If you are reading this, Bob Stern (1939-2025) had something to do with it. Or at least he would claim he had. One hallmark of all the tributes that have been pouring in over the last two days since his passing at the age of 86 was announced is how intensely personal they are.
Robert A.M. Stern was not only an architect, a teacher and a Dean, as well as a critic and historian, but also an acerbic and demanding, but loving mentor. His service to three or four generations of architects, critics, and policy makers as a guide is, in my mind, a greater legacy than that embodied by either his firm’s built oeuvre, or by the many books he wrote or oversaw.
So this memory is also personal.
Stern critiqued not just in an intellectual manner. His advice to me for years always started with the phrase “When you grow up….” Walking through Jon Jerde’s shopping mall in San Diego, to which I had chauffeured him as a young designer, after driving him to see a project he was working on nearby, I picked up a tie. Stern grabbed it for himself: “When you grow up, you will get to wear ties like this.”
When I proudly invited him to our home for dinner many years later, he looked around and judged: “Nice house. When you grow up, you will learn not to furnish such a place with Ikea.” (How did he know three pieces in the living room were from our then-favorite furniture emporium?) He could be complimentary, but always in a biting manner.
I mark my career as existing in the arc from “Congratulations, you have gone from writing things I read while I am on the phone to pieces I read in the bathroom” to “Yes, I read your most recent book. I just wish I could live long enough to refute everything in it.” There was also career advice, which I ignored at my peril; some of my most miserable years were spent at jobs he warned me against taking.
I think that hundreds of people could repeat such stories. That he was able to track and remember all of us was just a small part of the prodigious intellectual capacity that fed his wit. Not only did he remember seemingly every crit he was ever on, but he also knew and could articulate opinions on more architectural history than most professors in the field.
Bob was an expert on the New York social scene, which helped him become the apartment builder to the rich and famous there and raise vasts sums for Yale. And then he was also adept at figuring out the rules and regulations of academia and the full scope of what was going on in architecture around the world, which helped him become one of the most successful Dean the Yale School of Architecture –or any American school– has ever had.
Oh yes, he was also an architect. At its peak, his firm employed several hundred people and executed buildings all around the world. Some of the designs were quite good. Robert A.M. Stern’s firm was particularly skillful at channeling, streamlining, and making buildable –within the restrictions of modern craft and budgets– the kind of already stripped-down historic eclecticism that shaped both much of American academia and the aeries of quite a few members of the one percent during the two World Wars.
Was he himself a good architect? Only in the sense, I believe, that one of his models, James Gamble Rogers was. Rogers, whose work Stern channeled with good results for the two residential colleges he designed at Yale, was above all a master at collecting the talents of others: picking the best people, acting as a critic, and selling the work both before he was commissioned and especially in shepherding it through to realization. So it seems to me was Stern, and one of the strengths of his that you can see the work of the immensely talented crew he assembled in the individual buildings the Robert A.M. Stern firm produced.
The first time I visited the firm, I was there to see my classmate and friend Kevin Smith, who later rose to become one of those very good partners that shaped the work. As we were chatting, Stern walked by the desk and, after telling me to stop distracting Smith, glanced over at the drawing the then young designer was working on and said, “No, not that detail, the one on page 87” (or something like that), referring to a book of Palladio open next to the project under design.
But the design the firm produced was not just about copying and pasting historical references. Just as Smith became the partner responsible for some of the best and most modern-looking work in the office, so the buildings the firm produced became increasingly original and modern, while preserving historic references often updated in witty ways.
Then there was the march of the Black Books, as I think of them: tome after tome of encyclopedias of New York architecture divided into tranches slicing through times roughly every two decades, or one generation. Assembled with a team of researchers (working on these books became a finished school for several generations of historians and critics), they offer an epic narrative of the development of New York in the world’s central metropolis starting after the Civil War. Buried in the near-biblical recitation of buildings and who begat them are countless little stories and apercus that collectively embody what Rem Koolhaas has so aptly termed “Manhattanism.”
There were other books, including an excellent one on the development of American suburbia, and an early monograph on one of his predecessors as Dean at Yale, George Howe, that all made major contributions to architectural history. Looking at the array of what Robert A.M. Stern was able to accomplish makes you wonder where he found not only the wit and intelligence, but also simply the time to do it all.
And yet, Stern’s legacy is lighter, but also more incisive. Despite all of the monuments Bob Stern produced, what I will always remember is the flash of the yellow socks that were his signature eye-catcher that punctuated his otherwise impeccably sober businessman’s attire; the gleam off the martini glass he held while working the room; and the glint of his eye as he let fly another zinger.
I will remember the gossip and the erudite references, the advice and the digs. Stern was not just an architect, teacher, and historian, but above all else a critic who shaped our –my—culture is profound ways. For all that, we should thank Robert A.M. Stern and mourn his passing.
