Robert A.M. Stern on the Right Side of History

Robert A.M. Stern, who died last November at the age of 86, was a defining figure in the advancement of architecture over the course of his long career, and in particular in the renewed appreciation of history within the profession. Stern changed the trajectory of contemporary practice by arguing that architects should look to established architectural languages that convey meaning and capture the spirit of place, rather than inventing a new vocabulary “every Monday morning,” as he put it. His advocacy—and the success of the projects he built—helped shape generations of colleagues, students, and members of the public. Many of his peers and disciples were eager to speak with us in the weeks and months following his death to recall how important Stern was to them personally, and to all those whose architectural practice embraces tradition.

Most essays written after Stern’s death have cited his achievements in three arenas—his architecture, his publications, and his teaching—and many have praised his preeminence as a historian and educator, while giving short shrift to his architectural legacy, which too many within the architectural establishment dismissed as unserious or as pastiche. While this article touches on all three spheres, it emphasizes Stern’s architectural practice, arguing that the extraordinary range of projects realized by Stern and his colleagues was instrumental in restoring deep reverence for history and tradition to widespread professional acceptance.

Born and raised in Brooklyn, Stern earned his undergraduate degree at Columbia University before pursuing graduate studies at the Yale School of Art and Architecture. There he benefited from the mentorship of Paul Rudolph, chair of the architecture department, and of Vincent Scully, the architectural historian and author of The Architecture of the American Summer, his exposition of the Shingle Style. The school—with its essentially Modernist curriculum and the opening of Rudolph’s Brutalist Art & Architecture Building—stood on the precipice of change. Philip Johnson, another of Stern’s mentors, famously told students, “You cannot not know history.”

Stern stood out among a strong cohort of classmates. As editor of Yale’s architecture journal Perspecta, he orchestrated the double issue 9/10, which presented two of the urtexts of late-twentieth-century architecture—excerpts from Robert Venturi’s Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture and Charles Moore’s essay “You Have to Pay for the Public Life.” These appeared alongside contributions by Rudolph, Scully, Johnson, Henry-Russell Hitchcock, Louis Kahn, and others, forming what Stern later described as “the beginning of a new kind of critical discourse about architecture.” It was an auspicious beginning to a long and influential career.

After graduating from Yale in 1965, Stern spent a year as a fellow at the Architectural League of New York, where his exhibition “40 Under 40” (1966) foreshadowed a lifelong pattern of identifying and promoting a pantheon of distinguished architects—always including himself. He later repeated this strategy with another “40 Under 40” for A+U magazine (1977), with his curation of the “Strada Novissima” for the 1980 Venice Biennale, and with his book Modern Classicism (1988).

Following a brief period in Richard Meier’s office and time working for the City of New York, Stern opened his own practice in 1969, initially in partnership with John Hagmann. The firm focused at first on weekend houses and the renovation of New York apartments, adopting a distinctly Postmodern sensibility.

At a moment when the East End of Long Island—which Stern insisted should never be called “the Hamptons”—was filling with Modernist weekend houses, Stern’s early residential work charted a different course. His Wiseman House in Montauk, New York (1967), was essentially a shingled Modernist box with soaring arched cutouts suggesting a hipped roof; it was included in Scully’s The Shingle Style Today. Stern’s Lang House in Washington, Connecticut, featured on the cover of the April 1975 issue of Progressive Architecture, was another Modernist composition, painted a bold yellow-orange, with standard lumber profiles tracing white allusions to Baroque motifs. “Bob Stern is remembered in all sorts of ways,” recalled Andrés Duany, founder of DPZ, who worked briefly in Stern’s office that summer, “but he was the most radical architect on earth at that moment—and I think he should be remembered that way.”

Peter Pennoyer, now a principal of a respected firm of his own, began working for Stern in 1979 while still a student in Stern’s undergraduate studio at Columbia. The small office—no more than half a dozen people at the time—was, Pennoyer recalled, “spilling over with Postmodernist ideas.” Stern, he said, was “trying to get to a language that was as expressive and inventive as he wanted without being pictorially shallow,” which Stern later came to see as a weakness of Postmodernism.

According to Mark Alan Hewitt, whom Stern invited to teach with him in Columbia’s preservation program in 1985, Stern “knew how to get the best out of young talent and assembled a supergroup.” Even in those early years, Stern’s commitment to architectural history was unmistakable. Thomas Kligerman, now head of his own successful New York–based firm, was a student in Stern’s undergraduate studio in the late 1970s. “One of the first things Bob had us do,” Kligerman recalled, “in addition to our design projects, was to draw a historic house at quarter-inch scale—plans, sections, and elevations—ink on Mylar with Letraset lettering.” The drawings became part of a growing library documenting houses by architects such as Lutyens, McKim, Mead & White, and Adolf Loos. “Bob was very demanding,” Kligerman said, “but obviously the best teacher I ever had.”

Even at this stage, Stern had established the mode of leadership that would define his practice. “Bob would draw little more than rough schematic sketches on trace,” Pennoyer explained. “His real design input came through incisive critiques and by directing us to history books where we could learn how to do better.” That research, Pennoyer added, “bred an interest in—and respect for—correct, thoughtful design.”

By the early 1980s, Stern’s office numbered about a dozen people and occupied a suite of small rooms near the southwest corner of 72nd Street and Broadway in Manhattan. Alongside young architects—several of whom would later become partners or partners emeriti at RAMSA—worked writers engaged in research for what would become the first volume of Stern’s six-volume history of New York City’s architecture and planning, New York 1900. The office was steeped in the creative exuberance of 1980s New York that brought together artists of all kinds with the city’s movers and shakers.

As the 1980s progressed, Stern’s explorations in Postmodernism evolved toward increasingly authentic interpretations of traditional architecture. “I don’t think Postmodernism has been given enough credit as a transition toward the legitimization of traditional and classical architecture,” said Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, a founder of DPZ and dean of the University of Miami School of Architecture from 1995 to 2013. “It wasn’t merely cosmetic or tongue-in-cheek. It represented a genuine re-encounter with history, which the academy and the profession had largely ignored.”

Gary Brewer, introducing the “Reconsidering Postmodernism” conference he organized for the Institute of Classical Architecture & Art in 2011, memorably described Postmodernism as “the gateway drug” to a more literate traditional architecture.

Stern’s pivot from Postmodernism to traditional architecture was decisive—and, given his growing public profile, highly influential. The firm produced increasingly serious interpretations of the Shingle Style, still bearing traces of Postmodern symbolism, such as the Lawson House on Long Island’s South Shore (1981) and the Cohn House on Martha’s Vineyard (1983). These were followed by a series of houses that more faithfully captured the expressive variety of the Shingle Style.

Stern’s fascination with precedent and history was clearly a driving force behind this evolution, as were his clients’ aspirations for gracious and evocative summer houses. But practical considerations also played a role. John Ike, who studied with Stern and worked in his office from 1980 to 1988 before founding his own practice, recalled Stern asking a simple question: “Why not just do work that resolves practical issues using strategies that are time-tested and longer-lasting?”

Brewer recalled bringing a prospective client in the late 2000s—who had purchased the Lawson House with plans to renovate it—to visit a newer, larger, and more traditional RAMSA house nearby. She remarked on how much more sophisticated it was, and how convincingly it captured the spirit of its historic precedents. “Bob learned a lot in six years,” she observed. The house Brewer later designed for her at RAMSA now stands on the site formerly occupied by the Lawson House.

As Stern’s firm expanded, it undertook a wide variety of historically grounded projects: the white clapboard Norman Rockwell Museum in Stockbridge, Massachusetts; the Roger Tory Peterson Institute, whose rough-hewn log columns suggest an Ionic order; and the H.H. Richardson–inspired Ohrstrom Library at St. Paul’s School. In 1986, Stern brought his ideas to a broader audience through the PBS television series Pride of Place: Building the American Dream, which featured visits to significant sites across the country and interviews with a wide range of architects. In 1994, Life magazine inaugurated its annual “Dream House” feature with an affordable and adaptable Shingle Style design by Stern; readers purchased hundreds of plan sets.

Two major projects at the University of Virginia illustrate the firm’s evolution from Postmodernism to scholarly Classicism. The first involved renovations and additions to the Observatory Hill Dining Hall, an undistinguished brick building. When Thomas Kligerman joined Stern’s office in 1982, this became his first assignment. “Bob told me what he wanted in very broad terms—columns along the glass walls,” Kligerman recalled. “When he saw my drawings, he asked, ‘Tom, are those real columns or cute columns? Where’s the American Vignola?’” During Kligerman’s time in graduate school, Stern had shifted decisively away from cartoonish Postmodernism toward a more rigorous Classicism. The elevations were redrawn using the Doric order directly from Vignola, and the building’s massing was pavilionated, echoing Jefferson’s strategy for the University’s earliest buildings. Completed in 1984, the project was controversial at the time and was ultimately demolished in 2004 to make way for a larger, but far less distinguished, dining facility.

Just eight years later, in 1992, Stern’s firm won the competition for the new Darden School of Business, located about twenty minutes from Jefferson’s Lawn. This project represented a far more scholarly engagement with Jeffersonian principles—not only architecturally, but organizationally. Drawing inspiration from Jefferson’s Central Grounds and from twentieth-century precedents such as Delano & Aldrich’s Yale Divinity School (1932), Stern and his colleagues broke the program into a series of pavilions linked by arcades that defined lawns and courtyards. The success of the Darden campus led to commissions from dozens of colleges and universities seeking new buildings that would reinforce, rather than disrupt, the historic character of their campuses.

The Spangler Campus Center at Harvard Business School (2001), which Boston Globe architecture critic Robert Campbell called “the best piece of traditional architecture to be built in Greater Boston since the early decades of the twentieth century,” extended the Georgian identity established for Harvard in the 1920s by McKim, Mead & White. Literate in its use of precedent and inventive in its planning, it exemplified Stern’s mature approach to tradition.

By contrast, Stern’s George W. Bush Presidential Center at Southern Methodist University (2013) adopted a highly reduced Classicism. Balancing SMU’s desire to continue the campus’s Georgian character with the Bush Foundation’s wish for modern building for the first presidency of the 21st century, Stern sought what he described as “the essence of Georgian.” A subsequent RAMSA building at SMU—the Cox School of Business, completed in 2024 closer to the campus core—adopted a more conventional Georgian vocabulary.

The firm also completed important buildings in other traditional idioms, including classical public libraries in Nashville and Jacksonville, classical courthouses in Charlotte and Atlanta, and Collegiate Gothic buildings at the University of Notre Dame, the University of Arkansas, and the University of Portland. 

Although Stern insisted that traditional architecture, when appropriate, be executed with scholarly rigor, he remained agnostic about style. Under his leadership, RAMSA also produced a number of overtly Modernist buildings, always filtered through historical understanding. Discussing the tapered form of the glass-clad Comcast Center in Philadelphia (2008), Stern noted that the obelisk itself is a classical form. He also argued that the glass curtain wall had become a vernacular language for American office towers. Patrick Pinnell, who designed the ornamental program for RAMSA’s two Gothic residential colleges at Yale (2017), observed that “as unlikely as it may seem, Bob had his eye on Eero Saarinen—in his belief in finding the style appropriate to the job, and in his ability to do very different things well.”

The firm’s record-setting residential towers in New York were more consistently inspired by the masonry apartment houses of the interwar years. Through careful study, Stern and his colleagues reinterpreted their virtues—well-proportioned rooms, compatibility with townhouse-scale neighbors—for contemporary life. A Sotheby’s broker recently described this approach as “the Robert Stern school of architecture: limestone façades, classic finishes, timeless.” As the firm exported these ideas to cities across the country and around the world, its towers were always adapted to local context and culture.

Throughout his career, Stern also made significant contributions to New Urbanism—though he disliked the term, preferring to speak of “traditional town planning.” “When we began our planning work, hardly anyone else was thinking seriously about suburbia,” Plater-Zyberk recalled. According to Pennoyer, “Bob believed the profession—and especially the academy—had developed an inappropriate antagonism toward suburbia and toward American middle-class values. He thought suburbia could offer solutions to urban problems.”

This early interest led Stern to develop the Subway Suburb project, presented at the 1976 Venice Biennale, and later to publish The Anglo-American Suburb (1982), co-authored with John Massengale. “The obituaries underplayed this early work,” Plater-Zyberk noted. “Bob understood that planning could have a greater impact than designing one building at a time.”

Decades later, Stern applied these lessons as co–master planner of Celebration, Florida (1997), The Walt Disney Company’s new town, and in a number of large-scale communities in China that RAMSA master-planned in the 2010s and 2020s. Another influential planning effort—the revitalization of the theater district along New York’s 42nd Street—succeeded through Stern’s respect for history and his commitment to mixed-use urbanism. All of RAMSA’s planning projects, and the firm’s building projects as well, were designed with future development in mind. 

Stern’s work for Disney extended beyond planning. His firm designed numerous buildings for the company, including the Casting Building in Florida, with its harlequin façades, and the Feature Animation Building in Burbank, whose entrance is marked by a giant sorcerer’s hat—a zenith of Venturi’s “building as sign.” Hotels designed for Disney resorts became essays in historical styles: Shingle and Stick Style in Florida, Art Moderne at Tokyo Disneyland, and, at Disneyland Paris, a New England–style inn alongside a resort inspired by Western movie backlots.

Stern’s work for Disney, as well as his engagement with suburbia, led many in the academy to consider him unserious. Reed Kroloff, then editor of Architecture magazine, memorably dismissed him as “the suede-loafered sultan of suburban retrotecture and Disney party boy.” But it was on the strength of his commissions that Stern served on Disney’s board of directors for eleven years, an unusual distinction for an architect. According to his son, Nicholas Stern, “being on the Disney board taught Bob how to listen and communicate with a room of powerful businesspeople, setting him up for the most successful chapters of his life.” 

After Stern’s appointment as dean of the Yale School of Architecture in 1998, initial concern that he would impose a historicist approach quickly faded as he brought in architects of all stripes—Leon Krier, Zaha Hadid—as visiting professors and studio critics, leading Kroloff to concede that “Bob Stern may be the best school of architecture dean in the United States.” 

Leopoldo Villardi, who worked in RAMSA’s research department and served as Stern’s amanuensis on his memoir Between Memory and Invention (2022), wrote in his tribute in Architectural Record, “perhaps more than for his buildings, Stern will be remembered for his contributions to architectural pedagogy.” Stern served as dean at Yale for an unprecedented eighteen years. Mark Ferguson, of Ferguson & Shamamian Architects, consulted Stern before accepting the deanship of the School of Architecture and Allied Arts at Catholic University in 2020. “He counseled me to be present, visible, and accessible, and to serve two or more terms.” Beyond that, Ferguson said, “Bob’s critical understanding of positions of people who are, as he put it, either nostalgic for the past or nostalgic for the future, helps me navigate a pluralistic world.” It was precisely by bringing so many prominent Modernist architects to Yale that Stern was able to return new traditional architecture to its rightful position at the center of academic discourse. 

Stern’s leadership as senior partner at RAMSA was similarly influential. He set the direction for every project and remained involved as a critic throughout their development. Arthur Chabon, a former RAMSA associate partner, recalled that presenting work to Stern was a formative experience. “We modeled our firm on Bob’s,” said Brian Sawyer, who co-founded a successful practice with fellow RAMSA alumnus John Berson in 1999. “Architecture, landscape architecture, and interior design were all integrated under one roof.” Berson added that Stern demanded clarity of thought and presentation at every level of the firm.

Equally important was Stern’s integration of design and management, disciplines too often separated in large practices. “Bob taught us how to work,” Sawyer said. That model proved scalable, as partners and senior staff assumed increasing responsibility—both within RAMSA and throughout what Berson described as “the RAMSA diaspora.”

Stern was not an architectural theorist so much as a historian. He was interested in history as a tool for practice rather than in abstract philosophy. His publications fall into two main categories. The first comprises the many monographs documenting his firm’s work: eight volumes of Buildings and Projects books covering the years from 1965 to 2019, along with large-format books organized by building type. Through these, Stern modeled the kind of documentation he hoped architects would leave behind for future generations.

Stern’s library—numbering more than 10,000 volumes—was in constant use at the office. He frequently willed into existence books he wished he had at hand, especially monographs on underappreciated architects of the early twentieth century. “If you were to search for ‘books with a foreword by Robert A.M. Stern,’” observed Samuel G. White, author of several books on McKim, Mead & White, “you would find that he caused many of them to be written.” Stern contributed forewords to books on Lutyens, Grosvenor Atterbury, Cross & Cross, and Warren & Wetmore by Peter Pennoyer and Anne Walker; to Hewitt’s monograph on Mott B. Schmidt; to Charles Warren’s reissue of The Architecture of Charles A. Platt; and to a collection of essays on Cass Gilbert—all essential texts for architects working within historical traditions.

Stern himself wrote only one architectural biography, on George Howe (1975)—an architect who worked successfully in both historicist and Modernist idioms. Stern subtitled the book Toward a Modern American Architecture, echoing Le Corbusier. His most significant scholarly contributions, however, were his expansive histories: the six-volume New York series, chronicling the city’s architecture from the end of the Civil War to the present, and Paradise Planned: The Garden Suburb and the Modern City (2013), written with David Fishman and Jacob Tilove.

These long-term research projects were integral to Stern’s practice from the outset. In his early office, John Massengale and Gregory Gilmartin worked in a dedicated “writers’ room.” As Stern later wrote, “For an architect, writing is one way of reconsidering history while working in the present—always in search of the best from the past and the present, which allows us to invent for the future.”

Stern was also an ardent preservationist. He directed the preservation program at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation from 1992 to 1998, and preservation remained central to his work. Roberta Brandes Gratz wrote in Common Edge that Stern taught students “not just architectural history, but the importance of saving buildings.” He was an early and vocal advocate for landmarking Modernist buildings as well as older masterpieces.

Peg Breen, president of the New York Landmarks Conservancy and a close collaborator on numerous preservation campaigns, recalled: “Robert A.M. Stern was a great friend to the Conservancy. He supported us whenever we asked—writing letters, opinion pieces, and testimony. Bob was, and always will be, my hero.”

“You cannot write the history of architecture over the last several decades without Bob in a central place,” Pinnell observed. For more than fifty-five years, Stern led the firm that continues to bear his name, expanding a small boutique practice into one of the world’s most prominent firms working in traditional idioms.

Stern and his colleagues completed more first-rate traditional buildings—and across a wider range of types—than perhaps any other contemporary practice: modest houses, grand residences, institutional buildings, residential towers, and entire new towns. Yet Stern’s influence extended well beyond the projects his firm realized. “Bob created a comfort zone for architects interested in traditional practice,” said White. Ferguson added that Stern was “an enthusiast, aficionado, critic, author, visionary, teacher, and entrepreneur,” always available with thoughtful, often witty advice informed by deep historical knowledge.

In reflecting on Modernism’s unrealized promise to transform quantity into quality, Duany offered a characteristically pointed assessment: “Bob delivered both,” he said, making Stern “the only true modern architect.”

Massengale, Stern’s longtime collaborator, recalled a lunchtime conversation in which Stern said, “I have three goals in life.” The first was to become dean of the Yale School of Architecture; the second, to design a building New Yorkers would remember; the third, to establish an author’s department within his firm. By the end of his life, all three had been achieved.

In his final days, Nicholas Stern said, his father was “at peace with his legacy.” As Hewitt observed, Stern “achieved every goal he set for himself.” With his passing, Robert A.M. Stern has himself become part of the history he so deeply cherished. TB

About the Authors 

Before launching his own practice in 2024, Gary Brewer was a longtime partner at Robert A.M. Stern Architects (RAMSA), where he led the design of projects including the 1994 Life magazine Dream House, the new campus for the Darden School of Business at the University of Virginia, the Spangler Campus Center at Harvard Business School, and the widely published classical beachfront cottage in Seaside, Florida. garybrewerarchitect.com 

Peter Morris Dixon served as director of external communications at RAMSA, coordinating the firm’s business development and public relations efforts and helping craft the narrative of the firm’s work in publications for more than two decades.