While you may not know the name "Melvyn Kaufman," if you've walked or worked around Midtown or downtown, you probably know some of the buildings he developed—because many make sure they give something back to the public. For instance, at 777 Third Avenue, there's the Big Red Swing by Theodore Ceraldi, which is a big red swing for people to sit on. And on 77 Water Street's roof, there's the model of the World War I biplane that sits on a runway to amuse others. These and many others were the brainchild of Kaufman, who died on March 18 at age 87.

The architecture critic Paul Goldberger once called Kaufman "the man who has made a virtual mission out of making the New York skyscraper entertaining" and NY Times has an obituary that is riveting to anyone interested in commercial architecture as well as the place that public space occupies in NYC:

Mr. Kaufman had a lifelong fascination with office buildings as public spaces with which tenants and passers-by could engage. If one was going to erect a leviathan, his design philosophy seemed to go, at least make it leviathan with levity. He deplored lobbies, the sine qua non of office buildings since the dawn of recorded history. “Marble and travertine mausoleums are bad for the living and terrific for the dead,” Mr. Kaufman told The Times in 1971. Many of his buildings did away with traditional lobbies, employing set-back entrances from which wide public spaces extended to the street. These spaces were no mere plazas, but fields on which some of the buildings’ most conspicuous design elements were played out.

Next to 767 Third Avenue, there's a huge, three-story-high chessboard: "the board is visible to tenants in the rear, as well as to passers-by on East 48th Street. On it, games — often re-creations of historic matches — are played out in slow sequence, with pieces moved weekly by a worker in a cherry picker." As for 77 Water's biplane, "He put it there, parked on a 'runway' that lights up at night, he said, to spare tenants in surrounding office towers from having to look down upon water tanks and air-conditioning systems."

Kaufman was also behind 17 State Street, a curving, reflective glass building near the Staten Island Ferry terminal (Goldberg wrote of it, "The building is a kind of high-tech version of a lighthouse, standing almost at the edge of the sea"). And the City Review says his "wildest midtown building is 747 Third Avenue, which has undulating sidewalks, shown below, a plastic phone booth, a wooden platform entrance, a statue of a naked woman between the revolving doors and exposed ductwork in the lobby." (The undulating sidewalks are scheduled to be replaced with a flat, normal plaza.) The City Review also noted, "Melvyn Kaufman, the feisty, irascible, and delightful philosopher-developer of the two brothers, believed vehemently that buildings should do something for the public."