New York developer Melvyn Kaufman, who built half a dozen buildings in midtown Manhattan, died at the age of 81.
According to The New York Times, "Kaufman was a romantic, a surrealist, a purveyor of kitsch and a genuine iconoclast and rebel," Carter B. Horsley, a former writer on architecture for The New York Times and The New York Post, said in a telephone interview on Friday. "He was a maverick, and his rivals considered him something of an oddball, but they also respected the quality of his buildings."
Kaufman pioneered the use of lobbys being not just the entrance to a building, but a place for people to hang out.
The strange things that Kaufman were extensive. Also according to The New York Times, Other design elements were more covert -- unorthodox Easter eggs that Mr. Kaufman placed in his buildings for the benefit of those in the know. There is the nude woman at 747 Third, a sculpture tucked so discreetly into a space between the entranceway's two revolving doors that she can be glimpsed, fleetingly, only in midrevolution as one enters or leaves.
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