Architect of Government Buildings
While first focused on earning a living, he never abandoned his special design passion and eventually was able to improve neighborhood exterior and interior conditions for people working inside his designs.
MF was born in New York City. His father was an insurance representative, his mother a teacher.
EARLY INTERESTS
MF grew up in the city’s public housing and began thinking early about urban design. “In kindergarten, I was building housing developments with highways between them.”
COLLEGE
Following high school graduation, MF earned a degree in architecture from the Cooper Union.
BALANCING DESIGN PASSION WITH NEED TO EARN A LIVING
MF’s college courses exposed him to different types of structural designs. His passion became unconventional building designs but to earn a basic living, he settled for what he thought would be a stopgap job with the City of New York, which assigned simple architectural tasks such as drafting blueprints to renovate locker rooms for sanitation workers.
EVENTUALLY ABLE TO UTILIZE HIS PASSION WHILE EARNING A LIVING
During MF’s 40-year career with the NY City Sanitation Department, he became an in-house architect, a project manager and finally the Director of Special Projects, all the while never giving up on a singular crusade: to transform civic architecture, from being exercises in intrusive mediocrity, as the public tended to see such buildings, to being something worthy of approval and even veneration.
Most famously – eventually but not at first – he designed a salt-storage shed on the western fringe of the TriBeCa neighborhood in Manhattan. Glacially blue and rising 69 feet, it is called the “Spring Street Salt Shed”, but it appears, with a little imagination, to form, out of concrete, a coarse grain of salt. The initial plans for the project were criticized by celebrities living in the area but an architectural critic for the New York Times reviewed the plan and wrote: “Opponents of the sanitation project in Hudson Square may not have gotten exactly what they wanted. But they were fortunate. They got something better. I can’t think of a better public sculpture to land in New York than the shed.”
DESIGNING TO IMPROVE WORKING CONDITIONS INSIDE A BUILDING
Asked by a community board member about why there were so many windows in a truck garage he had designed for the city, MF replied: “Because there are people inside.”
CAREER SATISFACTION
MF said his secret to overcoming community opposition to his architectural plans was to build the best building in the neighborhood. “I keep learning from one building to the other. I may not make a ton of money, but I’m having fun.”
Many of MF’s designs have won awards, including an Honor Award from the 2018 American Institute of Architects.
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Editor’s note – This career story was written during the first phase of preparing a library of such stories. Then I was purposefully avoiding mentioning whether the story was based on my personal interview or a news article such as an obituary, concerned that an obituary would appear less relevant. I’m certain the source here was the New York Times newspaper. Since then, I have opted to disclose names of deceased persons whose identities were published within their obituary. And I gladly credit the obituary writer and publisher. No A.I. has been or will ever be involved.
