3 Takeaways - World Famous Architect Robert A.M. Stern on Architecture and Design: What Makes His Buildings Special? (#91)

Episode Date: May 3, 2022

Robert A.M. Stern, who designs the most sought after buildings in the world, shares how he sees architecture and design, and what makes his buildings so special that they regularly set records for the highest price per square foot, even when they're not in the best neighborhoods. He explains how his buildings are informed by the past but situated in the future, how he sees detail and ornament as the grace notes of architecture, and how he favors second glance architecture, as opposed to “screamers”.  The new J.P. Morgan building going up in New York City, he says, is “a screamer on Park Avenue and [may] be the final death of that once noble and coherent boulevard.” He also shares what and why he wants “to connect” and how making a building is a symphony.

Welcome to the Three Takeaways podcast, which features short, memorable conversations with the world's best thinkers, business leaders, writers, politicians, scientists, and other newsmakers. Each episode ends with the three key takeaways that person has learned over their lives and their careers. And now your host and board member of schools at Harvard, Princeton, and Columbia, Lynn Thoman. Hi, everyone. It's Lynn Thoman. Welcome to another episode. Today, I'm excited to be with architect Robert A.M. Stern, who's known as one of the most influential architects of our time. He's famous for his designs, which have changed architecture and skylines from New York to China. I'm excited to find out how he sees architecture and design

and what makes his buildings so special that they regularly set records for the highest price per square foot, even when they're not in the best neighborhoods. Bob designs buildings in a wide range of architectural styles and has designed all types of buildings, including private houses, tall apartment buildings, office towers, libraries private houses, tall apartment buildings, office towers, libraries, universities, performing arts centers, and even entire mixed-use neighborhoods in China. He leads Robert A. M. Stern Architects, known as RAMSA, and is a former dean of the Yale School of Architecture. Bob, it's really nice to see you. It's been a long time. Welcome

and thanks so much for our conversation today. Nice to be back with you again, Lynn. It is a pleasure, Bob. Let's start with the revitalization of 42nd Street in Manhattan. You did this early in your career. The street was infamous with its boarded up buildings, derelict theaters, and pornographic movie houses. The city of New York hired you to fix it. How did you transform it? Actually, the state of New York was really our client, not the city. But the city was very important to the process. 42nd Street had gone to such a derelict condition that it was a place that notably German tourists would come to see the degradation of the American city

as was represented by 42nd Street. What I did, working with my partner, Paul Whelan, and with Rebecca Robertson, who was the representative of the state, we determined that 42nd Street should be a mixed-use place that had combined the honky-tonk aspects of Midtown Entertainment District with hotels and restaurants. And we did a 15-year interim plan, but our plan was accelerated by the realization that we were coming up upon the millennium and corporations were suddenly wanting to be near Times Square or on Times Square because they realized the cameras of the world would be watching Times Square for the millennium. Key to that was, of course, the Walt Disney Company's decision to come to 42nd Street and renovate the New Amsterdam Theater, which is one of the most glorious theaters in the world, certainly one of the few Art Nouveau

style theaters in the world. And that's how it happened. I could go on and on. We studied with our consultants. How do we bring the vitality back in a natural way? Well, we measured the level of light that had been at 42nd Street in its more glorious days. We looked at how storekeepers put their signs on the windows and so forth. And we, unlike typical renewal projects, where everything is toilet trained to be very discreet lettering, dim lights and so forth, we went the opposite route. We said, this is how bright it is now. This is the minimum brightness it can be.

You can do anything you want above this brightness or the signs can be as big as you want from here on out and the other thing is we forbid big box stores and i think that was the first time that a systematic effort was made to not renew an area of the city with the easy crutch of the big box drug stores or whatever. And we fought some bitter battles to win that day. And we had wonderful, the greatest concentration of theaters in the world, literally on 42nd Street. And they were all derelict and used for pornography films and so forth. And we studied them and restored them. And suddenly when Disney came,

everybody else wanted to be there. Simple story. Took 10 years, but it was a simple story. Not so simple. You did something that was absolutely brilliant. When you talk about the lighting and the signage, what you actually allowed was enormous neon signs, which transformed the look of 42nd Street and made it so attractive for all the theaters. We encouraged it, actually, not only allowed it, we encouraged that kind of vitality.

And we had a concept working with Tibor Coleman, the late Tibor Coleman was part of our team, called Unplanning. The trouble with many urban renewal areas is they're planned to death. We said, no, no, free enterprise, just make it bright, make it exciting and appeal to as many people as possible, from women in mink coats and men in black tie to kids in sneakers and jeans coming for a hamburger and maybe just a stroll just to experience the place. And it worked. Continues to work. It does. It's brilliant. It works both for New Yorkers and for tourists. Exactly. I would say it's one of my most successful projects, one of my most satisfying moments as an architect. What are others?

Well, I love what we've been able to achieve. I and my clients and my partners in reviving the idea of the New York City skyscraping apartment house, whether it's 15 Central Park West or 220 Central Park South or others downtown 30 Park Place. And by looking at the great skyscrapers of the 1920s and early 30s before the Depression, my love affair with them has been continuous since my high school days i would say looking at how they were put together how they rose to wonderful crowns at the top whether it's the chrysal building or the empire state or number one wall or whatever i thought we could bring them back and we studied with the Zeckendorf brothers, in particular, as our clients

at that moment. We studied buildings all around town, how they contributed to the skyline, how they met the ground. And the other thing I realized from my studies of New York history was that the great apartment houses, many of them of the late 19th century, like the Dakota, which is world famous, I think, or others on Fifth Avenue in particular, had restaurants in them, had guest apartments, all kinds of shared amenities. So they were in a way like clubs as well as just apartments. And we revived that idea in 15 and 220 and 520 Park Avenue and on and on. So it's not just how these buildings look, but how they function. And so people are buying apartments, not just to put their heads down on a pillow, but to have private dining and all kinds of things, swimming pools, places to show films, places for their grandchildren

or children, as it were, to socialize after school and whatever. So these are really contributing to a rich lifestyle. I would love to be able to adapt that concept to more affordable buildings. And in one case, we have done an affordable, truly affordable building out in East New York, Brooklyn, but I'd like to be much more involved with that. It's tough to meet those budgets. And whether you're building 15 Central Park West or someplace in the wilds of Brooklyn, it still costs money to build those buildings both. So we have to work on that. But anyhow, I'm very proud of reviving that and

then taking these ideas, particularly to mainland China, where the Chinese have been building rigid, idealized buildings, but with no social programming and a very poor sense of landscaping. And with projects that we started there, again, you always find some developer or some government agency who takes a risk in your ideas. And everybody certainly started to look and see that an apartment house could be something more than just a warehouse for people. Your buildings have repeatedly set records for the highest price per square foot. Is that what makes your building so special? No, I like to think it's the architecture and the social mix that are included in the residential buildings that leads to these incredible prices.

After all, our buildings are mostly in very good areas, quite a few facing views of Central Park, a couple of others on the Upper East Side, where they take advantage of the low-rise historic district and so on. But it's the buildings of what they bring to the table, what we are able with our clients to bring to the table that makes them very attractive. And then, of course, people like the way they look. They don't want to live in buildings, many people, not all, that look like office buildings. Right now, we're in a period nobody wants to be in an office building at all, it would appear. But they're very happy to live in a romantic, if you will, New York apartment house. I was in your new building that you mentioned at 220 Central Park South.

It was beautiful. Can you tell us about the elements of design of that building, ones that someone like me, who's not an architect, might sense but not be able to actually articulate? Things that you might like. First of all, it's two buildings in reality. One, a lower building that fits into the street wall, as it were, of Central Park South and contains a very elegant pedestrian entrance. And then the tower, which rises behind a courtyard back toward 58th Street and has a motor court entrance and the wonderful

traditional materials, stone, limestone, and sometimes brick. And also that allows us to have details, window surrounds, ornamental details. One of the problems with contemporary modernist architecture is the death or the absence of ornament. I think ornament is the grace note of architecture, and we've reintroduced it into our buildings, and I think that enriches the buildings, and most people observe it. And we lavish the ornament maybe more intensely at the ground level, and also incredibly elaborate, carefully considered skyline features where there are penthouses.

Now, real estate advertisers say, oh, look, there are penthouses in their buildings. But in fact, they're just more apartments up at the top. Our penthouses are like the penthouses of the romantic period of the 1920s and early 30s. You look at the ones before, I like to climb as an architect on the shoulders of the predecessors I admire. When asked, what do you look at when you design a building? I don't look at the magazines of today. I look at the magazines of 50 years ago and of the buildings from 75 really years ago. In my view, you go backwards to go forward. Can you talk about how you think about the past and incorporate the past? I always try to fit the building into the setting. So wherever we are building, we look around.

I often wonder when I see buildings by some of my contemporaries, if the architects designing those buildings ever went to the site, ever saw what was built before them, or maybe they did and said, we're not going to do that. I always go there and say, well, maybe we will do that. Why not? To always be breaking traditions is a teenage, childish temper tantrum, in a way, to constantly break with the past. I think it's harder and more rewarding, and the public is often more appreciative to adhere to the past and extend it. It's nicer that I can talk to you in a shared language, which we're talking now. You've said you situate your buildings in the future. Can you elaborate?

Whenever you're an architect, you're always working with the present and the future. People are always saying, well, Mr. Stern, how will this endure? Not only artistically, but functionally. But the reality is the functions change and evolve. Right now, we're in a period of dramatic functional upheaval. People are not wanting to go back to their offices in the same way they did before. The mayor of New York says people should get out of their pajamas, get on a subway and get to the office. I don't know how effective he's going to be with that. But in any case,

the buildings ought to be beautiful so they can be repurposed to something else, but so that they can be part of a longer trajectory. I want my buildings to be measured not just on the last five minutes of architecture, but the long trajectory of architectural history. And I want them to be able to be converted. The great office buildings, for example, the towers from the 10s, 20s of the last century, are now being repurposed as apartment houses and lofts. And that's great. I don't know what kind of repurposing the glass boxes are going to have where you can barely open a window and the distance between the window and the elevator core is so great that you have to dial up a weatherman to know what's going on outside your window.

So I'm very interested in the continuity of architectural form. I'm not a disruptor. Many of my colleagues in the profession want to disrupt. I don't want to disrupt. I want to connect. Remember that phrase of Ian Forster, the novelist, only connect. Only connect. So your buildings are never dated into one particular style or time period right a building is not a fashion item you can have a dress or street wear or whatever and it looks really hip today a year from now my god you want to throw it away or give it away or whatever but then of course you put it in your closet and maybe 20 years from now, it'll be looking sort of interesting.

But buildings can't be put in the closet for 20 years. So I'm more interested in the continuity. When you're designing a building, how do you start to think about it? Well, the site, of course. The budget, I would be a liar if not say that I have some idea of the budget or some of my clients say i have no idea of budget that's not true i like to push the envelope when i can and

of course the deciding the cultural context what's appropriate the building we would design for uva we are designing and have designed the university of Virginia, totally different from what I've done at Yale and other places. Site is very important. Context is very important. And clients are very important. Believe it or not, clients have ideas. And when I went to architect school, we were basically taught that clients always had bad ideas, and especially developer clients. Actually, we were never even told about developers in architecture school. professorship to bring developers to work side by side with top level design teachers in the studio

with young students. And so they begin to realize that there is more than one point of view that influences a particular project. That's what it should be about, I think. Your work at the Kennedy School to me is extraordinary. You took three buildings, nice buildings, at least from my perspective, not particularly noticeable buildings, but you did a couple of things with them which were extraordinary. First, you connected them with sort of glass walkways between the building. So you kept the connection between the campus and Harvard Square open, open walkways below. And then I never really noticed that the space between these buildings was uneven. But you added a fourth building and you leveled out the space between the buildings.

So it became a lovely plaza connecting all the buildings. It was extraordinary. It transformed the school. Thank you for saying that. Working with Michael Van Valkenburg, a landscape architect who we work with often, we had the idea of raising that plaza up, creating a plaza. It has been the service entrance. It still is underneath there. The loading dock and some other rather utilitarian places, they were inadequate in my mind. They didn't exist. So we connected them and with a new addition, maybe gave them a focus which they lacked before. How do you think about foreground and background buildings and

what you call second glance architecture? Well, the issue of foreground and background buildings is very important for architecture, especially urban architecture. Modernist architecture, which flourished in the 20th century, tended to regard the one-off, standalone, iconic building, And the word iconic became a kind of buzzword as the be-all and end-all, whether it was the museum and build-out by Frank Gehry or the collection of buildings that comprise Hudson Yards or whatever. I think that we lost in the 20th century the capacity to make background buildings, buildings that define streets and plazas that go one next to the other in agreeable ways. The postmodernist devolution, as it's been called, of the 1970s and 80s, which had its greatest moment in the first architecture biennale in Venice in 1980, was all about making a street.

That was an amazing thing. Paolo Portoghesi, the Roman architect, put together this idea of a street. He asked 20 architects to design facades for buildings for those streets as though they were townhouses. So you have a wonderful variety, but you have the orchestration of the public realm. If you go to Venice and you go to San Marco, and it's one of the great public squares in the world, you stand there and you look around. No two buildings to speak of is alike, but they all work together because they share a vocabulary. That is to say the scale of base, capital, pediment, what have you. They share a reverence for and the use of decoration

to enrich the facades and to break down the scale of the facades to human proportions and so on. But we lost that in the modernist period where we have all these object buildings. What I've tried to do in my work is to make buildings that fit in. I mean, I like people to say, oh, that's a nice building. Who designed it? And Zalman says, as you said before, it's Bob Stern. And they say, oh, yeah, that figures. But I'm not interested in making a monument to myself.

I'm interested in the public realm of the street and maybe the institutional identity of my client in the sense that if the building is a library on a campus or even on a public street, our museum in Philadelphia for the American Revolution is in a way an object building and a street-defining building at once. And it uses the language of the late 18th century, early 19th century Philadelphia, Georgian, represented by Independence Hall and other buildings, Carpenter Hall, but it makes its own statement. So you can have a statement, you can have an identity, but still be part of a larger group. Each of us as people is in a way that way.

We all think we are special, and we all are special, but we're not trying to look completely different from everybody else unless you're a teenager. There is a teenage problem in architecture. And then there was a problem in art and painting and sculpture where painters it was considered the rigor to paint things not like the painter saw, but how he expressed his inner turmoil. In my view, that's what Jackson Pollock has contributed to the ongoing story of history of art. I'm interested in Pollock's turmoil for about 10 minutes, but I'm much more interested in the stories that a great artist have told from

time immemorial, seeing what they saw in the landscape, how they interpreted heroic stories from the Bible or from political history and so forth, much more than the inner struggle of Jackson Pollock to come to terms with a 10 by 12 piece of canvas. Bob, what do you call second-class architecture? Second-class is an architecture that doesn't scream at you when you see it, but it catches your eye in a nice way, and you turn around and look back at it again and say, yeah, I get what he was doing or she was doing, the architect. And I see how the proportions of these windows connect to the ones next door. The molding maybe picks up on a line in the building next door and so forth.

It's the connections. As I said before, I'm sort of beating the connectivity horse maybe to its death, but that's second-class architecture. We have a lot of crappy, if I may use that word in this interview, buildings by not very good architects who want to make things that scream at you. And so you look at them first, oh my God, standing on their legs, a new building by a very good architect. But I'm surprised for J.P. Morgan on Park Avenue.

My God, that's not second-guessing architecture to me. That's going to be a screamer on Park Avenue and be the final death of that once noble and coherent boulevard. I don't know if you've seen what it's going to look like, but it's coming out of the ground right now. And take a look for yourself. I'm disappointed in it. I will do that. How has technology changed what's possible in architecture? A lot. Technology has made all kinds of things possible.

One argument in the 20th century was that you didn't have to construct architecture. You more or less assembled architecture like a car on an assembly line in Detroit or wherever. But I think technology has liberated us from that self-imposed constraint of the modernist to realize that you can make things that have a traditional character with technology. Many of our buildings are stone or precast concrete, and they are designed with respect to traditional tropes of form, moldings, and so forth that give them a certain historical authority, but they're made by machines and they're assembled

by machines. I'm not against machines. I don't go out and get in my horse-drawn buggy to get around town. I have a car. I even have a driver's license. But a building can use those techniques, but it shouldn't necessarily have to be a prisoner of those techniques. And for a long time, architects were self-imprisoned in prefabricated technology techniques. Bob, before I get to the very last question on the three takeaways, is there anything else you'd like to mention? What should I have asked you that I did not? Oh my God, I don't know. I like to be interviewed and I usually give you longer answers than the interviewer ever expects or perhaps even wants, but fire away at questions.

But your part of the job is to ask the questions. I'll do my best to answer them. Okay. Then last question. What are the three key takeaways that you would like to leave the audience with today? One answer to your question is that architecture is a successful and appropriate expression of place. Where it is, is what makes the building important, not the abstract whim of the designer, the discovery he made or she made carving a grapefruit at breakfast as Eero Saarinen did come up with the dome structure for the Kresge Auditorium at MIT that way,

but no, the discovery of what is appropriate at that place. So that's one takeaway. Innovation is important, but innovation is not the be all and end all. To be the first person to do something may not be the most important, but also in architecture and art in general, one innovation, innovation turns out not to be as innovative as the innovator thinks, which art historians are constantly pointing out where things come from. Art begets art. Art is not science. Maybe in science you can innovate, although I've read just enough of what scientists have written to learn that they also climb on the shoulders of what went before. You don't have an aha moment at your desk or lab table the way romantic comic

books would have you think. So that's the second one. And the third thing is you're asking me all these questions as an individual architect, but i am the head of an office ever since i've opened my practice i've had other people working with me i try to be associated by people with people as our architects in my office we're not only as talented as i am if you will grant me some talent but more talented why hire somebody who's not as talented as I am, if you will grant me some talent, but more talented. Why hire somebody who's not as talented as you are or as smart as I am? I am pretty smart, but I'd like to be around smarter people. Collaboration is incredibly important in the discipline of architecture. And not only are the architects collaborating and the engineers and so forth, but the collaboration of clients, governmental officials and so forth.

It's a complicated, it's a symphony. Making a building is a symphony. I'm the conductor. I'll take that rap. I am the conductor. But it doesn't mean I can play all the instruments at once or any of them at all for that matter. Architecture is a symphony. Bob, that is wonderful.

And your buildings are extraordinary. Thank you so much. And thank you for our conversation today. It's just been terrific. Thank you. And pleasure to be with you on this interview. If you enjoyed today's episode and would like to receive the show notes or get new fresh weekly episodes, be sure to sign up for our newsletter at 3takeaways.com or follow us on Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook.

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