'Architecture Can Solve Problems,' Says Robert A.M. Stern

Architect Robert A.M. Stern is famous for designing grand multifamily buildings and single-family homes in modern traditional style.

Mr. Stern, 78, the former dean of the Yale School of Architecture and founder of Robert A.M. Stern Architects, specializes in limestone-clad structures. He is perhaps best known for designing 15 Central Park West, a limestone Manhattan condo building that's broken price records. Based in New York City, the firm has about 260 employees who travel the world to work on small and large residential, cultural, and academic projects, from Lima, Peru, to Shanghai. Recent and ongoing projects include everything from single buildings to whole neighborhoods in China, two new residential colleges, and private homes around the world.

Mansion Global:

How did you get interested in architecture? And who were your early mentors?

Robert A.M. Stern:

I got interested in architecture as an adolescent. I just gravitated toward it. By the time I got to architecture school at Yale, my role models became quickly established: Vincent Scully, the architectural historian who just died at 97; Paul Rudolph, the chairman of the department of architecture, then a leading young architect rising to the top of the profession; and Philip Johnson, who would be around at the school of architecture quite a bit. He was not part of the faculty but was always willing to entertain Yale students he thought were interesting at his Glass House in New Canaan, Conn. Philip remained my mentor and a friend all through his life.

More:A Three-Bedroom Inside Robert A.M. Stern’s New Upper East Side Condo Building

When I was 12 or 13, I was making drawings. I wouldn’t say my drawings were artistically interesting—they still aren’t. I’m not a drawing architect, though I do encourage young architects to draw in this computer age. My parents didn’t think I should go straight to architecture school. I think they thought I should be a doctor or a lawyer.

How has your firm evolved over the years?

I started by renovating apartments in Manhattan in the 1970s. Those were ripe opportunities for a young architect because youngish people were choosing not to move to Greenwich, Conn., but to buy co-ops and reimagine them instead.

In 1975, we worked on a townhouse on Park Avenue for Leonard Stern of Hartz Mountain. We gutted the building and did a brand-new facade. It had classical ambitions, far more than was popular at the time. Inside, the spaces were large and dramatic.

We did a house in Armonk, N.Y., that was a two-bedroom mansion. We also did a house in Martha’s Vineyard, Mass., and another one in River Oaks, Texas, for [real estate developer] Gerald Hines. Those were in the 1980s.

Stephen Ross, of Related, put us in competition for a really imposing spot on 65th and Third Avenue in the late 1990s. At the time, Third Avenue was considered beyond the pale. In 1997, we started on a building called the Chatham, which I subsequently moved into myself.

The idea for that building was that we could take the qualities of Park Avenue buildings and move them east. We looked at Rosario Candela buildings, and we looked at River House, a favorite of mine, as inspiration. Then, in 2004, Robert A.M. Stern Architects was awarded the commission for 15 Central Park.

More:15 Central Park West Remains Manhattan’s Most Expensive Condo

Columbus Circle was just changing. The Zeckendorfs [the developers] paid the highest price per developable square foot.

Their vision for 15 Central Park West included having its own restaurant—the Dakota once had its own courtyard and garden—and every kind of amenity. A frenzy began, and the prices just went up and up. It was one of the most successful condo buildings in North America. Then a lot of other clients came to us.

You’ve been involved in building whole communities in China. Can you tell us more about that?

In Shanghai, we’re doing a two-building development and another that’s a single building. But in some second-tier cities, we’re working on huge developments.

The Chinese are urbanizing and trying to do it better than they did in the 1970s and ’80s. They’re diversifying the buildings, so you don’t feel like your building is just a number. For our first large development, in Xiamen, a town with lots of white-collar companies, we did a development with a developer called Vanke, called "Heart of Lake. " The tallest building is over 50 stories, plus there are four-, five-, and nine-story apartment houses, and two-story townhouses.

More:A Sneak Peek at the New Robert A.M. Stern-Designed Four Seasons Penthouse in Tribeca

What responsibility does top-of-the-market real estate have to the public realm?

I began my career working for the city’s Housing and Development Administration for three years, so I earned my bona fides as a good citizen. I’m very interested in public issues, but the truth is... people come to us. Largely, people come to us for high-end properties, since that’s where our reputation lies.

But we’re doing Edwin’s Place, a supportive and affordable housing complex in Brownsville, Brooklyn, with a company called Breaking Ground. We also did a project for Breaking Ground, which was then called Common Ground, outside Hartford, Conn., in Willimantic. They had a project for homeless people that they could not get approved.

The neighbors said "we don’t want homeless people here," and they’d proposed something that looked like it was for homeless people. So they came to us, and we did something that looked like a shingle-style house or small inn. And there wasn’t a peep of objection from anyone. Architecture can solve problems. We can’t reform lives, but we can create environments that benefit people’s lives.

More:Click to Read More Luxury Real Estate Professionals Share Their Insights

What makes a building or a private house truly high end or "luxury"? Super high-end buildings have the most detail, and the most effort put into shaping the facades, the lobbies, the entranceways, and courtyards.

Big lobbies are not what sell a great idea of luxury. When you walk into your home, you don’t want to be bowled over by some lobby that looks like the Court of St. James could meet there. You want an intimate space and then an unfolding of spaces—an orchestration of the whole sequence from the car to the sidewalk, to the building, the lobby, the stairs.

At 20 East End Ave., I was asked to curate a library with books on New York. There are 600 books, a place to store your liquor, a dining room. Those are things that don’t occur in every building, but more and more people, even in luxury rentals, are wanting more amenities.

This interview was edited and condensed.

This story first appeared in Mansion Global magazine.