Hans Noë, an architect, sculptor and accidental restaurateur who was best known for his meticulous revival of one of New York City’s oldest bars, died on May 11 at his home in Garrison, N.Y. He was 96.
His death, in his sleep, was confirmed by his son Alva Noë.
Although Mr. Noë (pronounced NO-way) designed and built both innovative houses and geometric wooden sculptures, his most visible role in the cultural life of his adopted city was as the proprietor of Fanelli Cafe.
In the early 1970s, he began buying neglected buildings in SoHo, fixing them up and renting them to commercial tenants and as artists’ lofts. When, about a decade later, the seller of a five-story building on the corner of Prince and Mercer Streets threw in the street-level bar, Fanelli Cafe, Mr. Noë figured he’d clear it out. Though it had been serving alcohol under one name or another since just after the Civil War, the bar was in poor shape.
Instead of getting rid of it, though, Mr. Noë found himself adopting the place locals call Fanelli’s — dusting the ceiling fans, installing a roller gate and gradually introducing other improvements that were so well considered and gentle that the regulars may not have even noticed. He kept the place open later and more consistently. He cleaned up the kitchen and started serving hamburgers, omelets and bread from Manhattan’s Vesuvio Bakery. He got rid of the cigarette machine.
Mr. Noë’s younger son, Sasha, who took over around the year 2000, described one improvement as particularly emblematic of his father, who shied away from change for change’s sake but was never precious about details.
“When you opened the door,” Sasha Noë recalled in an interview, “the wind would come in, and it would make everyone cold. So he built a little half wall out of glass to keep people warm. But he didn’t make it look like it was built in 1847. He used his Mies van der Rohe knowledge to do it. He didn’t try to fake it.”
As a result of Mr. Noë’s loving attention, Fanelli’s became one of the few monuments to longstanding authenticity in an ever-changing city — a place where the roar of conversation is still the only background noise, and SoHo artists, Wall Street bankers and international tourists sit side by side at an ornate wooden bar under a ceiling stained the golden color of smoldering marshmallows by a century’s worth of tobacco smoke.
“I’ve seen people come in and try to figure out how to get that color,” Sasha Noë said. “I’ve seen them measuring the molding on the outside.”
Hans Heinz Noë was born on June 18, 1928, the younger of two sons of Ossy and Sidonie (Rosenmann) Noë, in what was then the city of Czernowitz in the Kingdom of Romania. (It is now known as Chernivtsi, Ukraine.) His father was a pediatrician.
Mr. Noë’s family was Jewish and spent World War II confined to ghettos in Czernowitz, as control of that city passed back and forth between fascist Romania and the Soviet Army, and in Bucharest.
After the war, the family lived for about a year in German refugee camps, including one in Offenbach, where Mr. Noë studied at what is now the University of Art and Design. Receiving American visas, the family arrived in New York City on Christmas Day, 1949.
Mr. Noë spent three years as a student at the Cooper Union in Manhattan, where he found a mentor in the sculptor and architectural designer Tony Smith, who introduced him to other downtown figures, including Mark Rothko, for whom he stretched canvases, and Barnett Newman.
“When it came to art,” Mr. Noë told the writer Lawrence Weschler in 2023, “Tony became my father and Barney my uncle.”
After being drafted into the Army and serving in the United States, Mr. Noë enrolled at the Illinois Institute of Technology, in Chicago, where he studied architecture under Mies van der Rohe and met the ceramist Judy Baldwin, a fellow student. They married in 1960.
In addition to his sons Alva, a philosopher, and Sasha, a sculptor who runs Fanelli’s, Mr. Noë is survived by Ms. Baldwin; a daughter, Adi Noë Brock, whom he had with the artist Kwok-yee Tai; and eight grandchildren.
Back in New York, he and Ms. Baldwin moved into Mr. Smith’s former office on LaGuardia Place, in Greenwich Village, and Mr. Noë began designing and building summer houses in the Hamptons with a partner, Richard Schust.
Uncomfortable dealing with clients’ demands, Mr. Noë hit on a way to avoid them. “I would find a cheap property,” he recalled, “clear it by hand, and then design and erect the structure on my own, with the help of Judy and a few friends and assistants, all on spec — and then sell the thing and generally break even.”
Reluctant to promote himself or his business, Mr. Noë built only about a dozen houses before turning to derelict buildings in SoHo. Ms. Baldwin opened Baldwin Pottery on East Seventh Street, which evolved into a successful ceramic supply business.
After two decades or so at the helm of Fanelli’s, Mr. Noë handed over the management to his younger son, and he and Ms. Baldwin moved upstate to a home he built in Garrison, in Putnam County.
There, he could spend his time constructing the strange geometric figures that he often lay awake thinking about: intersecting pyramids, extended triangles, sliced-up cubes and a distinctive trapezoidal solid that he called a “truncated tetrahedron,” first used in a building proposal in the 1950s.
When stacked up, these shapes — especially the extended triangles and truncated tetrahedrons — produced surprising and disorienting effects. Depending on where the viewer stood, a dozen of Mr. Noë’s special tetrahedrons might evoke Constantin Brancusi’s notched “Infinite Column,” or might seem to have perfectly straight sides. The triangles, stacked up, made skyscraper-like forms that seemed to be bent or falling down but were perfectly stable.
If Mr. Noë had had a different sort of temperament, or perhaps just different luck, his constructions might have been maquettes for large public sculptures in steel or aluminum, or for mass-produced design objects destined for museum gift shops.
Instead, he showed his work only twice, in exhibitions that came to him. In 2021, through the offices of an art collector who lived in a house Mr. Noë had built, he was given a show at the Fireplace Project in East Hampton, N.Y. An exhibit at the National Museum of Mathematics, in the Flatiron district of Manhattan, “Sculpture: The Work of Hans Noë,” followed in 2023.
“I used to imagine my general distaste for self-promotion and my indifference toward fame as sort of emblematic of a certain kind of moral or, at any rate, aesthetic superiority,” Mr. Noë told Mr. Weschler. “But I’m no longer so sure: I think rather that my problem may simply have been one of fear, a prolonged form of PTSD, as it were, with its roots wending back to my experience of the war, when survival enforced an entire regime of perpetual hiding.”
He added: “Any and every calling of attention to oneself could so easily have proven fatal, not only for myself but for my entire family. And maybe it’s just that I never got over that way of being in the world.”
Will Heinrich writes about new developments in contemporary art, and has previously been a critic for The New Yorker and The New York Observer.
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