Robert A. M. Stern, an architect who designed the New York City skyline with buildings that evoked pre-war grandeur but had modern luxury fit for billionaires and movie stars, has died at the age of 86.
Stern, dubbed “The King of Central Park West” by Vanity Fair, was credited with designing 15 Central Park West, which in 2008 was credited as being the highest-priced new apartment building in New York history.
With sales of almost $2 billion it was also considered the world’s most attractive apartment block and was a tribute to the first era of classic architecture in the city of the 1920s and 30s. The exterior was covered with over 85,000 pieces of limestone.
Hedge-fund managers, financial luminaries including Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein, tech entrepreneurs including Steve Jobs, and celebrities such as Bono, Sting, Denzel Washington and sports commentator Bob Costas have called it home.
Stern promoted the trend of modernist glass condominiums like Richard Meier, and the subsequent fashion for ultra-tall “shadow-makers”. Instead he opted to make the old new again – “traditional modern”.
“This was my breakthrough,” the 84-year-old architect told The New York Times of 15 Central Park West in an interview for his obituary, adding that he did not use computers and built everything by hand.
The Zeckendorf family, the backers of Central Park West, had discovered – as Vanity Fair put it – “that nothing people, especially rich people, like something new that doesn’t look very new”. The building features the classic layout of the old Money Park Avenue apartments with screening rooms, a copper-domed rotunda-lobby, a 75-foot pool, and a waiting room for drivers.
At the peak of his career, Stern, who was born in Brooklyn, ran a 300-person architecture firm and produced encyclopedic volumes on the city’s architecture and served as dean of the Yale School of Architecture.
“I became an architect because I loved the buildings of my city, New York, and I imagined that one day I would create buildings like them. The New York of my youth is the principal subject of all my work in architecture to this day,” he wrote in 1981.
Stern also designed the Beach Club Resorts for Disney World in Florida and his firm created the master plan for Celebration’s infamous Disney “new town.” He had a wide scope of work designing the George W. Bush Center in Dallas, the Museum of the American Revolution, and Philadelphia’s 58-story Comcast Center.
Short and high-pitched, Stern wore a pocket square, suede loafers, butter-yellow socks and chalk-striped specialty suits. Modernism was not in his interests. “Many modernist works of our time are self-important objects, and that’s a real bummer to me,” he told The New York Times in 2007. Buildings can be symbols or objects, but they still have to connect with the larger whole.
“I am not considered avant-garde because I am not avant-garde. But there is a parallel world out there – of excellence.”
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