For a Vanity Fair article on 15 Central Park West, Stern posed atop its concierge desk, weakly mimicking the classic image of an urbanely macho Robert Moses poised on an I-beam over the East River.  Stern shares Moses’ ego, if not his public mission, a distinction emphasized by this photo’s gated setting.  What lies beyond is for the privileged few.    

 Arnold Newman’s 1959 photo serves as the cover for Robert Moses and the Modern City.  Moses famously said “you can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs.”  Unlike Stern’s, his omelets were for everyone’s consumption.  What lies beyond is a public realm.       

The normally balanced architecture critic Paul Goldberger wrote two glowing reviews of 15 Central Park West.  His 2007 New Yorker piece, “Past Perfect”, pauses just long enough to ask, is ”costume-drama luxury the best that our new century has to offer?” before getting back to the building’s “exquisitely crafted marble trim.”  His 2008 Vanity Fair review, “The King of Central Park West”, is likewise awestruck save for two sentences that find the building’s exterior somewhat severe and its base less articulated than those of its neighbors.  Both pieces bristle with celebrity names and dollar signs. 

Stern’s enormous output fills many 9-pound books dedicated to his bland, pretty buildings for rich people.  The sheer proliferation of his easily turned-out product becomes a concern when it spreads to the public urban realm as a sort of invasive species, climbing like kudzu up the side of the Woolworth Building or choking out the native specimens of a historic New Haven neighborhood.   

A chummy interview of Stern by Goldberger is included in Robert A.M. Stern: Buildings & Projects 2004-2009.  Like Stern, Goldberger graduated from Yale and has taught there.  Stern’s career is bound up in Yale, where as a student he formed lasting relationships with faculty members Vincent Scully and Philip Johnson. 

Stern helped Scully research his 1962 book on Louis I. Kahn, the first book-length study of the architect, who also taught at Yale.  Scully wrote of Kahn that he “had worked himself back to a point where he could begin to design architecture afresh, literally from the ground up, accepting no preconceptions, fashions or habits of design without questioning them profoundly.  That ‘great event,’ so rare and precious in human history, when things were about to begin anew almost as if no things had ever been before, was on the way.”  If Stern ever read the book he helped Scully research, it had no effect on him.

Kahn said architecture began “when the walls parted and the columns became.”  He preferred the bluntness of Paestum’s ruins to the elegance of the Parthenon, finding them closer to the source of architecure’s power.  Architects like Stern see the past as something to be copied, often for easy profit, and as proof that the best that architecture has to offer is behind us.  Their successive re-issues carry architecture ever farther from its generating force and original vitality.  

Kahn’s interest in the past is seen by some as making way for the postmodernism that Stern would pursue with such commercial success.  In fact, Stern’s approach to design may best be defined in contrast to Kahn’s.  Where Kahn finds inspiration in the past, Stern finds a crutch.  Kahn’s Art Gallery was the first building to break from Yale’s neo-Gothic style.  In 2006, Vincent Scully called the newly restored Art Gallery ”our first modern building and our best.”  Nearly sixty years later, Stern is designing Yale’s two new residential colleges in neo-Gothic style.  If Stern stands for anything, it’s the end of architectural history, as of the 1920s.

Kahn rejected the easy road of imitation and visual charm.  In projects like the Salk Institute, he invested new forms with primitive power and timelessness.  In a world dominated by business as usual, few opportunities exist for the creation of architecture on this level.  Kahn’s commitment to it accounts for his relatively small output.  Yale twice gave him the opportunity to build.

In his extraordinary 2003 documentary, My Architect, Kahn’s son Nathaniel searches for his father – who died in 1974 when Nathaniel was 11 – among the buildings he left and the memories of those who knew him.  Interviewed for the film, Stern tries to bring Kahn down to his own level, telling Nathaniel, ”Don’t put him up on some gigantic pedestal. . . Don’t think that he was always trying to be a prince.  He was very much trying to be a player.  He wanted work, he wanted recognition. . . He was success-oriented.”  When Nathaniel asks, “Doesn’t every architect?”  Stern replies, “I can’t speak for every architect.”  Nathaniel continues in voice-over that Kahn was half a million dollars in debt when he died, and that of all his projects, only the Salk Institute made money.  Kahn was known to continue developing designs well after the likelihood of their realization or his payment for them had passed.  An architect who worked for Kahn, William Huff, remembers him turning down a prospective client who wanted a colonial house designed, and suggesting Thomas Jefferson when she asked him to recommend a colonial architect.  In a few years, Stern would have fit her bill.  Twenty-eight years ago in the Journal New Society, Reyner Banham described Stern’s ”complete lack of scruple that enables him to perform equally well in any style (or caricature thereof) that the market will bear.”

What would Kahn make of Stern today?  Of seeing Stern’s status as Yale’s Dean of Architecture used to hawk ten million dollar tract mansions in the sales material for Villanova Heights, the Riverdale development of Stern’s 10,000 to 15,000 square foot traditionally styled luxury homes?  As quoted in Carter Wiseman’s 2007 book, Louis I. Kahn:  Beyond Time and Style, William Huff says that Kahn “saw institutions as the important entities of man’s cooperative interactions,” and “loved Yale, where he found greatness as an institutional awareness – more so than his own alma mater,” the University of Pennsylvania.  Yale gave Kahn his first and last major commissions, for its Art Gallery extension and its Museum of British Art, and can claim much of the credit for creating his career.  At the end of My Architect, in Kahn’s Dhaka National Assembly Building, the architect Shamsul Wares movingly tells Nathaniel Kahn what an impossible gift his father had made to the poorest country in the world, for the asking.  Kahn, he says, ”has given us the institution for Democracy”.  Yale can take some of the credit for this.  It’s hard to believe this great institution can’t find an engaged, pluralist dean for its school of architecture who wouldn’t be so venal as to trade on its name, or use it to endorse self-serving preservation offenses.  Stern seems a vestige of yesterday’s world of self indulgence and unsustainable consumption, of Bush era deception and arrogance.  Goldberger’s 15 Central Park West pieces summon up the ghost of Herbert Muschamp, who in 1988 excoriated the previous boom’s architects for abandoning social responsibility to become ”Satan’s decorators” and “hired flunkies”.

Last year, Stern published The Philip Johnson Tapes, a book collecting his 1985 interviews of his teacher and “great friend”.  In it, Johnson says of Kahn, “I liked his work better than I liked him. . . . I never found him the great lovely guru-type.  I couldn’t stand all those long monologues about belief in truth.  I can’t stand truth.  It gets so boring, you know, like social responsibility.”  Stern seems a bit bored by truth himself, letting Johnson use questions about his fascist-leaning past as opportunities for lengthy self justification and whitewashing of his personal history into that of a “violent philo-Semite.”  Stern doesn’t even call Johnson on this unreconstructed view of Germany in the 1930s:  “I mean, Germany was being run down by the rich.  The German Workers Party was the only solution.  He [Hitler] was a magnetic, shall we say, speaker.”  Instead of asking Johnson just who he means by “the rich” or what Hitler had to say that attracted him, Stern responds, “Of course”.  It would take Michael Sorkin’s 1988 Spy exposé, “Where Was Philip,” to make Johnson eventually acknowledge and apologize for his early anti-Semitism.  

Johnson famously said ”architects are pretty much high-class whores” and often boasted that he’d design for Stalin if the price were right.  In his biography of Johnson, Franz Schulze says that he often called Stern “the best student I ever had.”  Given Stern’s record, it’s hard not to take those words in the worst possible way.  Asked in an Architect magazine interview whether the Presidential Center commission was a tacit endorsement of  Bush’s policies, Stern squirmingly said, “Look, I’m an architect, not a political commentator. Last time I checked, he was the twice-elected president of the United States. Even if it is controversial, we still need to preserve the papers of a twice-elected president. . . . And remember that most presidents are controversial and unpopular at times, but each of these people is the president, and each deserves a library.”  Then asked whether he’s been looking at presidential library precedents, Stern cites Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s as the most moving, before adding, ”He was also controversial during his presidency.”  In Stern’s Magic Kingdom, Bush may someday rank with Roosevelt.  Maybe once they find the weapons of mass destruction.  

Groundbreaking for the Bush Presidential Center is scheduled for late next year.  Saddam Hussein’s gun will be displayed there and is expected to be a major attraction. 

(Groundbreaking for Kahn’s Franklin D. Roosevelt Four Freedoms Park is planned for next month.  Kahn completed its design shortly before his death 35 years ago.  It will stand on the southern tip of Roosevelt Island, across the East River from the United Nations, an institution FDR named.  The project was kept alive and and will be executed largely through the effort of architects who revere Kahn.)

A rendering shows the main entrance of Robert A.M. Stern’s George W. Bush Presidential Center.  “I’m not considered avant-garde because I’m not avant-garde,” Stern says, “but there is a parallel world out there – of excellence.”

Earlier this month Robert A.M. Stern presented his preliminary design of the the Bush Library.  Stern has just the right attributes to be his fellow Yale alum’s architect: conservativism’s DNA-inscribed commitment to tradition, and an inability to refuse any commission, no matter how unsavory.  His building is the backward-gazing counterpart to the Polshek Partnership’s bridge-to-tomorrow Clinton Library.     

A muddled Bush Presidential Center is revealed in this model view.  Stern’s design calls for red brick and limestone facing.

The project will be built on the Campus of Dallas’s Southern Methodist University, where some faculty have objected to association with ”a pre-emptive war based on false premises” and “a legacy of massive violence, destruction, and death . . . in dismissal of broad international opinion.”  The Center comes to SMU attached to the “Freedom Institute”, a conservative think tank the presence of which has further angered faculty.  As reported in the New York Times Magazine, “Everything about the planned institute reminds them of what they detested about the Bush administration. It will proselytize rather than explore: a letter sent to universities bidding for the Bush center stipulated that the institute would, among other things, ‘further the domestic and international goals of the Bush administration.’ ” 

For Stern, the Library commission came as his profile reached dizzying new heights, primarily because of the phenomenal commercial success of his luxury condominium design for 15 Central Park West.  The development’s sales were enough to skew Manhattan real estate statistics for months on end.  In 2008 he was also awarded the Vincent Scully Prize, named for his old teacher, by the National Building Museum.  In December of 2007, the New York Times published a highly flattering appraisal of his turn as Dean of Yale’s School of Architecture, in which Reed Kroloff is quoted to say, “Bob Stern may be the best school of architecture dean in the United States.” 

A standard reference among preservationists, Stern’s unparalleled five volume study of New York architectural history bolsters his reputation as a scholar.  

It was Kroloff who had famously called Stern “the suede-loafered sultan of suburban retrotecture” in a 1998 Architecture magazine editorial about his appointment.  The Times piece plays up this turnabout, but in fact Kroloff’s loafer throwing had been a preamble to support for Yale’s decision; his 1998 piece went on to say of Stern, ”he is a teacher, scholar, and practitioner whose passion for and dedication to architecture are beyond question.”  Kroloff also accurately predicted that Stern would be “smart enough not to try imposing an esthetic agenda on a school that has always valued pluralism.”  While Stern’s architecture gets little critical respect, his dedication and scholarship have indeed long been viewed as unassailable.  Several of his recent projects, however, have seriously hurt his reputation among preservationists. 

Yale’s Hammond Hall has stood since 1904.  While a study found that it could be easily adapted to new use, the much loved Beaux Arts building is one of a dozen to be razed for Stern’s new dormitories.

Stern’s designs for two new Yale dormitory complexes have particularly rankled preservationists this summer.  The New Haven Preservation Trust and the Connecticut Trust for Historic Preservation unsuccessfully petitioned Yale to save seven historic buildings that are in the path of Stern’s plans.  Characteristically, his new gothic buildings will substitute false antiquity for the real thing, an approach that’s oblivious to both preservation principals and sustainability.  Stern’s dismissal of what is authentic in favor of make-believe meshes nicely with his past service on the Disney Company’s board of directors.    

The just-completed Superior Ink Condominium

On West Street in Greenwich Village, Stern’s Superior Ink Condominium would be entitled to its name had it adapted or added onto the original 1919 Superior Ink Building rather than razing it.   The Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation had unsuccessfully lobbied the Landmarks Preservation Commission to extend the Greenwich Village Historic District to include the old building, which it viewed as a rare remaining trace of its neighborhood’s industrial past.  While demolition of an older building to make way for a larger new one is business as usual in New York, Stern’s replacement is distinguished by how much it looks like an escapee from one of the postmodern development ghettos just across the Hudson.  Meanwhile, not far up the old working waterfront from Superior Ink, the High Line Park is a glowing example of what imagination can make of a modest industrial relic, while preserving a neighborhood’s unique sense of place.

In October of 2007, the Related Companies ran an 8-page ad in the New York Times Magazine dedicated to Stern and his luxury condominium towers, including The Harrison on Manahattan’s Upper West Side.  In 2006, the facade of Manhattan’s historic Dakota Stable building had its ornamental details jackhammered off by dark of night to keep it from being landmarked, clearing the way for sale of the property to Related and construction of The Harrison.  Stern had developed a fullblown design for the condo before the Dakota Stable was defaced.  

On Manhattan’s Upper West Side, preservation groups that had welcomed Stern’s efforts to protect 2 Columbus Circle were shocked to learn that he had kept them in the dark about his client Related’s intention to demolish the historic Dakota Stable.  Even as they they lobbied the Landmarks Commission to protect the Dakota Apartment Building’s satellite, Stern was designing for the building’s replacement with yet another luxury condo.  While in contract to sell the Stable to Related, its owner rushed to deface it – literally by dark of night – as soon as the Landmarks Commission signalled an intent to designate the building.  The strategy succeeded in preventing landmark designation and protection.  Stern is quoted in the New York Times as saying that the nighttime demolition created “a controversial and awkward moment”, adding “I don’t like to tear anything down if I don’t have to.”

Stern’s design for a hotel and condominium at 99 Church Street, center, would share a block with – and tower over – the Woolworth Building, at right.  His involvement in the project proves that to Stern, no building is so great that one of his own isn’t better.

Stern has proven quite capable of doing harm without tearing anything down.  His 912 foot tower design for 99 Church Street, currently on hold, would overshadow the 792 foot Woolworth Building, one of the most significant buildings in skyscraper history.  As David Dunlap wrote in the New York Times, “the Woolworth Building, already hemmed in by the new 58-story Barclay Tower across Barclay Street, will never soar the same.”  Unlike Costas Kondylis, the Barclay Tower’s designer and Trump house-architect, Stern sets great store by historic sensitivity.  His office’s website proclaims that “our firm’s practice is premised on the belief that the public is entitled to buildings that do not, by their very being, threaten the aesthetic and cultural values of the buildings around them,”  and speaks of “entering into a dialogue with the past and with the spirit of the places in which we build.”

Stanford White envisioned his Gould Memorial Library as the centerpiece of NYU’s north campus.  Stern had other ideas.

In another exception to this credo, Stern exploited his academic credentials to convince bureaucrats at the City University of New York that the original master plan for Bronx Community College (historically NYU’s North Campus) was the work of Frederick Law Olmsted and that the scene-stealing placement of his outscaled new building there was foreordained by no less an authority.  The resulting location of Stern’s North Instructional Building and Library, now under construction, negates Stanford White’s campus master plan.  It leaves White’s Gould Memorial Library off-center on what can no longer be called its historic quad, to share prominence with Stern’s new building.  Having staked out such an important location for himself, and at such cost to a nationally significant site, Stern anticlimactically gave CUNY a scaled-up rough copy of Henri Labrouste’s Bibliotheque Sainte Genevieve rather than making good with a worthy original design.  The result is a building that acknowledges neither its classroom component nor a site that’s radically different from the Bibliotheque’s.  Stern is quoted in the 2007 Times piece saying his buildings are “recollective and reinterpretations” and that “the history of art is full of interpretations of things that went before.”  Going light on the reinterpretation can be a real work saver, too.  continued