The Esquire SoHo apartment occupies two spectacular penthouses of the SoHo Mews building, one of the last completed commissions by architect Charles Gwathmey of Gwathmey Siegel & Associates. Gwathmey, who died at the age of 71 on August 3, 2009 (just as the SoHo Mews was being completed), was one of the most accomplished and important American architects of the last century.

He began his career like many other architects, courageously landing a commission to design an inexpensive home for his parents. Recently returned to the U.S. from a Fulbright scholarship, and influenced by LeCorbusier, Gwathmey created a design that was a heady mix of cubes, planes, and cylinders. The house had a shed roof, and “worst” of all, it was sheathed in vertical cedar.

Gwathmey’s design was so radical that no builder in the Hamptons would accept the job. He found a builder in New York City willing to travel and helped construct the house himself. At the age of 27, he had established what might have become a solid if uncelebrated career—that was, however, until 1967, when the Museum of Modern Art included him in the landmark exhibition “Five Architects.” With that, Gwathmey’s spectacular rise was almost assured. Along with Peter Eisenman, Richard Meier, Michael Graves, and John Hejduk, the New York Five all ascended to prominent roles in American architecture. Perhaps not as well-known as Graves or Meier, certainly not as hermetic as Eisenman or Hejduk, Gwathmey alone of the five continued to build his practice with an unerring focus on high modernist design.

In 1968, Gwathmey joined with longtime friend Robert Siegel, FAIA, to establish Gwathmey Siegel & Associates Architects LLC: the firm has more than 400 buildings to its name, and numerous awards. Gwathmey’s work includes some of the most spectacular private homes in the country, designed for clients like Steven Spielberg and David Geffen. His public work, however, is more well-known—including the controversial 1992 addition to Frank Lloyd Wright’s Guggenheim Museum (which actually respected and achieved Wright’s original plan for the structure). Numerous corporate and private interiors and two new towers under construction in Manhattan all demonstrate Gwathmey Siegel’s broad reach and trusted expertise.

As a piece of architecture, the SoHo Mews is not radical. It is a building that shows sophistication, restraint, and a deep appreciation for the peculiar logic of luxury real estate development. But more than any of these, it demonstrates a respect for history. The facade recalls the classical cast-iron faces of traditional SoHo factories and warehouses: the play of light and shadow, and the strength and vitality of industrial production. Yet the language of the building is also wholly modern, rarified, intellectualized, rendered in brushed steel. It is the work of a master who knows the project of modernity is to bring American design’s best traditions forward into a new light, with understanding, generosity of spirit, and honesty. Throughout the arc of his career, Gwathmey’s work embodied this simple truth. With his exit, American architecture has lost an icon.

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