Melvyn Kaufman, Developer Who Shaped Manhattan's Streetscape, Dies at 87 Star Black Melvyn Kaufman, left, with his brother Robert in 1980. The Sopwith Camel at 77 Water Street was in customary repose on the roof last week, the naked lady at 747 Third Avenue held court in her usual place in the lobby, and the chess game in progress on the wall outside 767 Third Avenue looked like the image shown here. Besides architectural anomaly, what all three buildings share is a builder, Melvyn Kaufman. Mr. Kaufman, a quixotic, unabashedly contentious developer who helped shape Manhattan's postwar streetscape and is credited with injecting his personal brand of whimsy into the city's office towers, died on March 18 at 87. His death, at his home in Mamaroneck, N.Y., was confirmed by his family. A longtime executive of the William Kaufman Organization, one of the city's most prominent family-owned development concerns, Mr. Kaufman erected half a dozen skyscrapers in Midtown (most along a stretch of Third Avenue from 44th to 49th Street), as well as several in the financial district. Though he was not an architect, his buildings were generally acknowledged to have sprung as much from his own vision as from the architect of record's - a vision Mr. Kaufman realized with the aid of designers like Pamela Waters and Rudolph de Harak. The result was a singular combination of sleek modernism and Disneyesque ornamentation that might be described as International Style Fever Dream. Whether it was visionary or gimcrack was a question that long divided architecture critics. "Kaufman was a romantic, a surrealist, a purveyor of kitsch and a genuine iconoclast and rebel," Carter B. Horsley, a former writer on architecture for The New York Times and The New York Post, said in a telephone interview on Friday. He was a maverick, and his rivals considered him something of an oddball, but they also respected the quality of his buildings. 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. Consider 777 Third Avenue, a Kaufman building designed by the architect William Lescaze and opened in 1963. Its entrance plaza, between 48th and 49th Streets, features a huge, interactive pop-art sculpture by Theodore Ceraldi called "Big Red Swing." Roughly the size and shape of a grand-piano lid, it can be sat upon, picnicked on and gently rocked, and on any fine day, amid the bustle of the avenue, there are people doing just that. In front of 747 Third (Emery Roth & Sons, 1972), the plaza, between 46th and 47th Streets, erupts into a series of brickwork hillocks. Topped with public benches, they suggest termite mounds as filtered through the surrealist vision of Antoni Gaudí. Mr. Kaufman's least lobbyesque lobby was at 127 John Street (Emery Roth, 1971), in Lower Manhattan. There, visitors entered through a long tunnel of corrugated steel, banded along its interior with hoops of bluish neon. Standing guard at the tunnel's entrance were two immense toy soldiers - a tableau, Mr. Horsley said, "that a visiting queen might appreciate." Nor did Mr. Kaufman neglect the backs of buildings, as his chessboard, a three-story-high affair with movable pieces, boldly attests. Mounted on a wall outside 767 Third Avenue (Fox & Fowle, 1980), 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. Other design elements were more covert - unorthodox Easter eggs that Mr. Kaufman placed in his buildings for the benefit of those in the know. There is the nude woman at 747 Third, a sculpture tucked so discreetly into a space between the entranceway's two revolving doors that she can be glimpsed, fleetingly, only in midrevolution as one enters or leaves. The Sopwith Camel is invisible from the street. A World War I biplane, it sits - or, more precisely, a life-size model of one sits - atop 77 Water Street (Emery Roth, 1970), one of Mr. Kaufman's downtown buildings. 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.