Robert A.M. Stern
Robert A.M. Stern (born May 23, 1939, New York, New York, U.S.) is an American postmodern architect whose buildings incorporate a variety of historical styles.
Stern studied at Columbia University (B.A., 1960) in New York City and Yale University (M.A., 1965) in New Haven, Connecticut. He worked in partnership with John Hagmann from 1969 to 1977 and then established his own firm, Robert A.M. Stern Architects (RAMSA). He quickly became known as a designer of striking private homes and villas—often in resort areas such as East Hampton, New York—that expressed the postmodern interest in historical context. Examples of work in this style include a large gabled house (1981) in Farm Neck, Massachusetts, designed in emulation of turn-of-the-20th-century Shingle-style homes by Stanford White and Grosvenor Atterbury; the seaside cottagelike Lawson House (1981) in East Quogue, New York; and a Tuscan Classical villa (1992) at River Oaks in Houston, Texas.
In the 1980s and ’90s Stern worked closely with the Walt Disney Company, creating many important spaces for the company and serving on its board of directors from 1992 to 2003. Among his many Disney commissions were two complexes (1987–91) in Lake Buena Vista, Florida: Disney’s Yacht Club Resort, in which he re-created a late 19th-century New England beach resort, and Disney’s Beach Club Resort, built in the style of a Mid-Atlantic seaside resort. He also designed Walt Disney Studios Feature Animation Building (1994) in Burbank, California, a structure that playfully incorporates Mickey Mouse’s hat from “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice” sequence in the Disney film Fantasia. He also served as a planner and designer (1997) for Celebration, Disney’s developed community in Florida, which utilized traditions of American small-town planning. During this period Stern was the target of some criticism in the architecture world, as many felt that his use of historical and cultural references, while often elegant in his private homes, became kitschy and retrograde in some of these Disney commissions.
Stern’s work apart from Disney included 222 Berkeley Street (1991), a mixed-use office space in Boston that utilizes the city’s palate of red brick and granite; a series of Jeffersonian spaces for the Darden School of Business (1996) at the University of Virginia, Charlottesville; a simple clapboard structure housing the Norman Rockwell Museum (1993) in Stockbridge, Massachusetts; and a series of golf-resort commissions in Japan. His firm also designed the Hobby Center for the Performing Arts in Houston (2002).
As the 21st century progressed, Stern remained prolific. He built several skyscrapers, notably Comcast Center (2008), Philadelphia, and Tour Carpe Diem (2013), Courbevoie, France. Stern was also selected to design the George W. Bush Presidential Center (2013) at Southern Methodist University, Dallas, Texas, and the Museum of the American Revolution (2017), Philadelphia. Acutely aware of the expectations for a building based on its location or function, Stern worked in a variety of styles, designing structures that are often indistinguishable from their historical precedents. For Abington House on the High Line (2014), New York, he looked to the neighbouring industrial structures, applying similar brick and painted steel to his residential building; for Damrak 70 (2016), a mixed-use building in Amsterdam, he used patterns of brick and limestone on the exterior, echoing the city’s traditional architecture; for the residence halls (2017) at Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut, he reinterpreted the red-brick Georgians on campus. Stern also designed historical-looking residences at the Hotchkiss School (2007), Lakeville, Connecticut; at the University of Delaware (2017), Newark; and at Colgate University (2019), Hamilton, New York. He continued to construct residential towers in New York in the late 2010s, including 220 Central Park South (2019), which became known for housing some of the most expensive apartments in the city.
Stern was also a noted architectural historian, writing groundbreaking books such as 40 Under 40: Young Talent in Architecture (1966), New Directions in American Architecture (1969), Modern Classicism (1988), and Tradition and Invention in Architecture: Conversations and Essays (2011). In 1986 he hosted Pride of Place: Building the American Dream, a documentary series shown on the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS). He was coauthor of several volumes on architecture and urbanism in New York City, including New York 1880 (1999), New York 1900 (1983), New York 1930 (1987), New York 1960 (1995), and New York 2000 (2006). Stern also coauthored Paradise Planned: The Garden Suburb and the Modern City (2013) and Pedagogy and Place: 100 Years of Architecture Education at Yale ( 2016). He began teaching at Columbia in 1970, and from 1998 to 2016 he was dean of Yale’s School of Architecture.
In 2007 Stern was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and in 2008 he was awarded the Vincent Scully Prize (established in 1999 by the National Building Museum in Washington, D.C.) for his lasting contribution to the field of architecture.