What Robert A.M. Stern Understood About New York City

Sometime next summer, just in time for the nation’s 250th birthday, visitors will walk down West 76th Street near Central Park West and most likely fail to notice the new wall of granite stonework and Doric columns that replaced a low brick partition and an empty lot. The façade, and the building behind it, will look as if they had always been there. That feat of continuity is the work of the architect Robert A.M. Stern, and it’s a shame he didn’t live to see the completion of the project, the New York Historical’s Tang Wing for American Democracy. Stern’s design, woven through and behind the original 1908 building and the 1939 addition that gave the museum its full-block width, is transformative yet inconspicuous, embodying his values of understated patriotism, historical preservation, tastefulness, and memory. It’s apt that he died on Thanksgiving Day.

Stern was perhaps the most powerful and most underrated architect in the country for the past 40 years. He taught legions of students, served as dean of the Yale School of Architecture, counted academic colleagues by the dozen, ran a firm of 300 architects, and designed hundreds of buildings in styles ranging from Plutocrat Classicism to Corporate Crystal. His masterwork, 15 Central Park West, reignited the pursuit of old-fashioned luxury. And yet almost every time his name comes up in conversation with other designers, I hear the same line, delivered in a confidential tone: “He’s a better historian than he is an architect.” That may be true, but it’s hardly a zinger since he set the bar high in both fields. His New York buildings don’t preen; they work. They’re not revolutionary, but they are profoundly urban.

Rather than impose an architectural vision on a recalcitrant city, he absorbed New York’s urban qualities into the design. That approach is usually called contextualism, but it’s a weak catchall for the art of fitting in. As every high-schooler knows, looking like you belong is a delicate and unpredictable operation with a high risk of looking dumb. Success depends on a sharp analysis of the world you aspire to join, and that’s where Stern excelled. He literally wrote the book on New York architecture — six of them, in fact — along with his principal co-authors David Fishman and Jacob Tilove, a 7,000-page saga that culminates in the recently published New York 2020. Like its predecessors, the most recent volume is an exhaustive guide to the city’s continual transformation, chronicling not just the loud dramas around Manhattan’s major monuments but also changes to neighborhoods that get less scrutiny: the leopard enclosure at the Staten Island Zoo, a cluster of supportive housing in the Bronx, a wooden-roofed Zen center in Flushing. In conversation, Stern dropped opinions like bang snaps, but he didn’t use the books to argue for his own architectural approach. Instead, they embody his erudition, his dogged loyalty to history, and his respect for teamwork and debate. As a historian and educator, he included colleagues and critics with whom he disagreed. (I’m one of the many critics the latest book quotes frequently and at length.)

Most Billionaires’ Row supertalls evoked a crystalline futurism, but Stern’s 220 Central Park South evoked Old New York, just taller.
Photo: Francis Dzikowski/OTTO

All that research surely shaped Stern’s reading of New York as a collective endeavor — an accumulated residue of egos, financial gambles, grandiose visions, technical innovation, real-estate opportunism, altruistic impulse, political reality, flickering fashions, and demographic happenstance. Grand plans are often left to marinate so long they become unrecognizable. Pure visions get creatively corrupted. And yet it doesn’t pay to give up on New York, because no matter how bad things get, trends reverse, slums are reborn, and doom is regularly delayed. Stern’s books, like his buildings, reflect his faith in an enduring city, made of granite as well as buzz.

He was not the first to design an extension for the New York Historical. In the 1980s, Hardy Holzman Pfeiffer’s proposal to crown the museum by topping it with a 23-story postmodern ziggurat condo tower enraged Upper West Side neighbors. Two decades later, Richard Meier & Partners stirred up a new round of anger with a plan to impale the original building with a white-steel-and-glass stake. Eventually, Stern achieved tranquility by persuading the museum to expand invisibly, keeping the original roofline inviolate, even if that meant relinquishing the windfall it might have reaped by selling its air rights to a developer. And yet he wasn’t opposed to such an exchange in principle. Farther uptown, he designed the Claremont, which shoots 40 stories up from the Union Theological Seminary and translates the early-20th-century vocabulary of gray schist and limestone into gray-and-black brick trimmed with limestone-hued precast concrete, all of which makes the tower look like it’s dressed in tailored tweed. The façade’s abundance of bays, quoins, parapets, and groupings of windows echoes the collegiate Gothic original, making it a good, if oversize, academic neighbor in a quarter dominated by colleges, universities, seminaries, and music schools.

The Claremont, in Morningside Heights, nods (down) to the Gothic towers of Riverside Church and Union Theological Seminary.
Photo: Francis Dzikowski/OTTO/©2024 Francis Dzikowski/OTTO

It’s the tallest skyscraper in Morningside Heights, giving the skyline a boost and opening a new vertical frontier. But it’s also respectful in its way, joining the ecumenical gang of stone towers that includes the 392-foot Riverside Church, the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, and the stumpier but extravagantly be-spired and -crenellated seminary. Those structures date from the early 20th century, when American architects (many schooled in Europe) wrestled with how to disguise revolutionary technology and unprecedented scale in familiar wrappings. And so, farther downtown, employees of Metropolitan Life Insurance took speedy elevators up to their paperwork farms in an Italianate palace on Madison Square that featured a Venetian campanile. The headquarters for the age of fossil fuels was the Standard Oil Building at 26 Broadway, its Renaissance stonework and columns piled high to reach the scale that the new century required. Riverside Church, too, was supersized by steel, the product that grew stronger at the speed of a growing puppy, allowing buildings to put on ever more muscle and height. That tower, too, invoked a 1,000-year-old style to disguise its mutant dimensions.

Prewar is forever at the Henry, Stern’s 19-story building still under construction at Broadway and West 84th Street.
Photo: DBOX/Compass

Stern missed that revivalist period, starting his career at a time when the mandarins of modernism held that modern architecture should be modern from core to skin: Since outer walls are no longer needed to hold up the building, they shouldn’t pretend to strength. A weatherproof membrane would do. He was never convinced by that fundamentalist view, believing that the sequence of windows, the roughness of stone, and the recognizability of a scroll gave architecture its character. (And Stern was certainly a character.) He looked back to the way his forebears had looked even further back, each generation of neoclassicists recapitulating all the ones that had come before and finding a new iteration of the past.

That didn’t make him a throwback, though; he was always deeply engaged with the present. He once recounted to Architectural Record the compromises he made during his early years of designing apartments for the affluent: “To meet a new generation’s needs — and it was my generation — plans were opened up. Staff rooms were combined to create family rooms, and living and dining rooms were frequently thrown together — something I now view with mixed feelings. I took apart more beautifully planned apartments of an earlier era than I would like to admit.” Even those most loyal to New York’s past are sometimes forced to betray it.