By PIERRE ALEXANDRE DE LOOZ

Over the past four years, during a stunning upswing in residential development, Pandiscio Company has branded a string of prominent new apartment buildings, coaxing extreme dollar value from every square sold. If you’ve never hugged a square foot, you will after meeting Richard Pandiscio. Cobblestones that have bounced back endless cycles of traffic takes me to Richard’s 40 Mercer street apartment – a building Pandiscio Co. branded. Somber in its grey steel frame and jewel colored glass, the building is a reincarnation of SoHo’s cast iron trophies, developed by Andre Balazs and designed by Jean Nouvel. Alone except for the concierge, I drift through the soaring, hallucinatory lobby, shimmering like a set for the Pet Shop Boys, and up the stainless steel elevator to Richard’s place.

The soundtrack to this story, however, is more like “Living Well Is The Best Revenge,” the opening track on R.E.M.’s latest album. Michael Stipe is talking about his current home renovation in Richard’s living room. I sit down while Stipe’s new album cover stares at me from the coffee table: a breathtaking image of a future city, a mash-up of modernist towers. Ironically, it is similar to a cover run by the New York Times a few weeks before, starring the best and brightest of New York’s newest residences. It turns out a third of this future city has been branded by Pandiscio Co.

With a note of embarrassment, Nicolai Ouroussoff at the Times called these residences generational landmarks, the “gorgeous tokens of a rampantly narcissistic age.” Richard on the other hand doesn’t cringe at history in the making. Collaborators describe him as both “dead serious” and tender. Now that Nouvel has won the Pritzker Prize, Richard tells me, critics are willing to consider 40 Mercer a good building. Richard holds his bar high, level with the Seagram, the Woolworth, and the thrill of the 110-story original World Trade Center.

In New York, marketing has smelt the golden path of residential real estate for some time, with a standard march of parties at the sales office, direct mailing, and illustrated brochures. But as Melissa Laux, Pandiscio Co.’s Art Director explained to me, Richard’s sensibility – fed off the twin nipples of magazine publishing and art – has meant that execution makes the difference. For their branding of The Mark – “l´adresse la plus chic de New York” – Pandiscio Co. has stitched together a rive gauche blockbuster from the brassiest to the most quaint elements, including a logo which debonairly evokes both the Hermès insignia and Giorgio of Beverly Hills. Their branding celebrates the couture overhaul of a well known Upper East Side hotel by a team of creators led by interior designer Jacques Grange, who over the years has worked for Yves Saint Laurent and more recently Ronald Lauder. Grange invokes design goddesses like Coco Chanel and Madeleine Castaing when describing the furniture that will appoint the hotel – “Hollywood style with the elegance of Paris,” according to the Pandiscio Co. designed brochure.

In the show room, Galerie Mark, also designed by Pandiscio Co., the gossamer of detail and organza of signature style supplant the hard line of real estate. Under the cooling effect of recessed fluorescent lights, the materials and finishes that I might enjoy as a resident are set in jewelry vitrines like baubles. Splashy, colorful illustrations of life in the future hotel by Jean Philippe Delhomme, an illustrator for Vogue and Barney’s, rival the floor plans for wall space and attention. After collaborating with Richard on numerous projects, a veteran real estate strategist like Louise Sunshine will confidently say that these illustrations are the foundation of the brand – and sure enough, the usual interior renderings had to be specially presented by a sales woman from a little black portfolio because they were otherwise hidden away. Admittedly, Galerie Mark shot my head straight to a LVMH cloud. I walked out with a gift tote designed after a marksmen’s quiver by Pandiscio Co., though the illusion was so strong I mistook it for a Dior saddle bag.

Richard’s Senior Creative Director, Alex Kellas – whose enthusiasm matches Miles Davis’, wailing at the night – told me he wanted to focus on Johnny Depp for the Mark campaign. In 1994 Depp had infamously run up a $9,767 bill at the hotel having trashed his suite during an alleged fight with then girlfriend Kate Moss. Kellas, who understands the social glue that gossip affords any advertising endeavor, no doubt realized that the hotel’s business is said to have improved after the incident, although Depp admitted that he had been trying to squash a rampant roach. Pandiscio Co. might assign mandatory readings of the week’s real estate press to its entire staff but their brand logic stays blissfully off the standard beat and goes headlong for the scoop – in this case the roach, that makes you feel a little lighter.

Richard hired Kellas in 1998 after listening to an electronic jazz record the young Austrian had recorded and was promoting in New York. “Richard listened to it from start to finish. It was so bizarre!” Kellas recalls. “Working for Richard,” Kellas says, “is like working with a gardener.” And while Richard, often dressed as if freshly back from a nature hike, actually does have a green thumb, Kellas is referring to his ability to harvest diverse talent and avoid monoculture. While creative director at Andy Warhol’s Interview from 1993– 1997, Richard labored to work outside the confines of the public relations treadmill and to create a less controlled editorial environment. As he explains, his desire was “to work with people who were willing to take chances and speak freely, younger stars and designers that had not been lassoed by all that control. I felt like PR, especially Hollywood PR, was totally beginning to control any magazine’s ability to speak freely.”

For his entire tenure at Interview, and longer, Richard fueled a column called “Ones to Watch,” a prized invention of his time at the magazine. Over the years the column provided people like Alexander McQueen, David Sedaris, and Andrea Zittel (photographed with a chicken on her head by Todd Eberle) with their first major exposure.

PIERRE ALEXANDRE DE LOOZ: Somebody once called Interview the planet to land on if you were feeling like an alien somewhere else. It seems like the magazine was incredible PR for New York City, saying, “Hey we have a world here for you.”
RICHARD PANDISCIO: It is certainly true in my case. I read it all through high school. In those days the interview format alone was novel, as opposed to all the other magazines. It was just people talking and talking about their experiences and it was really super refreshing.

So how did a person make the cut for “Ones to Watch”?
You couldn’t have PR or any kind of handlers. And nothing could have been written about you before. I did Laura Linney, right after she graduated from Brown and then I found out she had some other little piece for some other magazine, so it didn’t run. The more unknown they were, the better, because I thought there weren’t that many opportunities for people to have a place or a picture. It was really great. You met one interesting kid and sure enough they knew another interesting kid and that was how it worked. New York does create those threads of communities doing interesting things.

At Richard’s place, cigarettes flare and the conversation turns to the perfect lines of a Judd on the living room wall, reminiscent of the Nouvel building we are sitting in. The Judd had been hung by an expert, a friend of Richard’s, the guy who executed most of Judd’s wood sculptures. He hung it so low, my hosts recount, that it would collect discarded tumblers during parties, or worse, be mistaken for a CD organizer. A cruel and amusing fate for an art piece perhaps, but not out of place in Richard’s world, where nothing is sacred and everything is illuminated. The clothbound brochure – Jacques et Jill: A SoHo Neighborhood Love Story – that Pandiscio Co. produced for 40 Mercer unleashes two squiggly-lined, hand-drawn Chihuahuas all over pristine digital renderings of the building. They scamper their way through the promotional pages, falling in love. They are like prankster graffiti scratched onto the surface of a generic poster. As a result, Nouvel’s steel and glass architecture fades to the background, but lingers reassuringly.

A year later Pandiscio Co. produced a brochure for 246 W17 in New York’s Chelsea area, using heavily pixilated, candy-colored graphics of the building by eBoy, crawling with a circus of different characters like a classic Nintendo game – yet another way of pushing away the architecture so you want it more and providing a reason to get attached. “We almost called it the ‘Chelsea Clinton,’” Richard explains with his Mona Lisa humor, because “it wasn‘t the most beautiful building in the neighborhood, but we hoped it would become as friendly and democratic as a luxury apartment could possibly be.” A page from the brochure introduces you to a cast of Julian Opie like figures, the building‘s “savvy and progressive residents,” including Benjamin the room scent designer, Pilar the celebrity dietician, and Bruce the arbitrage consultant. In the simplest terms, Richard humanizes a building for the prospective buyer by concerning himself with the personalities who may live, play, and love inside. Don’t architects also think about that sort of thing, he asks?

Some architects are just not interested in personal narratives. Richard Meier’s glass prisms on Manhattan’s west side highway are catered to a generic voyeur.
It’s interesting that those buildings attracted such highly visible buyers. What do you think that was about?

I think the buildings operate like the cover of a celebrity magazine – a first for New York. All the buildings you’ve worked on have followed on this historically.
In fact we also did a campaign for those, for the most recent tower, but it did not run. We thought it was better than the first two because it was Meier inside and out.

I was at a party there recently and some one remarked how crazy it is that we create interiors that look like the lofts people worked so hard to improve back in the ’70s – like living in a loft was fun. I lived on Vestry Street and I never thought loft living was any fun.

In John Chamberlain’s building?
Yes. It was the second place I lived in. It was one big room and twelve of us lived there in different corners.

There was nothing fun about it, although you could have a party and invite a million people. The first loft I lived in was a dance studio during the day and we could only come home after a certain hour. It was cheap and that’s where interesting people had to live because they were doing interesting things, and it took on this glamorous sheen that got associated with an artistic lifestyle, although it was nothing other than cheap rent. And do you remember how many movies were set in a loft, to create the romantic lifestyle, no matter what city it was in?

Like Fatal Attraction.
That was filmed in the triangle building by 14th Street and 9th Avenue, at the edge of the Meatpacking district. The apartment in that film belonged to a friend of mine and she rented it to the movie studio for like $20,000 a week. This was right after we had come to the city and it seemed like she was the richest person. Do you remember the sex scene in the kitchen?

Classic.
They rebuilt her kitchen, all steel reinforced, so it could support the action. She still lives there. You can ask her about it. That building was a dump, the worst building in the city with two sex clubs in the basement; Hell Fire was the straight one.

The loft has gotten so white-washed. Why do people obsess about it? It’s like the word “luxury,” totally meaningless. What do people think they are buying?
I see the phrase loft-living and I get grossed out. But I think people like the idea of the large space.

Wouldn’t you say they think they are buying a creative identity?
I would, specially a loft in downtown Manhattan.

Well, you can buy a loft in Beijing and in Tokyo. And they are not big. For the most part it’s not even a large space, it‘s white walls and wood floors. It’s like people want to be New Yorkers all over the world. So would you side with your frequent collaborator, Andre Balazs, who you quote in the brochure for One Kenmare Square against the white box?
Well, I like a good white box.

For Philip Johnson’s posthumous Urban Glass House you coined the paradoxical phrase “modernism has never stood in opposition to luxury.”
Who said it’s a paradox?

20^th-century modernism combined ideas of economy and accessibility for everyone when it was born in Europe. Those are two things not necessarily associated with luxury, certainly not in America. So when you create a statement like “modernism has never stood in opposition to luxury,” it is eye catching. In fact, you provide a history for that statement in the brochure but you throw in examples that are all about thinking economically, like the Eameses, who were very resourceful. So what is luxury?
In China they don’t use the word “luxury.” They use the word “VIP.” Here, of course, VIP is the name of a local strip-bar. That’s how they identify luxury and it’s really interesting for a communist country.

Sure – it’s about the basic fact that some people have it all and some don’t.
But the word “luxury” is meaningless to most people. It’s a category.

It’s like going to the romantic comedy section at the video store.
Exactly – they are rarely romantic and they are rarely comedies. If we look it up we see that the definition of luxury is sponsored by Lexus.

Lexus of Edison NJ, by the way. It says, “A refinement of living rather than a necessity;” “A life of luxury on the French Riviera …’”
I like, “Habitual indulgence in comforts and pleasures in addition to those necessary for a reasonable standard of well being.” None of these definitions are very personal.

For me I always say that luxury is like saying NO. It’s a freedom to live the way you want, express yourself, your feelings, surround yourself with something that’s very unique to yourself; it’s anything but generic. The misuse of luxury – and it is misused constantly – is that it’s about financial wealth. The fact that the Eameses designed with modest materials and were able to create experiences that were paired down, essential, and original, to have that aesthetic to enjoy in that period of time was a great luxury. Did they create luxury? You are sitting in something that came out of that same period. It’s not the most expensive couch in the world, but I think it’s a luxurious couch to this day. It’s a well-designed couch.

And how about this building?
The fact that it exists and got built is a luxury. I think it is a really innovative building, handsome and feels very comfortable in this neighborhood. You can define an apartment as being a luxury apartment, but really all it has are the essential elements for it to be commonly referred to as luxury – it is still common. There is no artistry; it’s generic and once something is generic, how can it be luxury?

What’s so threatening about being generic?
You’ve been in a plane and looked out across America and seen now it’s all the same. How is it possible that every residential unit looks identical in a country this large?

Where are the architects to challenge that? For some odd reason, residential building is not taken seriously by the architectural community. There are a few extraordinary examples of single-family homes; most architects have one under their belt, but it doesn’t blossom into a larger conversation. They all seem like follies or one family’s indulgence. You read endlessly about museum designs and civic projects, but when was the last time you read anything seriously critical of residential living? It’s only décor. So when I see one glimmer, like Jean Nouvel, whether it’s a luxury building or a housing project, if someone is looking at new ways to approach homes I am really turned on.

Why is the issue of home so important for you?
It might be because I am asked to market these buildings and convince people that this is really great stuff. And I might feel a little guilty that I don’t think all of it is. It’s not good enough to warrant that kind of hyperbole and I wish it were. A house doesn’t need to have a stable or a corn crib or a root cellar, which were essential 150 years ago. But, is that all that’s changed? Does this apartment need a half-bath or even a bathtub? They are vestiges of what once seemed necessary. A lot of real estate talks about lifestyle. But I don’t think anyone is really looking at the way we live. I don’t see any experimentation.

When Richards says “experimentation” it comes with the force of having watched two decades of creative aspirations boil over in the streets, clubs, studios, and bars of New York. Andrea Schwan, a frequent collaborator who runs her own public relations consultancy, calls him a cultural anthropologist. She sees her current promotional duties for real estate, and her collaborations with Richard, as part of developers’ recent foray into the art and culture industry. Back in his office in the Meatpacking district, where the cobblestones still shine, he is describing a concept for a promotional banner over the phone. Does the person on the line know the work of James Rosenquist?

Richard has designed many artists’ books, starting in 1994 with David Salle and proceeding to get artists like Keith Haring, Jeff Koons, Vanessa Beecroft, George Condo, and Julian Schnabel between his covers. This led into the re-branding of Phillips de Pury and the widely respected branding of Ronald Lauder’s Neue Galerie. But you sense that his heart goes back to the artists, because designing a monograph is a unique and personal position. “It’s their representation of themselves to the world and it is forever,” he explains. Schnabel paid tit for tat for his book by producing a portrait of the designer so large it doesn’t fit anywhere Richard might hang it. All the same, Richard prefers payment in kind from artists, betraying his deeply rooted interest in artistic production. “With David Salle, I was all over him to help me understand his paintings better.” The book is a tour de force in expressive graphics, decoding the paintings through type, image, and layout, an experiment from cover to cover – and Richard’s first book. “Whenever you do something for the first time, you come up with solutions that you don’t realize are wrong or you are asking questions you don’t realize you are not supposed to ask.” And this can make for the best work he says.

A serial dater’s wet dream, Pandiscio Co. seems to deal with every project as if it were the first time. Each showroom that Pandiscio Co. conceives, draws on the nature of its location and seeks its own sense of style – presumably that of the prospective buyer. Where Galerie Mark has an uptown demeanor, 100 11th Ave, the showroom for Nouvel’s forthcoming West Chelsea building is vast, open, and sparsely arranged, a perfect counterpart to most Chelsea galleries, with stark numerical diagrams of the building’s glass skin plastered on the wall like a Jan de Cock installation. From his very first job as a secretary at House and Garden, Richard has spent time considering how fine-feathered birds build their nests. At the time, House and Garden was not style-narrow, he explains. “It was about quality over style – a very simple formula and a good one.” In 1986 he became a designer there, and while his reach was limited, he began tinkering with spreads of unusually distinctive homes, including those of Gilbert & George, Donald Judd, and ironically, David Salle photographed by Robert Mapplethorpe.

Creative life in ’80s New York, Richard tells me, fearlessly mixed styles and looks. As artist and social historian Carlo McCormick has written: at night this mélange turned social and economic on the downtown scene. For Richard nightlife happened at Paper magazine starting in 1985. After leaving his desk at Condé Nast, he would go down to editor Kim Hastreiter’s apartment and layout the magazine on her kitchen table. “How did your adventure at Paper start?” I asked him.

I had a friend who worked at a sort of a fancy fabric store. He’d have leftover piles of $300/foot silk or some crazy jacquard or whatever. I knew how to sew, since my grandmother had taught me when I was a kid. So, I started to make these silly hats. Kim Hastreiter saw a friend of hers wearing one of my hats and she wanted to do a story on the hats. This is another part of this whole period which does not exist anymore: Henri Bendel used to have an open call on Thursday – anybody from anywhere could wait in line and show the buyers whatever it was that they made or did or designed. If they liked it, they would buy it. I had only made twelve hats from weird little pieces of left-over fabric. And they bought all the hats that I had done and asked that I make them in all sorts of different colors and featured them in advertising and in Elle magazine. So, that’s how we met and Kim asked, “What else do you do?” “Well I work at House and Garden as a designer and I’ve only done one issue.” And she said that the art director had just quit and that she needed an art director. “Could you do that?” “Sure, I’ll try,” I said. We had to do everything at Paper. We even did the liqueur add on the back cover. Kim would come up with the concept and write the copy and I would take the picture, for years – La Grande Passion liqueur.

Working with the scraps of cloth is similar to what you were doing with the David Salle book and then becomes integral to the Keith Haring book – the idea of working with leftover bits and pieces, ephemera. Your approach even changed the exhibition the book was intended to catalogue!
It was a very nice experience. I was asked to submit a proposal and they invited half a dozen different designers to submit ideas for the book, but they really liked mine. The director invited me down to the foundation, which was in Keith Haring’s studio. They had all the greatest hits, the big mature works which are phenomenal. But there was none of the stuff I remember of seeing in the subways. When Haring started getting known people would tear them down and take them home. There was none of that in the studio, which was the stuff I loved. I asked if I could see his scrapbooks, his more personal stuff. There was a storage space, they said, that needed to be cleaned out. So, they came back with giant boxes of all the stuff from the time he was a little boy – his school papers, his note books, his text books, all of his photographs, his Polaroids, his letters, things he collected, where you could really see the evolution of the artist … his secret handwriting in funny symbols. To me that was the story. That was worth making a book about. The Whitney was mounting a big show which Tibor Kalman was designing and was the reason for the book. He gave the Whitney people a heart attack with all the stuff he wanted to do. He wanted to sledge hammer the Whitney’s pristine wall. He had these crazy, wonderful ideas for the exhibition. When Tibor saw the book, which came out a little before the show, he asked if I would curate an additional display of the ephemera. Then he made these end-to-end vitrines that were a foot deep, waist high, and ran the entire length of every wall of every room of that show. It was thousands of feet of vitrine space that I had to fill! The only fight I really had with Tibor was over some of the material that I felt was very critical, because it was pornographic. It was odd. I think he was thinking like a dad because he had young children. I never did understand, because so much of Keith’s work with AIDS was so educational. It was probably the best place for children to see this stuff: with their parents in a controlled environment.

Do you like Haring’s work?
Oh my god! Some of it is unbelievable. To see filmed footage of him working is just amazing. It was sure, fast, never a doubt. It just flowed out of his being. I’ve never seen anything like it. And some of it is really moving.

What grabs me is how essential it all is.
It’s so essential and his pictograms communicate so clearly.

One thing you share is an appreciation for synthesizing personality into a character. You often use characters for branding buildings, whether it’s the little dog Jacques who accompanies Jean Nouvel in the 40 Mercer storybook or the suave beaver in a top hat chatting up Andre Balazs for the William Beaver House. Why have these characters?
Disney and development, to me, do go hand in hand. I grew up in the late ’60s and the early ’70s, and “The Wonderful World of Disney” came on every night at seven o’clock. At the time, Walt Disney was developing Disney World. He understood entertainment and promotion better than anybody. He would use the two-minute spot before the Disney movie of the week came on to promote his development in Florida. He would show you the plans and talk to Mickey. He would entertain you while selling the world on a gigantic real estate development: a community bigger than a city. Similar mega-developments are happening in the Middle and Far East and there is a similar tendency towards showmanship – just generally not as entertaining. I find characters are a simple way to tell a story and entertain. It’s really important to entertain people in a competitive market, get them to pay attention, and get attached. The beaver is a really loveable character and he relates directly to the site. John Astor was a fur trapper and he is also thought of as the father of Wall Street because he invented options trading. He would sell the beavers before they were bagged because they were in high demand in Europe for making top hats.

You’ve gotten into trouble with that one.
Beaver House is probably one of the best-known buildings in the city, and it was instant, everybody was talking about it. That’s what advertising is about, I‘m sorry. Oh, those Upper East Side lady brokers couldn’t deal with it. They were embarrassed by it. They would not bring their clients down because it was humiliating for them. It did well with the international crowd, since there isn’t the same baggage. Then we toned it down, but it wasn’t as effective.

During our winding exchange, Richard keeps reminding me that he is selling something that doesn’t exist. Unlike the efflorescent universe of artists, writers, musicians, and the many beautiful faces that have crossed his path and been captured on the printed page, in his current line of work the building behind the brand is just a concept. He reminds me that he is asking people to plunk down a lot of money on something for which he has no proof – which might well sum up life in New York. So naturally I ask him about the movies, a similar creature of fantasy, and what film he would recommend to anybody moving here. Not surprisingly he says Breakfast at Tiffany’s:

When Holly Golightly takes a drag of her cigarette, exhales, and says, “God I love New York,” you believed it! She’s sitting on the edge of the Seagram’s plaza, or at least that’s how I remember it. I want to do a campaign with a bubble coming out of the building that says, “God I love New York.” Buildings in New York should love New York.