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"View Slideshow\n\nLike crocuses in spring, new apartment buildings\u2014tall and short, skinny and fat, fancy and plain\u2014are breaking ground all over Manhattan. But long live the dowagers, those haughty, high-ceilinged monuments to prewar civility that line New York's grander avenues. However, if you look closely, there are dowagers and dowagers, and those along Central Park West are a sorority apart. From the massive Dakota, with the dark stone window trim set against the golden ashlar, to the lither and blither Art D\u00E9co masterworks, to the named buildings like the San Remo with twinned spires, they are more diverse and idiosyncratic than their classicized sisters along Park and Fifth avenues, where cornice lines agree and point together toward a common infinity.\n\nLike their buildings, the residents of Central Park West are, traditionally, less traditional than their neighbors across Central Park. Case in point: the client who came to Lee F. Mindel and Peter L. Shelton with a sprawling penthouse in a pre\u2013World War I building. Many CPW apartments are rambling affairs that once competed with town houses to accommodate the large families of other times. The client, however, had just two children but brought an unusual program. He is a philanthropist with a foundation specializing in nature conservation and animal and human rights, and he wanted the grand public rooms facing Central Park to accommodate not only the family but also associates and guests attending meetings and receptions. The floor plan would be configured to accommodate both the formal and the family functions, with two entrances and two stairways up to the 6,000-square-foot roof garden. \"Our mission was to create a backdrop for the exchange of ideas,\" says Mindel.\n\nMindel and Shelton are compassionate Modernists, architects who take and respectfully reinterpret historical buildings in contemporary terms. For them Modernism does not break with history but continues it. \"The owner was taken with the history of the building, and we never wanted to abandon the past, because we loved the building,\" says Shelton. \"But how do you work on a historic building without resorting to restoration? How do you bring history forward without being a history victim?\"\n\nFor the architects, old does not necessarily mean good, and they set out to distill what distinguished the apartment, making the core of its historicism stronger by recasting the apartment with an open floor plan. In traditional spaces, furniture hugs the wall, but an open plan ushers furniture off the wall: \"You need to work with light and air and space in the context of historicism,\" says Mindel.\n\nThe apartment had never suffered the erasures that typify old addresses that have changed hands many times. Especially in the living and sitting rooms, which face the park, the character remained a cross between Beaux Arts Revival and Arts and Crafts, with gridded wood paneling behind an ornate carved wood fireplace surround. Fluted columns supported a mezzanine overlooking the 14-foot-high living space. First the architects devised an open and flowing sequence of rooms squared to the apartment's shell. Then, within the new layout, they extended the paneling from the living room down a gallery hyphenating the front and back, and into the master bedroom, so that the new treatment seems original to the 100-foot-long apartment. The messages are mixed: The white paint refreshes paneling that retains a sense of age. Crown moldings conceal the vents. Shelton and Mindel complemented the old by building a walnut-clad tower with a staircase up to the penthouse family room, and a walnut closet between the study and second living room.\n\nSometimes architecture is best served dry, and by being spare and disciplined in their touch, the architects set the stage for the real actors in the space, a collection of historic furniture. Mindel is fluent in his knowledge of 20th-century Modernist furniture designed by architects, and in the quiet of the shell, he curated a habitable and comfortable gallery. The art is simply located off the wall, in space, configured in Beaux Arts geometries that reinforce the square geometries of the rooms, scoping the fundamental principles of the building into the furniture. The sectional groupings\u2014some square, some circular\u2014reiterate the Beaux Arts spirit of the building.\n\nNo single style dominates, but the mix of pieces is unified by their high level of craft and conceptual quality. Mindel sites the pieces on sectional rugs with barklike textures that recall the trees outside, and the pieces float in space, like three-dimensional sculpture seen in the round.\n\nThe living room and adjacent sitting room introduce a short course in the history of decorative arts. Secessionist dining chairs from 1905 by Viennese architect Josef Urban circle a round, painted glass dining table by Brazilian architect Joaquim Tenreiro, and a distinguished, beautifully crafted 1910 barrel chair by Eliel Saarinen stands next to the fireplace. Alberto Giacometti sculpted the floor lamp in the adjacent sitting room, near an oval caf\u00E9 table by Adolf Loos. If the front rooms are stately in their verticality, the study goes horizontal with low, floating pieces, including a chaste 1960s Danish desk by Fabricius and Kastholm and reclining armchairs from 1962 by Finnish architect Yrjo Kukkapuro. The pieces all speak to each other across time in the language of abstraction, summarizing a hundred years of invention.\n\nThe sense of authenticity emanates from noble materials that have aged\u2014the worn leather of a 1948 settee by Danish cabinetmaker and designer Jacob Kjaer, for example, and the ebonized wood of a side chair by the Swede Carl Bergsten, from 1906. Mindel and Shelton play these materials off the polished chrome, aluminum and bronze of the kitchen and bar. \"It's a collage, a layering of history, set against elements of our time,\" says Mindel.\n\nJosef Hoffmann and Loos, among other Germanic Modernists, designed gesamtkunstwerks, and Mindel and Shelton here also controlled everything, soup to nuts, from the floor plan to the fabrics. \"When you do it all, you have an opportunity to make the space better by integrating all the elements,\" says Shelton. \"The shell is not alien to the contents, and the furniture completes the shell.\"\n\nThrough their process of gentle rather than radical transformation, the apartment seems fresh, new and high IQ. At the same time, the design suggests that the apartment was built this way back in the early 1900s, and the same discerning family collected each new wave of invention, creating a gallery of heirlooms over several generations.\n\n\"We were trying to distill it to be the best the building could have been, empowering history without reiterating it,\" says Mindel. \"The design represents a collage of history, but in the present. It's modern without alienating the past, and historical without alienating the present and future. I think the apartment looks like today.\""^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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