Hans Noë, an architect, sculptor and accidental restaurateur, best known for his meticulous revival of one of New York City’s oldest bars, died on May 11 at his home in Garrison, NY. He was 96.

Although Mr. Noë designed and built both innovative houses and geometric wooden sculptures, his most visible role in the cultural life of his adopted city was as the proprietor of Fanelli Café. In the early 1970s, he began buying neglected buildings in SoHo, fixing them up and renting them to commercial tenants and as artists’ lofts. When the seller of a five-story building on the corner of Prince and Mercer Streets threw in the street-level bar, Fanelli Café, Mr. Noë adopted the place, improved it, and made it, as The New York Times described it, “…a place where the roar of conversation is still the only background noise, and SoHo artists, Wall Street bankers, and international tourists sit side by side at an ornate wooden bar under a ceiling stained the golden color of smoldering marshmallows by a century’s worth of tobacco smoke.”

Mr. Noë spent three years as a student at the Cooper Union in Manhattan, where he found a mentor in the sculptor and architectural designer Tony Smith, who introduced him to other downtown figures, including Mark Rothko, for whom he stretched canvases, and Barnett Newman.

Later, at home in Garrison, he constructed geometric figures like intersecting  pyramids, extended triangles sliced-up cubes and a distinctive trapezoidal solid.