Though active as a philanthropist, Bartos became primarily known as the co-designer of Shrine of the Book that houses the Dead Sea Scrolls in western Jerusalem.
Bartos's various and diverse activities, primarily not architecturally focused, included service as the chairperson emeritus of the SculptureCenter, Long Island City, Queens, New York.
The Bartoses became generous philanthropists, concentrating on culture, particularly twentieth-century art of which they were avid collectors, filling their Park Avenue apartment in New York City.
Celeste became fabulously wealthy as a result of inheriting the estate of her father, Samuel Gottesman (1885–1956), a Hungarian émigré who had become a pulp-paper merchant and financier.
In the early 1990s at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the Bartoses gave US$100,000 toward the Rotch Library expansion project in the School of Architecture building and donated $1 million for the establishment of The Celeste and Armand Bartos Visualization Center, a classroom facility completed in 1999.