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Robert AM Stern, an architect who fashioned the New York City skyline with buildings that sought to invoke pre-war splendor but with modern luxury fit for billionaires and movie stars, has died at the age of 86.
Dubbed “The King of Central Park West” by Vanity Fair, Stern was credited with designing 15 Central Park West that, in 2008, was credited as being the highest-priced new apartment building in the history of New York.
With roughly $2bn in sales it was also considered the most lucrative apartment block in the world and an homage to an earlier era of classic architecture in the city of the 1920s and 30s. The exterior was covered with more than 85,000 pieces of limestone.
Hedge-fund managers, financial tycoons including Lloyd Blankfein, CEO of Goldman Sachs, tech entrepreneurs including Steve Jobs, and celebrities such as Bono, Sting, Denzel Washington, and sports commentator Bob Costas called it home.
Stern bucked the trend for modernist glass condominiums by the likes of Richard Meier, and again for the later fashion for ultra-tall “shadow-makers”. He chose instead to make old fashioned new again – the “traditional modern”.
“It 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 a computer and drew everything by hand.
The backers behind Central Park West, the Zeckendorf family, had figured out – said Vanity Fair – “that nothing appeals to people, particularly rich people, like something new that doesn’t look too new”. The building featured the classic layouts of old money Park Avenue apartments, along with screening rooms, copper-domed rotunda-lobby, a 75-ft pool and a waiting room for chauffeurs.
At the peak of his career, Stern, who was born in Brooklyn, ran a 300-person architectural 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 imagined one day that I would make ones like them. The New York of my youth is to this day the principal subject of all my work in architecture,” he wrote in 1981.
Stern also designed beach club resorts for Disney World in Florida, and his firm did the master plan for the infamous Disney “new town” of Celebration. He had wide range, designing the George W Bush Center in Dallas, the Museum of the American Revolution and Philadelphia’s 58-story Comcast Center.
Small and with a high-pitched voice, Stern wore pocket squares, worn with suede loafers, butter-yellow socks, and chalk-striped bespoke suits. Modernism was not among his interests. “Many Modernist works of our time tend to be self-important objects, and that’s a real quarrel that I have,” he told the New York Times in 2007. “Buildings can be icons or objects, but they still have to engage with the larger whole.
“I’m not considered avant-garde because I’m not avant-garde. But there is a parallel world out there – of excellence.”
