NY Times
High-Rise Architect Sails Proudly in Mainstream
The architect Costas Kondylis, in the sales office of Atelier, with a model of the building, which he designed.
By ROBIN POGREBIN
February 5, 2007
Costas Kondylis certainly doesn’t look like a troublemaker.
In jacket and tie, with slicked-back silver hair, he comes across as a successful architect enjoying the fruits of his 40-year experience in New York — which he is. But he also happens to be the designer of some of the city’s most polarizing projects, including Donald Trump’s various towers, the Plaza Hotel’s renovation and four residential towers in the far West 40s that some architecture aficionados dismiss as dull blots on the skyline.
Mr. Kondylis is clearly not uncomfortable in the middle of controversy. He has established a 185-member office, completed 75 buildings in New York and currently has 15 more in the works. If the architecture profession hasn’t exalted him as much as it has some others, the city’s developers keep hiring him. Again and again and again.
“I did not design museums and philharmonic halls — that’s Frank Gehry territory,” Mr. Kondylis said in a recent interview at his office. “But I always push design, and our buildings were always ahead of the game, and I think now we are in the design mainstream.”
Not everyone considers the mainstream a good place to be. “Things are changing in New York in a positive way,” said the architect Richard Meier, who suggested that Mr. Kondylis’s aesthetic “is sort of where it was, not where it’s going.”
“Costas is a traditional architect for developers who want traditional buildings in New York,” added Mr. Meier, who said he was replaced by Mr. Kondylis on a project near Gracie Mansion because “the developer wanted something traditional and didn’t want a good contemporary building.”
Mr. Kondylis’s clients include several of the city’s major developers, like the Related Companies, Vornado Realty Trust and Forest City Ratner Companies. But his name is perhaps most closely associated with Mr. Trump.
Mr. Kondylis designed the Trump International Hotel and Tower at Columbus Circle, several buildings at Trump Place in the West 60s along the Hudson River, and Trump World Tower near the United Nations, whose 90 stories claim the title of the world’s tallest residential building.
“Costas is an architect with great aesthetic taste who can also draw plans,” Mr. Trump said. “He’s never been given proper credit until recently. He’s starting to get it now.”
While many New Yorkers consider Mr. Trump’s buildings too shiny, too tall or just tasteless, Mr. Kondylis makes no apologies for his association with the developer. “He’s an entrepreneur like all the American entrepreneurs — the Paleys and the Carnegies,” Mr. Kondylis said. “They had guts.”
Yet he acknowledged that he doesn’t like everything Mr. Trump demands. “He wanted a gold building — gold this and gold that,” Mr. Kondylis said of Trump World Tower, which ended up bronze (Mr. Kondylis’s preference). “The only compromise was the way the canopy had to incorporate bronze and the Trump name,” he added. “The way I justify it for myself, it’s the branding of the building. That’s something sometimes you have to deal with. Like designing for Gucci, it’s maintaining a brand.”
Larry A. Silverstein, the developer of the World Trade Center site, enlisted Mr. Kondylis for two buildings on the far West Side. The first, called Riverplace I, on West 42nd Street between 11th and 12th Avenues, has about 900 apartments and was completed in 2001. The other, on 11th Avenue between 41st and 42nd Streets, is under way. In the same neighborhood, for the Moinian Group, Mr. Kondylis designed the Atelier at 635 West 42nd Street and a high-rise tower now being built at 605 West 42nd Street.
“He designs an attractive, buildable, functional building,” Mr. Silverstein said. “If I’m going to do a residential building in New York, the most natural thing in the world is to pick up the phone and call Costas.”
At a time when many high-profile architects are challenging the city’s skyline with unorthodox designs, Mr. Kondylis’s more conventional style can seem like a throwback. But there is still a market for it. “He brings a level of sophistication and elegance to middle-class aspirations,” said Fredric M. Bell, executive director of the New York chapter of the American Institute of Architects. “He’s a compromiser. He’s someone who takes the realities of the marketplace and tries to work around the edges.”
Despite Mr. Kondylis’s financial success, his architecture is often ignored by the critics. An exception was Herbert Muschamp’s review of Trump World Tower in The New York Times: “It punches through the morbid notion that the Midtown skyline should be forever dominated by two Art Deco skyscrapers, the Empire State and Chrysler buildings, as if these cherished icons couldn’t stand the competition.”
Mr. Kondylis remains unfazed by the lack of approbation. “Of course I care,” he said. “I’m very interested in what architects think of my work. But that’s not what guides me. There is a suspicion among developers when you care too much. They think you’re designing for the cover of an architecture magazine.”
The Greek-born Mr. Kondylis came to New York 40 years ago, after working in Switzerland. He grew up a fan of industrial design and showed an early affinity for architecture: as a child, when his parents were building a home in Athens, he would visit the site and give them his opinion. He was enthralled by residential building. “It’s a decision you make early in your life,” he said. “With housing, you have a sense of accomplishing something on a social level. You build neighborhoods.”
While some New Yorkers have complained that his projects cast shadows, bring congestion or clash with the prevailing aesthetic, he said he stands by his designs as vertical neighborhoods.
“I believe in skyscrapers,” he said. “It’s the most environmental form of urban development.”
Mr. Kondylis, however, lives on a low floor of an Upper East Side prewar building and said his apartment was modeled after his image of the architect Mies van der Rohe in his red-and-white-checked wing chair— “warm, sympathetic, cozy.”
“I don’t think the apartment has to make a statement about who I am,” Mr. Kondylis said. “I like it to be soothing to my psyche.”
He has happily embraced his reputation as the Developer’s Architect — designing the maximum square footage with materials that meet the budget. “My concern is to create value for the developer, because they’re my clients,” he said.
Mr. Kondylis said his conscience is clear: While he has made some concessions to developers along the way, he has never sold out.
“Sometimes we have battles,” he said. “Some I win, and some I lose, and some I come out O.K. I can’t think of one building I never want to associate my name with. I push the project to the limit until I feel I’m losing a client. We can’t afford to lose a client.
“We can afford to, but it’s not professional.”
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