Robert A. M. Stern

In over thirty years of practice, Robert A. M. Stern has developed a distinctive architecture committed to the synthesis of tradition and innovation and, above all, to the creation and enhancement of a meaningful sense of place. This monograph, covering the years 1999?2002, is the fourth in a series on Stern's work. The volume includes more than one hundred projects, including houses and apartments, buildings for cultural institutions and universities, office and commercial structures, government facilities, and designs for products, including fabric and tableware. From the Trade Paperback edition.

Architect, educator, and architectural historian Robert A. M. Stern is the founding partner of Robert A. M. Stern Architectus and dean of the Yale School of Architecture. In addition to monographs on the firm's work, Stern has written a series of books on New York's architecture and urbanism, including New York 1880, New York 1900, New York 1930, and New York 1960.

Vincent Scully is the Sterling Professor Emeritus of the History of Art at Yale University. Scully is the author of more than a dozen influential books of which the best known are The Shingle Style and Stick Style: Architectural Theory and Design from Richardson to the Origins of Wright, Architecture: The Natural and the Man-Made, and Modern Architecture and Other Essays.

From:
Robert A. M. Stern and Paul Goldberger: A Conversation

PAUL GOLDBERGER: Bob, forty years of practice is an extraordinary thing, all the more because you continue at such a rapid pace. I remember the office over the storefront on West Seventy-second Street, which was probably smaller than your reception area is right now. Let me first ask you if there’s anything you miss from those early days when it was a kind of office on a shoestring.

ROBERT A. M. STERN: “Office on a shoestring” sums it up perfectly. What one does miss, of course, from when one is brand new in practice, is the thrill of the first or the second or the third commission or telephone call as it were. And the very close camaraderie of a few people. But there is no question that a larger office—and I’m not sure how much larger “larger” should really be—provides one with all kinds of other things and a more solid professionalism. You avoid some of the horrible mistakes that many small practices make, both technical errors in execution of the work and mistakes in terms of how to position the firm and how to write a contract and a hundred other things.

I was thinking of that, actually, as I was waiting for your arrival. Of course, it was much nicer in some ways when it was smaller and I knew everybody. And I knew them warts and all, and they knew me warts and all. Now I think they know me warts and all and I’m not sure I know them.

But there are people in our practice today who don’t go back to day one but do go back to say, day three. People who have been here thirty years or more and are now partners, and we have a close camaraderie. But of course, many others who came to the practice have become partners and associates as well.

PG: It is remarkable, though, that there are some people who really spent their entire careers here.

RS: I’m always disappointed when people leave. But I recognize that for some people, for many people, it’s a good thing to do. Find their own way. Sometimes people don’t work better in a different environment than the one they’re leaving, but they think it’s going to be better, that the grass will be greener. Sometimes, they think they’re going to be able to do it on their own, and they suddenly discover that independent practice is not for everyone or not for them. Some chose to return to the nest. But we’ve spawned a lot of firms.

PG: You know, for a while, it seemed right to compare Robert A. M. Stern Architects to a practice like Delano & Aldrich or John Russell Pope or James Gamble Rogers, great eclectic firms of the 1920s, ’30s, and so forth.

But given that they were less concerned about formal innovation than they were about careful, conscientious re-use of historical form and given the sheer volume of work you now have, larger than any of those firms, I think even in their heyday, I wonder to whom would you want to be compared, ideally?

RS: There were no really large firms in the time of the architects you mentioned, to my knowledge. None that was very large. McKim, Mead & White and Daniel Burnham set the model, but it was just the model for big practice, not the reality. It’s only since the founding of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill in the late 1930s and after that the large firm taking on many different kinds of work began to emerge.

I like to think that we are able to compete with different firms for different kinds of work, that we can compete with a KPF or a Skidmore for a corporate project and other firms for other kinds of work. Maybe we’re sui generis, egomaniac though such a claim might be.

PG: We all know you are sui generis, so the question is therefore, perhaps the firm also is?

RS: We run our practice differently. First of all, we run side by