Gene Kaufman certainly ranks as one of the city's most prolific architects. During the third quarter alone, he had 16 residential and hotel projects totaling well over 1 million square feet underway around town. Yet for all his commercial success, one thing largely eludes him: even a smidgen of love from critics.
When he filed permits for a 79-room hotel in Chelsea last year, for instance, a local real estate blog referred to the designer as the "dark lord of architectural blandness." Weeks later, another critic called the designer's execution of the world's tallest Holiday Inn, which opened its 492 rooms downtown in October, "another atrocity courtesy of Gene Kaufman." Such snipes—some of which are unfit for publication in a family newspaper—have increasingly dogged Mr. Kaufman as he nears 30 years at the helm of his namesake architecture firm.
Yet his skill in landing jobs—this year, another 40 Kaufman properties will be either designed or built—speaks volumes about what it takes to succeed in New York as an architect, as well as, for better and for worse, why the city looks the way it does. The fact is that in a metropolis with some of the nation's highest land and building costs, Gene Kaufman Architects delivers more of the one thing developers -value above all else: profit.
"The value of a [hotel] project when we do it is usually a couple million dollars more than if somebody else does it," said Mr. Kaufman, seated at his desk behind a high, undulating black partition in his SoHo office. "That's why people come to us."
Just ask the city's most prolific hotelier, Sam Chang. In 1997, the then-aspiring developer of smaller, budget hotels—many in the boroughs outside Manhattan—tapped Mr. Kaufman for a seemingly impossible project. It was a proposed 65-room Hampton Inn in the South Street Seaport Historic District, a project where the architect first demonstrated an odd mix of ingenuity and shrewdness that helped launch his career.
The hostelry's location was perfect, but the size of the lot and zoning constraints made it nearly impossible to build enough rooms to cover land and construction costs. Somehow, the designer would have to find a way to shoehorn more rooms.
"So we told them that we will put in this brand-new thing, and people will come to stay in the hotel just to see it," Mr. Kaufman said. "It's called a flat-screen TV."
True, the sets were initially budgeted to cost $10,000 a pop, but they also took up far less valuable space than traditional TVs—enough to allow Mr. Kaufman to shrink the width of each room enough to squeeze in one additional room onto each floor. That change alone was enough to boost the hotel's projected revenue, quickly persuading the chain's executives to go ahead with the project, which indeed has proved wildly successful.
Since then, Mr. Kaufman has designed about 50 hotels, often with Mr. Chang's McSam Hotel Group as the developer, and has found myriad ways of reconfiguring rooms and shrinking construction schedules and costs, all while sticking to guidelines imposed by many hotel chains on everything from ceiling heights in the lobby to room layouts.
Among other things, he has an in-house team of consultants focused on getting projects through labyrinthine bureaucracies like the city's Department of Buildings. The fact that his designs often feature plain-Jane façades, and buildings set back from the street wall to ensure that every floor is exactly the same size, also help cut costs.
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| The world's tallest Holiday Inn (99 Washington St.), Candlewood Suites (339 W. 39th St.) and 347 Bowery are beloved by clients but loathed by critics of Kaufman-designed hotels. |
Similarly, on the residential side, Mr. Kaufman has a reputation for keeping costs low enough that developers can afford to take chances on projects in iffy areas that others had written off. More than 20 years ago, he and a developer tried to persuade the city to grant permits for an apartment project in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, where they insisted that they could make good money charging monthly rents of a then-¬unheard-of $1 per square foot.
"They said, 'How are you ever going to get that much money?'"
For the developer, that bet would have paid off handsomely, as rents in the area have since quintupled.
Scores of designs for shoestring apartment buildings and budget hotels that others insisted would never pencil out have handsomely enriched Mr. Kaufman's clients and his own firm, but they have also come at a cost to the 56-year-old's reputation. One writer referred to him as the designer of "craptastic apartment buildings." Yet even some of his harshest critics concede that his budget designs simply reflect what his clients want and what city zoning rules allow.
When Mr. Kaufman was tapped in 2006 for a planned seven-unit residential project at 314 John St. in Prospect Heights, Brooklyn, for example, he produced two very different façade designs. His client, the developer Aljohn Group, cited costs in opting for the cheaper one, since the prices for other elements of the building, such as the foundation and plumbing, are fairly standard.
"At the end of the day, everything in New York City always comes down to money," said Nikolai Fedak, founder of blog New York YIMBY [Yes in My Backyard]. "While rich people are willing to pay the price for top-level design, it just so happens most New Yorkers aren't rich, and neither are the people who come here to visit" and stay in a hotel.
Developers of luxury properties can afford to hire starchitects and set a higher aesthetic bar because they know their buyers will cough up enough cash to justify all the additional sums spent on the finer points of a building—from custom-made windows to marble-clad bathrooms. But for those who aim to build for everybody else, the same math does not work.
"It's very 'in' to say architects can do design on any budget," Mr. Kaufman said in his deadpan delivery. "But I think a lot of criticism [of my buildings] is actually from people who want something for nothing."
Others insist that New York has to offer not just striking properties for those few who can afford them, but something for everybody else, too.
"We need hotels and residential buildings that are not exclusively for the very rich," said Kenneth T. Jackson, a history professor at Columbia University. "To the extent that Gene Kaufman is helping to provide those units, that's a good thing."
And while Mr. Kaufman has designed pricey projects as well, it is the blander ones for which he is known. Oddly enough, they seem out of keeping for a man who has so many connections to high art and design. After graduating from Cornell University, he interned at an architecture firm in Switzerland and went on to work as an associate for world-renowned Uruguayan architect Rafael Viñoly—the designer of what now stands as the tallest residential tower in the hemisphere, 432 Park Ave.—before starting his own firm.
Bowing to the greats
During the last real estate boom, he designed a Williamsburg condo inspired by the design of French architect Le Corbusier, a titan of modernism. And since purchasing a majority stake in well-regarded architecture firm Gwathmey Siegel & Associates in 2011, Mr. Kaufman has led a campaign to save an upstate government office building, designed in the (all too) brutalist style by Paul Rudolph.
Outside the office, he is a devoted museumgoer, along with his wife, Terry Eder, a successful classical pianist. In recent months, Mr. Kaufman has been attempting to purchase the name and assets of their beloved but bankrupt New York City Opera.
It is less surprising, then, that Mr. Kaufman is currently designing a ground-up development of artist studios in Bushwick, Brooklyn, and that he also has done many higher-end projects that have been better received by the same people who criticize his budget hotels. Among those is his design for Hilton's boutique brand, Indigo, in the financial district. YIMBY grudgingly praised it as "actually somewhat appealing." In the same vein, Mr. Kaufman's vision for a Thor Equities hotel on Canal Street was deemed "not that ugly," by Curbed.com, which also described an upcoming project of his a few blocks west as "surprisingly pleasant."
And on the residential side, Mr. Kaufman's work in today's hyperpricey Williamsburg bears little resemblance to designs he came up with in the late 1980s. His work there includes projects such as the Lucent and the Decora.
Even when he's had big bucks to spend, though, Mr. Kaufman's designs have stirred the wrath of some critics. A daring design for a condo on the Bowery prompted The Village Voice to note that the building "may as well come emblazoned with a rainbow 'F—k You!' sign."
But like him or loathe him, it is the pricier side of Mr. Kaufman that the city may be seeing more of as a result of changing market dynamics. The designer's longtime collaborator, Mr. Chang, notes that stratospheric land and construction costs are making budget-hotel development a thing of the past.
"People think there will be a lot more new [budget] hotels, but I think construction will completely slow down," said Mr. Chang, who, having built more of them than anyone else, announced last year that he is retiring.
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