NEW YORK — Hugh Hardy, an architect who breathed exuberant new life into some of New York City’s most storied theatrical landmarks, among them Radio City Music Hall and the New Amsterdam Theater, died Thursday in Manhattan of a cerebral hemorrhage. He was 84.
You have felt Mr. Hardy’s ebullient approach if you have ever taken in a show at the New Victory Theater on 42nd Street or the Majestic Theater in downtown Brooklyn, sought directions at the gingerbread information kiosk in Central Park, dined in the Rainbow Room at Rockefeller Center or Guastavino’s under the Queensboro Bridge or — before Sept. 11, 2001 — at Windows on the World atop the World Trade Center.
You have seen his masterly use of dramatic gesture if you have walked by the townhouse at 18 W. 11th St. in Greenwich Village, destroyed by an explosion in 1970 when it was being used by radicals as a bomb factory and rebuilt with a brick facade that seems to pivot — clearly signaling the disruption of the tranquil row.
What they have in common is Mr. Hardy’s affection not just for the past but also for showmanship, nurtured by his early association with theatrical set and lighting designer Jo Mielziner.
Mr. Hardy headed three architectural practices of his own: Hugh Hardy & Associates, formed in 1962; Hardy Holzman Pfeiffer Associates, formed in 1967 with Malcolm Holzman and Norman Pfeiffer; and H3 Hardy Collaboration Architecture, formed in 2004.
Although Mr. Hardy’s firms were best known for renovations and restorations, they have left some distinctive marks on the Manhattan and Brooklyn skylines.
The most jewel-like is the Claire Tow Theater on top of the Vivian Beaumont Theater at Lincoln Center, on which Mr. Hardy had worked in the early 1960s, mediating between Mielziner, the stage designer for the Beaumont, and Eero Saarinen, its architect.
The most commented on is 420 W. 42nd St., a 40-story apartment tower with a facade of alternating horizontal stripes in cream and dark purple brick. Neighbors call it the zebra building or the Oreo cookie building.
That was fine with Mr. Hardy. “The Chrysler Building is at the other end of the street,’’ he told The New York Times in 2001, “and the patterning and decoration here is meant to have its own pizazz and reflect the energy of 42nd Street.’’
“I am tempted to say what it all comes down to is that for Hugh, all architecture was theater,’’ Paul Goldberger, a contributing editor at Vanity Fair, a professor of design at the New School and a former architecture critic for The New York Times, said in an e-mail Friday.
“I don’t think any architect has better embodied the spirit of New York than Hugh, not only through his work but also through everything he thought and wrote and did,’’ Goldberger said. “Every one of us has lived more intensely in New York because of Hugh, understood the city better because of him, and loved the city more because of him.’’
Robert A.M. Stern, who chronicled much of Mr. Hardy’s work in his definitive architectural histories, “New York 1960’’ and “New York 2000,’’ said, “In a profession that frequently takes itself too seriously, Hugh sparkled with wit.’’
Mr. Hardy married architect Tiziana Spadea in 1965. They were “the Nick and Nora Charles of a certain New York set, a group of people who are involved in helping to ensure a future for New York as rich in magic as its nostalgia-tinged past,’’ Julie Iovine wrote in 1997 in the Times.
