A Few Words with Robert A.M. Stern, 2010 Landmarks Lion
Architect Robert A. M. Stern has tirelessly helped save historic architecture in every New York borough, during four decades of running his own Manhattan firm, writing definitive books and leading Ivy League graduate programs. His scholarly volumes about the city’s architectural evolution, his training for preservationists, his advocacy campaigns and building projects have benefited neighborhoods from the leafiest Bronx suburbs to the stateliest Staten Island villa rows and most avant-garde airline terminals. On October 27, at the Four Seasons restaurant in midtown, the Historic Districts Council will celebrate him as the 2010 Landmarks Lion.
A master of multitasking, Mr. Stern has served as Yale’s architecture school dean since 1998 and before that ran Columbia’s preservation program. “My educational children are everywhere,” he chuckles. His office has meanwhile kept 220 staffers busy with projects across the U.S. and as far afield as Cyprus and Korea, in building types as dignified as courthouses and as whimsical as seaside follies. Out of respect for existing contexts as varied as Columbia’s campus and the Bronx gardens of Wave Hill, the firm has added neighborly structures based on diverse precedents like Gothic chapels, Art Deco hotels and Arts and Crafts cottages.
In just the past few years, their high-profile New York projects have ranged from sympathetic renovations for the 1970s Kaufman Center performing arts complex on West 67th Street to the rebirth of an abandoned 1880s brick public school on Patchen Avenue in Bedford-Stuyvesant. Mr. Stern has also fought to save other architects’ innovations in architecture, including modernist works by the likes of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill and Harrison & Abramovitz and Edward Durell Stone’s 1960s 2 Columbus Circle. The Stern practice has spun off countless offices, too; that is, his students and ex-staffers have gone on to become high profile architects, preservationists, designers and scholars in their own right, including bold-face names like Peter Pennoyer and Andrés Duany.
In his spare time, Mr. Stern managed to create a popular TV series, “Pride of Place: Building the American Dream,” and to co-write hefty and definitive books about New York’s architecture spanning from the end of the Civil War to the 21st century. His volumes explain how evolving fashions in urban planning and design have sculpted streetscapes from the Victorian boathouses on stilts of the Staten Island coast to the Corbusian cruciform apartment blocks of Elmhurst. The books also delve into lost landmarks, like Harlem’s little-known 1880s Opera House on 125th Street and the still-lamented Penn Station. Mr. Stern has found time as well to write forewords for other scholars’ recent monographs about New York powerhouse architects, ranging from inventive early 20th century traditionalists like Grosvenor Atterbury and Warren & Wetmore to the Kentucky-born modernist Paul Rudolph.
Mr. Stern, by designing so nimbly and writing so prolifically, has broadened countless minds. One major goal for his new construction, he says, is to “help people reappraise what’s around them. I think of myself as an architect responsible to the past, present and future.” As for his publications, he adds, “I specialize in underappreciated architects, traditionalists and modernists alike.”
A lifelong New Yorker, he was born in Manhattan and grew up at the northern edge of Flatbush, while often visiting midtown to admire the clean-lined, then-new slabs of Lever House and the United Nations. His college and architecture school mentors ran the gamut from modernists (Rudolph) to postmodernists (Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown), traditionalists (Vincent Scully) and chameleons (Philip Johnson). In the 1970s, after briefly working for Richard Meier, he founded his own firm. Mr. Stern now divides his time between an apartment in one of his own stone-trimmed brick towers on the Upper East Side and a Victorian duplex loft in New Haven. He also spends time in the West Village visiting his son Nicholas, who runs a boutique construction management company called Stern Projects.
Robert Stern is currently working on a book about the firm’s campus projects, scattered from Harvard to Rice University to Pomona and in styles as varied as Georgian and Mediterranean Revival. He is also writing a survey of planned suburbs around the world, built between the 18th century and World War II. New York’s contributions to the genre, including Forest Hills and Prospect Park South, will of course be covered. “There’s an incredibly elaborate mosaic around the city, and not just generic sprawl, that most people aren’t aware of,” he says.
The HDC is very pleased to be honoring one of the most erudite, influential and passionate Lions in the two-decade history of this award.
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