Hans Noë, a distinguished architect and sculptor, died peacefully in his sleep in the home he had designed for his family in the scrub-forested hills of Garrison, New York, on May 11, a few weeks shy of his 97th birthday.
Born in 1928 in Czernowitz, a cosmopolitan provincial capital in the far east of the former Austro-Hungarian empire (his generational cohort included writers Paul Celan, Gregor von Rezorri, Aharon Appelfeld and the financier Felix Rohatyn), he was the son of pediatrician Ossy Noë and his wife Sidonie (nee Rosenmann) and brother to Marcel (who died in New York City in 1973). His peaceful childhood came to an abrupt end at the age of 12 as the second World War raked back and forth across the town. The family somehow survived the entirety of the ensuing Holocaust (which claimed the vast majority of the town’s Jews) in deep and precarious hiding.
After the war, they emigrated to America, where Hans enrolled in Cooper Union, becoming a trusted acolyte of his architecture professor, the sculptor Tony Smith, who presently handed him off for further training to Chicago-based Bauhaus master Mies van der Rohe. In Chicago he also met Judith Baldwin, a budding potter and ceramicist who would become his dear and vivid partner for over six decades (they in turn would have two sons: Sasha, a fellow sculptor, and Alva, a philosopher, now the head of the department at Berkeley).
Graduating from the Illinois Institute of Technology in the late 1950s, Hans returned to New York, where he specialized in small-scale domestic architecture. (An extreme perfectionist, he preferred not to work for clients and hence built a series of exquisite dwellings on properties he bought on spec and subsequently sold, many in the Hamptons.) He also designed a pottery school for Judith in Greenwich Village, which became a mecca for aspiring ceramicists during the 1960s, ’70s and ’80s.
In the early 1980s, he resurrected the aging ground-floor bar Fanelli’s, on Prince Street in Soho, which under his management thrived as a bustling watering hole for the art scene which was then suddenly bourgeoning all about the reviving district. (It remains in the family to this day, run by Hans’ son, Sasha.)
Following retirement, Hans repaired to the home he designed and built near Cold Spring, where, across the next 30 years, he threw himself into a secret passion, producing hundreds of exquisite geometrical sculptures and maquettes for monumental pieces which, a sort of Hidden Master, he shared with hardly anyone, until the last few years when he at last allowed them to be seen across a series of small shows, notably in a well-reviewed 2023 exhibition in Manhattan’s National Museum of Mathematics.
He continued working in that vein right up till the end and leaves a remarkable legacy, which includes, in addition, daughter Adi (married to chef Sean Brock), and eight grandchildren: Alva’s August, Ulysses and Ana; Sasha’s Van, Nina and Asa; and Adi’s Leo and Nava. His was an exemplary, if often harrowing, 20th-century life.
Funeral arrangements are under the direction of Clinton Funeral Home, Cold Spring.
