOP. DORNBRACHT: SINK FITTINGS. WILSONART INTERNATIONAL: CABINET, COUNTER SURFACING. BENZA DESIGN: CLOCK. FORBO FLOORING SYSTEMS COMPANY: FLOORING (KITCHEN), WINDOWSILL SURFACING. SCHREINEREI SCHNIDRIG: TABLE (DINING AREA), CUSTOM LED LAMP (LIVING AREA). PRODUCT & DESIGN: CUSTOM ROUND TABLE (LIVING AREA). MAHARAM: CHAIR FABRIC (LIVING AREA), WINDOW SHADE FABRIC (BEDROOM). JSL CARPET CORP.: CUSTOM RUG (LIVING AREA). TODRIN INDUSTRIES: CANDLEHOLDERS. USM MODULAR FURNITURE: CABINET (BEDROOM). LOT-EK: FOUR-LEGGED LAMP. SPINNEYBECK: HEADBOARD UPHOLSTERY. AREA: BEDCOVER. RUCKSTUHL: RUG.
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