Robert A.M. Stern, architect, prolific architectural historian, charismatic educator, and transformational dean of the Yale School of Architecture from 1998 to 2016, died on Nov. 27 after a short illness. He was 86.
When Stern came to Yale as the architecture school dean in 1998, he was returning to a place that had captivated him in his youth, and where he earned a master's degree in architecture in 1965.
While he hoped to attend Harvard as an undergraduate (and he never forgot the rejection he received), he instead went to Columbia University, in his beloved hometown of New York City. And it turned out that Columbia significantly broadened his interests and gave him a superb foundation.
At Columbia, which at the time did not have an undergraduate architecture program, he studied history and literature. Benefiting from the core curriculum program and the university's renowned faculty, he found a home in Columbia's Avery Architectural Library under the mentorship of its associate librarian Adolf Placzek. He wrote his senior seminar papers on the architectural history of New York, a prelude to his later New York series on architecture and urbanism which traced the evolution of the city from the Civil War to the present day.
But as perfect as Columbia was for a boy who had spent his youth walking the city and viewing its buildings, his experience as a Yale graduate student turned out to be something else entirely. Stern had thought, once again, that he would go to Harvard - and this time he was admitted. But at the urging of a friend, he visited Yale and something in him found an immediate match at what he found in architecture there.
Yale, he said, was "bursting with energy." At the time, the dean of the architecture school was the invigorating Paul Rudolph, a popular, individualistic, maverick personality who had transformed the school and who believed it should be a place where critics of different views could engage in hot debate. Rudolph restructured the curriculum, participated in design studios, and was, as Stern would later say, a "direct, harsh, refreshingly brusque presence" at student crits. He vitalized the school, making it a true community with strong figures, who were in continual disagreement. He recruited famous critics and created a social life, with parties in his apartment where faculty and students drank and mingled.
Stern loved everything that Rudolph had put in place at Yale - the sheer energy of it was especially attractive to him. And as a student he took it all in, reveling in the controversies and contradictions. He became close to Rudolph, absorbed the atmosphere where the Modernists (Gropius, Le Corbusier, and Mies Van Der Rohe) were becoming "old hat" and the young Turks (Saarinen, Philip Johnson, and Rudolph himself) were in ascendence.
He benefited from classmates who would go on to become some of the important architects of their time. He met Robert Venturi, who taught a series of studios at the school during the 1960s, and who at the time emphasized context and an awareness of the past in design. Venturi's 1966 book, "Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture," became a manifesto for the postmodernism that Stern took as his own for a part of his career. And he became absorbed in the culture of the place, the high octane academic, professional and social world with a mixture of different people with diverse opinions, where there was no governing or limiting ethos.
Perhaps most importantly, he came under the influence of Vincent Scully, the iconic professor and architectural historian whose "impassioned lecture style, charismatic personality, and powerful convictions," as Stern wrote, "helped set the moral compass of all who studied with him." Scully was to have an enduring influence on Stern, and not simply his charismatic and galvanizing lectures. For Stern, Scully's book "The Shingle Style: Architectural Theory and Design from Richardson to the Origins of Wright" became deeply influential for the building of many of his first homes. "All of my shingle style houses without question are a result of these books, his writing, and what he said in class," Stern stated in his 2008 Interview with Richard Conniff.
Scully and Stern were quite a pair. Anyone who ever drove with either of them gained uncomfortable insight into something similar and definable in their characters. Both were backseat drivers to the nth degree in an automobile. "Watch out," "It would be better if you…" "Don't you see that car," 'Turn NOW," and other anxiety and accident-provoking remarks would make the driver firmly decide then and there never to be at the wheel again with such passengers.
Stern had excellent executive function, and although always frank, sometimes brutally so - especially as he grew more accomplished and famous - he was nevertheless in control and professional: No one who was the head of a firm that has hundreds working for it could be otherwise. As an undergraduate he had failed as a coxswain but had been chosen to manage Columbia's crew team. In the '60s he helped manage Scully's class. His attention to detail and punctiliousness were legendary.
As a graduate student, as was usual for him, Stern, became a figure of distinction, someone of large personality and equally large gifts who was recognized by the faculty and had a prominent and acknowledged place among his classmates. He had a confidence, an acquaintance with architectural history, a power of expression, a memory that enabled him to absorb with detail, and a style that made him unignorable. A born writer and editor, he became first an associate editor and finally the editor of Perspecta, the architectural journal edited by Yale's graduate students, and he corralled famous architects and teachers to write for it. It was in the journal's landmark double issue, Perspecta 9/10, edited by Stern, that selections from Venturi's book on "Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture" were first published.
And yet, although he was a trenchant critic beyond his years in graduate school, Stern nevertheless was forced to take a year off because he twice failed the required course in Structures and could not be promoted. While he tried to enroll as a master's candidate in the Department of Art History to complement his architecture degree during this enforced time away, his inability to learn languages closed that route to him. Eventually he was allowed to graduate with his Master of Architecture degree after making a solemn promise to Hank Pfisterer, a professor of architectural engineering, that he would never design anything "bigger than a house" without a structural engineer. (He kept the promise.)
Wherever he was, and whatever he did, Stern was a true one off, an original. He always loved film and the theater, and there was an element of the theatrical, of showmanship, in much of what he did. These would be nothing, however, unless accompanied by substance: his gifts, his powers of expression, his memory, his energy, and his ability to get a multitude of different things done well.
Although his career as an architect started slowly, he was always involved in work that made people aware of him. After graduating from Yale he worked for the Architectural League of New York; from 1972 to 1977 he was its president, the youngest ever appointed. As a central hub for architectural discourse, the League placed him in the middle of many architects he came to know through exhibitions, educational, award events, and of the social networking at which he was always a master.
He began publishing books, "New Directions in Architecture" in 1969 and "George Howe: Toward a Modern American Architecture" in 1975. These were the prelude to the later massive undertaking that he had begun in college, a series of books he authored, coauthored, and edited about New York architecture, comprehensively covering the city's development and architecture across different time periods, from the Gilded Age to the beginning of the 21st century.
Beginning in 1970 he taught at his alma mater, Columbia, moving from teaching a single course to becoming a tenured professor, and taking on leadership roles as the director of the Temple Hoyne Buell Center for the Study of American Architecture and director of the Graduate Program in Historic Preservation. He also navigated the deep waters of institutional reluctance to accomplish something important to him: the development of an undergraduate major in architecture, which had not existed when he was working towards his degree. Typically, the new program was rigorous and a model of its kind.
Over time his own architectural philosophy moved from postmodernism to what he called "modern traditionalism." After wrestling with modernist demons, he said, he wanted to "put back into architecture what orthodox modernism had taken out of it," "reinventing and reinvigorating the free-spirited modern classicism that had been erased from history books by strict modernists."
He came to believe that "the buildings of the late twentieth century that I have come to enjoy, were not the dead ends that historians seemed to think they were" but were "the jumping off point for new buildings." These developments put him orthogonal to the current architectural modes of the day - something that bothered him not at all.
Very important to this development was Scully's book on the shingle style, which gave him models for what the literary critic and author Van Wyck Brooks called a "useable past." Over time his development of this style became the initial foundation of the work of his firm, Robert A.M. Stern Architects (RAMSA), building homes with elegant and comfortable "modern traditional" living spaces for those who could afford them. Stern recognized that people may like to admire glass houses but if they have their choice, they often don't really wish to live in them - and this meshed with his own architectural beliefs.
His most famous signature project, 15 Central Park West, where all apartments were sold before the building was completed (and where prices soared into the many millions of dollars), was finished a decade after he became dean at Yale and accelerated his firm's renown. But RAMSA already had been deeply involved in building such homes for single clients - as well as major projects for companies, corporations, and schools - and had hundreds of architects, planners, and designers working for it.
Stern coveted the position of dean at Yale School of Architecture. Any such deanship is a feather-in-a-cap for an architect, of course, and provides a boost to the career of even the most distinguished professional. But for Stern, there was so much more than this. He loved teaching at Columbia, but the Yale School of Architecture meant something very special to him. As he returned as leader of the school, in the back of his mind was a palimpsest of the school he'd known as student. He yearned to recreate that vitality.
His road to the deanship was not simple. "Sometimes, politics clouds the judgment of search committees," Richard Levin, who at the time was Yale's president, writes in a forthcoming memoir. Stern was one of two candidates that Levin proposed for the committee to consider, but he was not among the four candidates the committee proposed. As Levin writes, the members believed "that Bob Stern's design practice, with its deference to incorporating historical architectural styles, was too backward-looking and conservative to attract students," "Implicit in their thinking," Levin adds, "was the conviction that any dean with Bob's strength of intellect and personality would try to recreate the school in his own image."
Levin was nevertheless skeptical about the committee's own list of candidates, all distinguished in their own right, but without the blend of gifts, he believed, that would make them the kind of transformative dean the school required in its then weakened condition. He arranged to meet with Bob, who came prepared with a detailed and electric vision. Among his most critical efforts, he said, would be to make the school a "wide-open arena for discussion, where every interesting approach to architecture was tested and debated." Stern laid out his plans, step by step, arguing that he "wanted Yale to be the place where every distinguished architect wanted to teach."
Stern, Levin writes, was "the smartest, most intellectual, and most articulate architect I had ever encountered."
Levin took the bit between his teeth and hired Stern. The two then endured what each described as a "tough moment": the introduction of the new dean to a recalcitrant audience of faculty, staff, and students. "To say there was 'polite applause' would be correct, but there wasn't much of it," writes Levin. A "funereal silence" was more like it. A few faculty even left the announcement in protest. Stern thought some people had made up their minds before hearing him say in his acceptance remarks that "Yale should be a place where poetics and pragmatics rub together, where the past and present intersect, where the abstract and the concrete co-exist."
There was at least one passionate Stern proponent. "Of all the many distinguished graduates of the Yale School of Architecture, [Stern] best understands its history and values, its special traditions…," Levin wrote at the time. "His track record with its unique integration of architectural design historical scholarship, executive ability, and devoted academic service, especially fits him to be our new dean. The school can confidently expect a burst of fresh and powerful burst of creative energy under his direction."
Undetered by his reception, Stern set to work. Energy had always been his byword, and it was in full view. The school he'd experienced as a graduate student would be the model he had in mind. Like Rudolph, he was set on his own views and never wavered. But for Stern, like Rudolph, this did not mean he did not think it of utmost importance to engage those with different views.
Using his vast Rolodex and many connections, he brought in architects from around the nation and world - young and old and from every architectural point of view - as visiting critics and teachers. First there was the renowned architect Philip Johnson, who served as the Eero Saarinen Visiting Professor, and then a litany of other major figures. Gehry, Hadid, Eisenman, Beebe, Berke, Gwathmey, Foster - the list would go on and on and included many as yet unrecognized names as well. Stern was devoted to the idea of pluralism - the notion that many different ideas can flourish at once - and claimed that as the longtime "governing ideal" of the school to which he was so dedicated.
Opinons mattered: they could be as different as possible, so long as they were presented well and argued passionately. "Bob was energized by debate," noted Deborah Berke, the current Edward P. Bass Dean at the school and J.M. Hoppin Professor of Architecture, who was also a friend and admirer. He created situations that produced it. He invigorated the lecture program, "requiring" the presence not only of students but of all faculty. He reinvigorated Perspecta, the student-led journal, and started the architecture magazine Constructs. He organized major symposia. He saw to it that Yale created a historical archive for architecture and added some major donations to it. While not a student of technology himself - he never did learn to use a computer and he sketched everything by hand - Stern nevertheless made it one of his first responsibilities to ensure faculty and students had the modern tools they needed to do their work.
Well known for his energy, he seemed to be everywhere at the same time. Someone once claimed that she spotted him on East 65th St. in New York City at the same time someone else was certain she saw him walking up Chapel Street in New Haven. It was always possible, she said, knowing him, that he was at two places at the same time.
Like Rudoplh, his model, he was a rather terrifying presence at crits, offering up his frank critiques to students whom he felt had to learn to take sharp criticism, as they would be entering a challenging and unsparing profession. Since everyone was a target, students learned to take it - getting "Bobbed" they called it. And beyond this, perhaps most important of all, he developed a true culture, a place where everything and everyone was active and alive. In his yellow socks, with his bespoke suit and his pocket handkerchief, he held forth with martini in hand (and it had better be made to his liking) at crowded receptions after lectures in the apartment he had renovated above Zinc on Chapel Street. He made everything intense, vibrant, and alive. He made everything at the school matter.
"Bob loved an informed opinion and a rigorous debate," said Berke. "We've enthusiastically continued that approach at the school. Discussion, along with commitment to excellence and heartfelt hospitality continue to shape how we teach architecture at Yale."
In 2008, Stern was able to realize a dream, when, with a major gift from Sid R. Bass '65, and contributions from others, the Charles Gwathmey restoration of the Yale Art and Architecture building was rededicated as Paul Rudolph Hall. Some alumni thought that someone of Stern's architectural beliefs would reject the building's Brutalism. Far from it. He admired the building for what it was - the work of a genius. The restoration was done to his usual specifications, with rigor and care. And through this restoration Stern was able to honor the dean who had meant so much to him and to the school, but whose career had ended as sadly as had the building itself, which had been scarred by fire and neglected for many years. Stern was not a visible sentimentalist, but it is nevertheless not hard to imagine how much this must have meant to him.
Without a doubt his other most prized effort at Yale was the design and construction of Yale's two new residential colleges, Benjamin Franklin and Pauli Murray, which opened in 2017. When choosing the architect for these buildings in 2008, there was no competition: Then-President Levin and the Yale trustees knew what they wanted. "We had learned from experience that we wanted our new colleges to resemble the best of the work of James Gamble Rogers, rather than strike a new, experimental direction," writes Levin. The new colleges, which at the time might have seemed to be at a distance from the central campus (they no longer seem far!) had to be comfortable or students would not wish to live there. Stern's work ensured that, as Levin writes, "he would create spaces that were beautiful, workable, and 'felt like Yale.'"
In the end, as Dean Berke wrote, "For him, nothing was more important than architectural education, and nothing was more fun than talking about design with a martini in hand. His spirit of hospitality and love of discourse live on at Yale."
And Levin said when speaking to Stern at his 80th birthday in 2016, "Taking excellence as your north star, you ambitiously drew upon the whole profession to bring both the most traditional and most progressive voices to Yale, creating the environment you promised, and elevating intellectual life at the School of Architecture once again to the glory it had in your student days under the leadership of Paul Rudolph."
During the same party, a modified version of a Gilbert and Sullivan song paid homage to his uniqueness in slightly different terms: "The rest of us are sheep, and he's a RAMS,"
"You have to go back to go forward," Stern said. It was the phrase that was at the heart of his philosophy and it summed up the trajectory of his Yale career to perfection.
