Rosario Candela and the New York Apartment: 1927–37 by David Netto, Peter Pennoyer, and Paul Goldberger. Rizzoli, 304 pp., $45.
My first nature was an Upper West Side apartment building: the lobby an eternal frozen pond of white marble, a hedgerow of wrought iron shielding the passage from the building’s entryway to the elevators; once inside the apartment, a molded ceiling of hexagonal honeycombs, the smell of wood, the feel of that wood, the honeyed color of that wood glazed by early morning light through high windows. There was also something about the scale and the proportions of the place, especially for a small child, that felt natural. Maybe this is because the apartment’s plan still followed simple ratios observed in the natural world, passed down to the modern West since Vitruvius as principles of architecture. The building went up in 1910, and the apartment had been left untouched by various waves of subdivisions during economic downturns elsewhere in the city. What I’m trying to say is that both building and apartment felt not “ro…
