Costas Kondylis, one of Manhattan’s most prolific architects and a close friend of President Donald Trump, died at the age of 78.

Costas Kondylis was the principal of Kondylis Architecture, which is based in New York. Over the last three decades, he designed dozens of residential and commercial buildings throughout the city, including several for the Trump Organization, like the Trump World Tower.

He was born at April 17, 1940. A native of the Greek island of Samos, Kondylis spent his childhood in the Belgian Congo before moving back to Greece with his parents as a teen. Following college in Switzerland, he relocated to New York to study urban design at Columbia University. Kondylis worked as an architect at Philip Birnbaum & Associates in the 1980s, and launched Costas Kondylis Architects in 1989. Since then, Kondylis acted as a very prolific architect, and designed over 75 buildings, the majority of which are located in New York City.

In particular, Kondylis designed several iconic skyscrapers, such as 1049 Fifth Avenue, Trump World Tower, and Manhattan Place. The tallest residential building in Manhattan, the 90-story edifice created a stir when it was proposed in the 1990s; area residents decried it as egregiously out of scale for the neighborhood, and newsman Walter Cronkite spearheaded a well-publicized (albeit futile) crusade against the building.

“Costas is an architect with great aesthetic taste who can also draw plans,” Mr. Trump had said. “He’s never been given proper credit until recently. He’s starting to get it now.»

Some of examples of his work are:

Capitol at Chelsea, New York, 2001
Grand Beekman, New York, 2003
The Aston, New York, 2004
240 Riverside Boulevard at Trump place, New York, 2005
Trump Tower at City Center, White Plains, banlieue de New York, 2005
Barclay Street Tower, New York, 2007
Trump parc, Stamford, banlieue de New York, 2009
Kondylis’s wife, Lori, passed away in 1997 from breast cancer. The couple had two daughters together, Katherine and Alexia; the latter runs his firm’s interior design practice, Kondylis Design.

Source: ellines