Geoffrey Baer Remembers Influential Architect Robert A.M. Stern

The influential architect Robert A.M. Stern has died at the age of 86. His work is visible across the country, including in Chicago in the form of the Streeterville skyscraper One Bennett Park. WTTW's Geoffrey Baer met Stern in 2011, when Baer interviewed Stern for a documentary about his life and work in anticipation of Stern receiving the Richard H. Driehaus Prize at Notre Dame University that year. The documentary is free to stream via the PBS app. You can further explore Stern's buildings and watch interviews from the documentary at the companion website. 

Baer recalls that encounter and more, below.

Most people dream of meeting a star of TV or movies or popular music.  For architecture geeks like me, the real luminaries are called “star-chitects,”  the Frank Lloyd Wrights of today.  I’ve been lucky enough to meet and interview many of them over the years, but the first one I ever met was Robert A. M. Stern, known to everyone as Bob.

Producer Dan Andries and I traveled to New York to interview him for a documentary about his life and career in January of 2011.  To say that I was nervous is an understatement.  And it only got worse when we visited his office on the snowy day before the interview to survey the location. I showed up in jeans and slush-covered boots to discover an office elegantly designed down to the finest details of woodwork and hardware, and a large staff who were as finely dressed and formal as their surroundings.

We were told Bob would give us only 45 minutes the next day, and we were granted permission to set up the interview in a private refuge he had built on the roof of the building that was reached by a spiral stairway.  Another space up there was occupied by a small staff of writers he maintained for the many hefty books he published on architecture and New York history.

I showed up the next morning properly attired and noticed one of the writers was wearing a dress shirt identical to mine – or so I thought.  “Joseph A. Bank?” I asked.  He sniffed and retorted, “Brooks Brothers!”  and went back to work.  Not a great start to the day.

Right on time, Bob appeared wearing his signature chalk-striped bespoke suit, suede loafers, and yellow socks, clearly impatient.  But then something transformative happened.  I discovered that my years of making TV shows about architecture and my lifelong love of buildings gave me the ability to speak his language.  He quickly relaxed and his brilliant intellect and raconteur’s gift of making his ideas accessible and entertaining shone through.  Our conversation extended far beyond the 45 minutes we had been allotted.

He talked about seeing the skyline of New York from across the East River when he was growing up as a working-class kid in Brooklyn, dreaming of someday adding to that skyline. He said he saw Manhattan as the Emerald City.  He called it his “personal Oz”.

In our documentary, other famous architects and critics variously described him as intelligent, witty, sarcastic, a provocateur, a bit of a rascal, even a gadfly – characteristics that made him an interviewer’s dream.  Pulitzer Prize-winning architecture critic Blair Kamin called Bob the “quintessential New York dandy architect.”  Distinguished architecture writer Paul Goldberger told me, “He loved stirring the pot.”

Stern trained in architecture at Yale’s celebrated program, graduating in 1965, and according to his classmate, the late Chicago architect Stanley Tigerman, he was not intimidated by the renowned department chair.  “He was the only student who called Mr. Rudolph ‘Paul’”, Tigerman told me.

Rudolph instilled in Bob a healthy skepticism about the glass and steel modern architecture that was taught as gospel at most schools in those days.  Early in his career, Bob became a leading exponent of returning to tradition in architecture – a movement that came to be called “post-modernism,” in which architects incorporated elements of the past into new buildings.  Whereas modernist buildings at their worst were a sort of one-size-fits-all concept that ignored their surroundings, Bob told me that he sought to create buildings that “speak the local language of architecture in a new way.”  He called it “modern traditionalism.” In a PBS series called Pride of Place that he hosted in 1985, Bob gestures to modern buildings on the New York skyline and says, “See how ugly they are”.

But where it was called for, he could design in glass and steel with the best of them, as in his Comcast Center in Philadelphia.  In a different spin on traditionalism, he developed guidelines that brought back to life his beloved 42nd St. theatre district.  The guideline only set minimum levels of brightness for neon signage, with no maximum, recalling Times Square’s heyday in the 1930s.

His firm Robert A. M. Stern Architects (RAMSA) would eventually employ hundreds and design museums, university buildings, and country homes for the wealthy, as well as urban high-rise buildings like One Bennett Park in Chicago.

His own work might have hewed to tradition. But as Dean of Architecture at Yale from 1998 to 2016, he invited architects from across the spectrum of styles and philosophies to teach, earning him wide respect.

His larger-than-life personality notwithstanding, his buildings blended in so well with their surroundings that they (and by association he) did not earn much attention outside of architecture circles. That is until, late in life, he designed a retro apartment tower overlooking New York’s Central Park that became the darling of New York’s ultra-rich. Fifteen Central Park West, inspired by the glamorous New York apartment buildings of the 1930s, broke record after record for home prices in New York.  Every apartment was sold before it opened in 2008, totaling more than $2 billion in sales. Buyers included Denzel Washington, Sting, sportscaster Bob Costas, and Norman Lear, creator of “All in the Family.”  Bob told me, “I try to turn fantasy into reality.”

For years after our interview, each time I saw Bob, he remembered me and asked what I was working on. Was it just flattery?  Was he angling for another TV documentary?  I don’t think so.  I think he had a genuine curiosity and prodigious memory.  And it left me with a great fondness for my first star-chitect, whose legacy lives on in buildings across America.