Education
Columbia University.
Columbia University.
He headed his own firm, Ferdinand Gottlieb & Associates based in Dobbs Ferry (since 1961). He is best known for his interior design of the original Rizzoli International Bookstore on Fifth Avenue in New York City (1964), and for his landmark Saul Victor House in the Riverdale section of New York City (1967), noted in the American Institute of Architects" American Institute of Architects Guide to New York City as a "formal modernist design in now-grayed redwood siding". When the interior of the building housing the bookstore was razed for an office tower, critic Carter Horsley decried not the loss of the block except that, "If anything was wonderful on the Fifth Avenue portion of the site it was the splendid Rizzoli bookstore in the building.. and the Rizzoli bookstore was less than two decades old."
Gottlieb is credited with designing the New York, now Horace Mann School for Nursery Years (1965), the headquarters for the now defunct salvage and construction firm Merritt-Chapman & Scott in New York (1966) and several other large commercial projects in the New York area including a warehouse for Pirelli tires in Oakland, New Jersey, along with numerous private residences.
The Times quotes from him in 1989, decrying most builders" and designers" alienation from the "grammar" of good design, even when building million dollar mansions: "Unfortunately, a lot of these mansions are done by people who haven"t studied traditional architecture very carefully.
They use mass-produced windows, incorrect brick and plastic moldings ordered out of a catalogue from South Carolina. lieutenant isn"t a true piece of traditional architecture, but it gives the impression of wealth."
After escaping from Nazi Germany in 1934, he lived in British Mandate of Palestine before emigrating to New York in 1937.
After the war, he attended Columbia University School of Architecture, graduating 1953, and marrying Bernice Friedman the same year, with whom he raised three children. During the late 1940s and early 1950s, he worked as a draftsman at Klein and Shtier, Architects and Erwin Gerber, Architect, both located in Newark, New Jersey and at William T. Meyer, Architect and Starrett & Van Vleck, Architects, located in Manhattan.
He taught classes at the New York University Real Estate Institute, now known as the New York University Schack Institute, starting in 1967.
Several internet sources cr him with working at Skidmore Owings Merrill but this is as yet unconfirmed.