Centennial Man

Chances are Hans Noë, an architect and Holocaust survivor who did a stint at Mies van der Rohe’s office, palled around with sculptor Tony Smith and ran famed SoHo watering hole Fanelli’s for decades, has had a more eventful life than you. In mid-October, the National Museum of Mathematics staged a public conversation with the nonagenarian, and it was clear the audience had come prepared to hear the man spin a yarn. Wearing a ball cap that cast his eyes in shadow, he certainly looked the part of groused raconteur. Moderator Lawrence Weschler tried his best to steer Noë across the many contours of his biography—coming of age as a Jew in the fascist-controlled city of Czernowitz, now part of Ukraine (“In those days, life was just a throwaway thing. … Nothing has changed”); immigrating to New York, where he studied architecture at the Cooper Union; his friendship with Smith, whom he considered a mentor, and initial antipathy toward Mark Rothko (his paintings “made me seasick”); the time he spent restoring watches in San Francisco, where he was stationed during the Korean…