When Clara Aich, a Hungarian photographer, first stepped contained in the outdated foundry at 218 East twenty fifth Avenue in Manhattan, the constructing was an impressive smash. It was winter 1977, and snow had fallen via the collapsed roof of the four-story, Nineteenth-century brick construction, powdering the ramshackle flooring of its foremost studio area. Most evocatively, the place was stuffed to the rafters with plaster fashions of architectural sculptures: gods and gargoyles, cherubs and lions, eagles and nymphs.
No different purchaser was within the wreck, however Ms. Aich was captivated by it, frequent sense be damned. “‘I’m someplace in Rome,’” she recalled pondering as she stood within the freezing studio. “It was simply hauntingly stunning for me.”
Although gentle on funds, she scrounged up the $15,000 down cost, plus one other $10,000 for the architectural ornaments, undeterred by warnings from buddies in regards to the daunting price of repairing the constructing.
“It was the dream of youth,” she stated.
The plaster ornaments, it turned out, have been fashions left behind by Rochette & Parzini, a prolific agency based by a Frenchman and an Italian that from 1909 to 1972 labored on high quality architectural sculpture in that studio for metropolis landmarks just like the Morgan Library, the Waldorf Astoria Lodge and St. Patrick’s Cathedral.
“For me they have been crucial,” Ms. Aich stated of the ornaments. “They grew to become a part of me after I noticed them there.”
Ever since, Ms. Aich has displayed them on just about each exposed-brick wall, intermingling them with work and “objets d’artwork” from far-flung lands.
The central area of her constructing is the double-height, ground-floor studio, which till her retirement a number of years in the past served her nicely for industrial images shoots for shoppers like Revlon and Estée Lauder. Illuminated by three skylights, it’s a place of inviting heat, the place artwork administrators favored to linger and buddies dropped by for an espresso, basking within the gracious, Outdated World atmosphere.
However Ms. Aich has additionally lengthy operated the constructing as a type of luxurious, speakeasy salon, internet hosting intimate musical performances, operas and performs whose performers typically wind up utilizing the studio as a crash pad.
Palazzo Parzini, Ms. Aich calls the place, however others have named it Casa Clara.
“I nonetheless vividly keep in mind strolling in there for the primary time as a result of it does really feel like a complete portal. You stroll in and it’s nearly like Narnia within the sense that you just open that picket door and abruptly you’re undoubtedly in a special time in a complete totally different power,” stated Janine Picard, who co-directed an adaptation of “Romeo & Juliet” there final yr. “All of the artwork that’s in there, I really feel like actually the area itself is respiration with historical past and creative historical past.”
The ambiance is each bohemian and refined. Vintage Kazakh carpets cowl the ground, with one other draped over a Steinway grand piano. A plaster Bacchus leers throughout the room at a large-format {photograph} of road graffiti. Ms. Aich’s father, a hussar in an elite Austro-Hungarian cavalry regiment, gazes out impassively from a World Conflict I oil portrait.
The occasions Ms. Aich has hosted are as eclectic because the décor. There was the German Discussion board, a program that supported gifted younger German opera and cabaret singers. There was Kansas Metropolis Sound, a bunch of musicians enjoying Nineteen Thirties jazz. And the Egyptian shaman who stayed there for a month, main meditations. There was the projection on a big display screen of an avant-garde opera from the Bregenz Competition in Austria, which drew the Hungarian and Swiss ambassadors to the studio.
“I went just a little out of hand with champagne and little Wiener schnitzels, taking them round,” she stated.
However all this may increasingly quickly come to an finish. Burdened by a $2 million mortgage, Ms. Aich is poised to listing the constructing on the market for $7.9 million, full with 4 tales of unused air rights above it.
“I count on somebody will knock it down,” she stated, a prospect she finds notably unhappy as a result of it took her a long time to renovate the constructing, little by little as cash grew to become obtainable.
Jonathan Hettinger, who’s dealing with the sale for Sotheby’s, stated he thought it extra seemingly that the customer could be a artistic skilled who would reside there and use the primary studio area for entertaining or non-public occasions.
Ms. Aich stated that her first three years within the decrepit constructing have been “like struggle occasions: one sizzling plate, one gentle hanging down, a protracted electrical heater my assistant and I might heat our arms with.”
Since then, she has made the constructing (principally) watertight, added new skylights of their historic places and enlarged the bookend mezzanines on both finish of the ground-floor studio. She sleeps luxuriously within the entrance one, in an vintage Indonesian mattress surmounted by the plaster maquette of a neoclassical pediment.
Creativity is within the very bones of the constructing. In its early days, it housed the Nationwide High-quality Artwork Foundry, established by the sculptor Maurice J. Energy in 1868. An Irish native, Energy crafted many bronze Civil Conflict memorials across the nation.
In 1909, Eugene Rochette and Michel Parzini, who additionally glided by the title Michael, purchased the foundry and moved their sculpting and modeling workshop there. The pair had met on the prestigious École des Beaux-Arts in Paris.
Their arrival in america within the early Nineties coincided with the Metropolis Stunning motion and the ascendance of the Beaux-Arts architectural model, which meant loads of decorative work for these uncommon artisans this aspect of the Atlantic Ocean educated in sculptural modeling and stone carving.
Thayer Tolles, curator of American work and sculpture on the Metropolitan Museum of Artwork, stated that Rochette & Parzini have been a part of “a phenomenon of immigrant artists who’ve had comparatively bold educational, skilled high quality arts coaching coming right here and realizing that their expertise are finest put to make use of working behind the scenes, so to talk, and fulfilling this nice demand for architectural sculpture.”
In 1904, the 2 males based their very own enterprise. The agency’s handwritten ledgers from 1905 to 1908, shared with a reporter by a Parzini descendant, present that the pair have been fast to seek out work with a few of the metropolis’s pre-eminent architects, like Warren & Wetmore and McKim, Mead & White, on richly ornamented buildings like Grand Central Terminal and the William Ok. Vanderbilt château on Fifth Avenue. (A dollhouse-size maquette of that mansion is tucked right into a nook of Casa Clara right this moment.)
Rochette retired by 1921, and Parzini adopted in 1938, leaving the agency within the arms of his son, Archie, and his companion, Willie Decker.
“He was the firstborn, very spoiled, very handsome Italian son of two immigrants from the north components of Italy,” Lynne Parzini, Archie’s daughter, stated of her father. “And although he was very happy with the work, and I consider his personal talents, I don’t assume he ever put his coronary heart into it the best way it ought to have been.”
Nonetheless, his studio carried out some high quality work.
In 1942, a brand new excessive altar was consecrated at St. Patrick’s Cathedral on Fifth Avenue, above which rose an exquisitely detailed, gothic-style baldacchino, or cover. Designed by Maginnis & Walsh, the baldacchino was forged in bronze from plaster fashions created by Rochette & Parzini.
Ms. Parzini, who frequented her father’s studio as a toddler within the Fifties, remembers it as a “magical place” with a “buoyant ambiance,” crammed with music and the chatter of Italian and German sculptors talking of their native tongues.
However within the ensuing a long time, the demand for sculptural work was swept away by the dominance of modernist structure, for which the elimination of decoration was a central tenet.
“To my thoughts,” Archie Parzini instructed Newsday in 1981, “each damned constructing now appears like a manufacturing unit.”
Ms. Aich met Mr. Parzini as soon as.
Standing within the ornament-filled studio not way back, as rainwater leaked from a skylight onto her Steinway, she recalled the dazzling impression he made when he visited in 1978.
“He was essentially the most dashing older gentleman out of an Italian movie,” she stated, “very, very elegantly dressed” in a darkish blue swimsuit with “a fantastic carnation in his lapel.”
Delighted that she deliberate to maintain the studio intact, he proudly confirmed her round, explaining which constructing every plaster mannequin had been made for.
“Archie left a completely warmhearted feeling in me,” Ms. Aich stated. “He gave me the sensation: ‘I belief you with my constructing.’”
