How One Family Dominated Fin-de-Siècle NYC Architecture

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By Curbed Staff  Apr 15, 2014, 4:44pm EDT

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Two of the most important people in the history of New York City's built environment weren't politicians, magnates, or architects. They were two members of a family of builders from Spain. Their surname? Guastavino. It may not ring a bell, but pretty much every New Yorker has seen the work of Rafael Guastavino, Sr. (1842-1908), and his son Rafael Guastavino, Jr. (1872-1950). Their ascent to acclaim typifies the American dream, and it's one that still has missing pieces—but more on that later.

Rafael Sr. was born in Spain and studied at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris. In 1881, he and his eight-year-old son immigrated to the United States, where the two would revolutionize American architecture. They brought with them a vaulted tile ceiling technique whose foundation can be found in a tradition the Moors brought with them to Spain from Africa. But the Guastavinos took it further. Spaces massive and intimate could be draped in intricate tile ceilings. Rafael Sr. made their signature tiles fireproof, while Rafael Jr. would develop ones with better acoustics. Together, they amassed 24 patents and created some of Gotham's most stunning spaces. According to the Museum of the City of New York, which is hosting an ongoing exhibition on them called "Palaces for the People: Guastavino and the Art of Structural Tile," there are 300 Guastavino-annointed spaces in the five boroughs alone, and over 1,000 of them across the country.

"These are works of art that are actually functional as well. So, in the same way that the Brooklyn Bridge is recognized as a great work of art, Guastavino vaults are also works of art," exhibit co-curator John Oschendorf, who is head of the Guastavino Research Project at MIT (which is a thing), told me. "They're functional. They're load-bearing. But they're also beautiful to behold and generations of Americans have loved these spaces without necessarily knowing that one family was behind all of them."

"I would argue that the Guastavino method was sort of the proto-modern construction method for large spaces. We think of modern technology, modern architecture, we tend to think of concrete and steel. But here through this ancient technique of thin tile vaults, they were creating structures in which the structure and the finish were one, where it was sort of the idea of the Gesamtkunstwerk—the total work of art," exhibit co-curator Martin Moeller, Jr. of the National Building Museum in Washington, D.C., told me. "It's almost difficult to walk through New York and not come across a Guastavino vault, in one of the most important spaces that you might pass on a typical walk through the city."

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