Robert A. M. Stern: Buildings & Projects 2004-2009 - Hardcover

Stern, Robert A. M.; Goldberger, Paul

 
9781580932349: Robert A. M. Stern: Buildings & Projects 2004-2009
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 1580932347 ISBN 13: 9781580932349
Verlag: The Monacelli Press, 2009

Inhaltsangabe

I think that all architecture comes from what went before. And how carefully one hews to precedent or how many liberties one takes, in my view, is part of a larger set of judgments as to what is, or could be called, “appropriate.” Appropriate from every point of view, especially from the site, the cultural expectations of a community and of the specific client. - Robert A. M. Stern Central to the work of Robert A. M. Stern is a commitment to an architecture that reinterprets the past to serve contemporary life. This monograph, the fifth volume since Stern opened his practice in 1969, explores the application of this principle to a wide range of building types, including libraries, university buildings, cultural centers, offices, towers, and private residences. Focused on the years 2004 through 2009, an exceptionally productive period for Stern’s firm, this volume includes designs for the Miami Beach, Jacksonville, and Clearwater Public Libraries in Florida, the vast Zubiarte retail complex in Bilbao, Spain, two new residential colleges at Yale University, the widely acclaimed 15 Central Park West condominium in New York, Comcast, a crystalline addition to the Philadelphia skyline, and the George W. Bush Presidential Center in Dallas, Texas. In a conversation with renowned architecture critic Paul Goldberger, Stern discusses the principles that have guided the firm since its inception, focusing on the collaborative nature of the work and the importance of precedent and context. He also describes his own role as an educator, as dean of the architecture school at Yale University, and his deep interest in the history of architecture, first awakened during his student days at Yale.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Robert A. M. Stern, the principal partner of the architectural practice he founded in 1969, is also dean of the Yale School of Architecture. In addition to monographs on the firm's work, Stern has written a series of books on New York's architecture and urbanism, including New York 1880, New York 1900, New York 1930, and New York 1960.

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I think that all architecture comes from what went before. And how carefully one hews to precedent or how many liberties one takes, in my view, is part of a larger set of judgments as to what is, or could be called, "appropriate." Appropriate from every point of view, especially from the site, the cultural expectations of a community and of the specific client.
-Robert A. M. Stern

Central to the work of Robert A. M. Stern is a commitment to an architecture that reinterprets the past to serve contemporary life. This monograph, the fifth volume since Stern opened his practice in 1969, explores the application of this principle to a wide range of building types, including libraries, university buildings, cultural centers, offices, towers, and private residences.

Focused on the years 2004 through 2009, an exceptionally productive period for Stern's firm, this volume includes designs for the Miami Beach, Jacksonville, and Clearwater Public Libraries in Florida, the vast Zubiarte retail complex in Bilbao, Spain, two new residential colleges at Yale University, the widely acclaimed 15 Central Park West condominium in New York, Comcast, a crystalline addition to the Philadelphia skyline, and the George W. Bush Presidential Center in Dallas, Texas.

In a conversation with renowned architecture critic Paul Goldberger, Stern discusses the principles that have guided the firm since its inception, focusing on the collaborative nature of the work and the importance of precedent and context. He also describes his own role as an educator, as dean of the architecture school at Yale University, and his deep interest in the history of architecture, first awakened during his student days at Yale.

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From:
Robert A. M. Stern and Paul Goldberger: A Conversation

PAUL GOLDBERGER: Bob, forty years of practice is an extraordinary thing, all the more because you continue at such a rapid pace. I remember the office over the storefront on West Seventy-second Street, which was probably smaller than your reception area is right now. Let me first ask you if there’s anything you miss from those early days when it was a kind of office on a shoestring.

ROBERT A. M. STERN: “Office on a shoestring” sums it up perfectly. What one does miss, of course, from when one is brand new in practice, is the thrill of the first or the second or the third commission or telephone call as it were. And the very close camaraderie of a few people. But there is no question that a larger office—and I’m not sure how much larger “larger” should really be—provides one with all kinds of other things and a more solid professionalism. You avoid some of the horrible mistakes that many small practices make, both technical errors in execution of the work and mistakes in terms of how to position the firm and how to write a contract and a hundred other things.

I was thinking of that, actually, as I was waiting for your arrival. Of course, it was much nicer in some ways when it was smaller and I knew everybody. And I knew them warts and all, and they knew me warts and all. Now I think they know me warts and all and I’m not sure I know them.

But there are people in our practice today who don’t go back to day one but do go back to say, day three. People who have been here thirty years or more and are now partners, and we have a close camaraderie. But of course, many others who came to the practice have become partners and associates as well.

PG: It is remarkable, though, that there are some people who really spent their entire careers here.

RS: I’m always disappointed when people leave. But I recognize that for some people, for many people, it’s a good thing to do. Find their own way. Sometimes people don’t work better in a different environment than the one they’re leaving, but they think it’s going to be better, that the grass will be greener. Sometimes, they think they’re going to be able to do it on their own, and they suddenly discover that independent practice is not for everyone or not for them. Some chose to return to the nest. But we’ve spawned a lot of firms.

PG: You know, for a while, it seemed right to compare Robert A. M. Stern Architects to a practice like Delano & Aldrich or John Russell Pope or James Gamble Rogers, great eclectic firms of the 1920s, ’30s, and so forth.

But given that they were less concerned about formal innovation than they were about careful, conscientious re-use of historical form and given the sheer volume of work you now have, larger than any of those firms, I think even in their heyday, I wonder to whom would you want to be compared, ideally?

RS: There were no really large firms in the time of the architects you mentioned, to my knowledge. None that was very large. McKim, Mead & White and Daniel Burnham set the model, but it was just the model for big practice, not the reality. It’s only since the founding of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill in the late 1930s and after that the large firm taking on many different kinds of work began to emerge.

I like to think that we are able to compete with different firms for different kinds of work, that we can compete with a KPF or a Skidmore for a corporate project and other firms for other kinds of work. Maybe we’re sui generis, egomaniac though such a claim might be.

PG: We all know you are sui generis, so the question is therefore, perhaps the firm also is?

RS: We run our practice differently. First of all, we run side by side with certain partners who are doing the kind of work we did twenty, twenty-five years ago, relatively small scale, and other partners who are running large projects. And in between are the institutional projects, which tend to be a bit of one and the other.
But we have people who move around in the practice from one kind of work to the other. And I think people enjoy not doing the same kind of project over and over again year in and year out. People who might not want to be specialists, but would rather be generalists. And that’s the way I think we are.

One thing that’s different from any other firm you might compare us with: we have always kept ourselves to one office. The condensed energy of this place—the bumping into each other in the halls and on the stairways and so forth, of the people who are all really involved in the projects—is an essential ingredient in our ability to work together successfully.

PG: So you prefer the challenge of airplane travel to the sacrifices one makes having branch offices.

RS: Yes—especially now that I get my partners to travel.

PG: How do you keep quality up at this volume?

RS: My job in the office—certainly in the last ten or so—maybe fifteen years—has been to set the agenda for projects and then be the quality control. We’ll go this way; we’ll go that way. We’ll look at this set of alternatives or that. A design direction for a project emerges under my leadership and once that happens, my job is to see to its nurturing and to its survival in the rough-and-tumble of budgets, value engineering, and construction. I constantly meet with the architects working on our projects which are in intensive design development. As they move to the next stages, we meet less frequently as more technical issues come on board, but whenever there’s a decision that involves a significant intersection between idea and realization, then these projects are brought back to me. I think I can say that I am ultimately responsible for what we do, good or bad.

PG: You set each project’s initial design direction.

RS: Yes. Usually I sit down with a partner and other key people. I’ve done it collaboratively since the day John Hagmann and I started. The notion that an architect locks himself in his closet, so to speak, and invents a project is, I think, a foolish one and not operative for me. Not operative for most people.

PG: Let’s talk about the role of history today: how does one justify doing work that is so reliant on historical precedent in the twenty-first century? Is that different from doing so in the twentieth century? Or if it was justifiable in the twentieth, is there any reason it should be any different in the twenty-first?

RS: I don’t see how any art can proceed—I regard architecture as an art—without climbing on the shoulders of what went before it. The modernist argument may have provided a necessary tonic to do some house-cleaning almost a hundred years ago. But modernism has become a style and an ideology. In fact we now live in a period of revived modernism in which architecture students and young practitioners are doing things that make me smile. I mean, I wouldn’t be as blatantly devoted to some of my precedents as they seem to be to Case Study houses in California.

I think that all architecture comes from what went before. And how carefully one hews to precedent or how many liberties one takes, in my view, is part of a larger set of judgments as to what is, or could be called, “appropriate.” Appropriate from every point of view, especially from the site, the cultural expectations of a community and of the specific client. It’s not a matter of what mood I’m in that morning or which book happened to land on my desk that...

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Verlag
The Monacelli Press
Erscheinungsdatum
2009
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
1580932347
ISBN 13 
9781580932349
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Auflage
1
Anzahl der Seiten
624
Herausgeber
Dixon Peter Morris
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