AFA Winter 2017

skyscraper located in the Financial District of Manhattan; Lombardi was the first person to convert a skyscraper into residential spaces. On the 29th floor, he transformed the former boardrooms of Sinclair Oil into an apartment for his family. Lombardi continued to build his personal architectural collection, adding in 1978 an extraordinar y residence known as the A rmou r- St i ne r (Oc t a gon) Hou s e i n Westchester County, New York (Fig. 2); in the 1980s, he acquired Erdödy-Choron Kastély, a moated Renaissance castle in Central Europe; and in the 1990s, he returned Erdödy-Choron Kastély to the Hungarian government and acquired 9th to 19th century Château du Sailhant (Fig. 3). In the 21st century, he returned to the location of his first love affair with houses, his family’s summer lodge at Valhalla Highlands, north of Manhattan. Here, he reconstructed Alfheim Lodge (Fig. 4), which had not been completed in its intended Rustic Storybook Style because of the interruption of World War II. Each of Lombardi’s homes presents different pur- poses, functions, and contents. The homes continue to be subject to further investigation and conservation efforts, and additions continue to be made to their individual collections. Lombardi’s homes are works in progress that will never be complete. Winter 118 www.afamag.com | w ww.incollect.com Joseph Pell Lombardi J oseph Pell Lombardi has always been obsessed by houses—old houses in particular—and cannot remember a time when he wanted to do anything other than care for them. A restoration architect, for the past fifty years Lombardi has specialized in converting commercial buildings to residential lofts, and focusing on the conservation of historic houses and the creation of contextual residential buildings; his firm has been involved with more than 1,000 structures throughout the world. His libraries are filled with books about houses and he serves on numerous historic house boards. Few things make him happier than restoring a missing feature or finding an appropriate furnishing for his five homes; auction alerts from around the world regularly inform him of possible additions. Collectorof Houses Lombardi’s passion for architecture is grounded in his childhood, where he compared the Romanesque, Italianate, Moorish and Renaissance Revival style houses in his Harlem neighborhood to original examples in his copy of Sir Banister Fletcher’s A History of Architecture . He learned early on that the fabric of a house could be read like a detective, thus gaining an understanding of its history. As an architectural student during the heyday of modernism in the 1960s, he was considered a heretic for expressing interest in old buildings rather than creating new structures. Lombardi notes that in that era, historic preservation in America was more an act of love than a profession. When the Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture began a program in Historic Preservation, he enrolled and obtained a Master’s degree under the great preservationist James Marston Fitch. In 1969, Lombardi established an architectural f irm specializing in the conservation and restoration of deteriorating Manhattan townhouses, and pioneering in the conversion of loft and off ice buildings to residences. In the next decade he purchased his first historic home, an 1850s parsonage in rural Vermont, which he still owns. Also during the 1970s he acquired Liberty Tower (Fig. 1), a thirty-three-story 1909 Gothic-style Fig. 1: Liberty Tower, designed by Henry Ives Cobb and built in 1909, had the distinction of being the “World’s Tallest Building on so Small a Plot” and was one of the earliest of the romantic skyscrapers that changed the skyline of Manhattan in the early 1900s. Lombardi purchased the Gothic-style tower in the 1970s and converted it to residential use, living on the twenty-ninth floor.