Columbia GSAPP is profoundly saddened by the passing of Robert A.M. Stern, whose long and formative association with the School shaped the very character of architectural debate, preservation culture, and design education here for almost three decades. His tenure at Columbia provided the intellectual ground from which his later achievements would grow, and it left an enduring imprint on the architecture of New York as well as on architectural culture and pedagogy worldwide. A 1960 graduate of Columbia College, Stern returned to the University in 1970 as a young architect of formidable promise, and quickly became one of the defining voices who helped the School rethink the future of architecture, reconsider the place of history within architectural thought, and reaffirm the discipline’s responsibilities to the life of the city. He remained a member of the GSAPP faculty until 1998, when he became the Dean of Yale’s School of Architecture.
GSAPP Dean Andrés Jaque reflects: “Bob Stern remains present in GSAPP’s unwavering commitment to understand architecture as the enactment of histories and societal entanglement. His influence lives on in the many designers and scholars who found in him the confidence to pursue their own intellectual paths, while maintaining the belief that design and architecture are inseparable from historical inquiry and critical discourse. His imprint is indelible.”
Stern’s teaching at GSAPP was characterized by an unusual blend of intellectual intensity, humor, and generosity. In design studios that he taught almost every semester from the 1970s through the 1990s, he encouraged students to understand New York not only as a site for architectural invention, but as an archive of values and cultural memory. His lectures on American Architecture were dense, argumentative, animated by stories about architects he admired and those he sparred with, and always shaped by his belief that architectural knowledge is inseparable from social and political histories. He often stressed the importance of his undergraduate days at Columbia College when he experienced a humanistic plurality; his desire to shape a specific lineage for contemporary American Architecture was deeply anchored in New York City. The course on American Architecture he established at GSAPP began in what he called “The Age of Cosmopolitanism” in the 1870s; and his meticulously researched series of monographs on New York, starting with the 1983 volume New York 1900, centered the city in the rise of a new architectural epoch.
Robert Stern was appointed the inaugural director of the Columbia GSAPP Temple Hoyne Buell Center for the Study of American Architecture in 1983. Throughout his time as director until 1988, he demonstrated an early commitment to scholarship in architecture that he would continue to champion even at the height of his career as a practicing architect. In a 2023 interview with the Buell Center’s current director Lucia Allais, Stern recalled, he thought his task at the Buell was to define “American Architecture” through a diversity of building traditions, and stressed that this required concerted efforts at a moment when most historians were focused on the European past. “Today this may seem maybe a bit obvious,” he said, “but it was rather path-breaking in the early 80s to find scholars who were interested in Hispanic or in Native themes in relation to architecture.”
As the Director of the Buell Center, Stern tackled this perceived lack by staging public conversations. In an April 1983 conference, American Architecture: Innovation and Tradition, buildings of vastly different geographies and periods were discussed together, including Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s American work and the Pueblo architecture of New Mexico. In 1985, Stern launched an “Oral History Project” to interview American architects such as William H. Jordy; in 1986 he hosted Francesco Dal Co for seminars on his book The American City. Stern’s own predilection for thinking of history in terms of styles and influences also affected his Buell work, as with the 1987 publication of Vincent Scully’s The Architecture of the American Summer: The Flowering of the Shingle Style, and the 1988 symposium, Hispanic Influences on American Architecture.
Aside from the particular view of American Architecture he expounded, Stern’s Buell years offer an early and important example that sustained interest in historical scholarship must include a willingness to support the work of researchers outside the mainstream of the academic canon.
From 1992 to 1998, Stern served as the Director of the Graduate Program in Historic Preservation at Columbia University GSAPP. During his tenure, he expanded the curriculum to embrace the preservation of architecture from the recent past, including buildings less than fifty years old. Under his leadership, preservation studios investigated significant works of New York architecture that had been overlooked by the Landmarks Preservation Commission, anticipating and at times influencing future city policy. In 1994–95, his teaching focused on Lower Manhattan, where he argued that “individual landmarking of isolated buildings may not be enough, the entire area should be designated a historic district.” A demanding teacher who led by example, Stern approached preservation with a rigor that transcended his well-known skepticism toward certain strains of Modernist architecture. As early as 1996, he and his GSAPP students urged the Landmarks Commission to recognize Park Avenue as a Modernist historic district—an action that, had it been adopted, might have prevented the recent demolition of SOM’s Union Carbide Building (1960–2019).
Unafraid of controversy, Stern was outspoken in defense of architectural heritage. He published pointed opinion pieces and did not hesitate to protest when he believed historic buildings were at risk. In 2017, he joined a public demonstration opposing the alteration of Philip Johnson’s AT&T Building, an effort that contributed to the building’s eventual landmark designation.
In 1977, parallel to his academic life as a Columbia GSAPP professor, he founded Robert A.M. Stern Architects. The firm’s work ranged from experimental early interiors to major cultural buildings and urban residential towers, projects that made him a defining figure in late-20th- and early-21st-century architectural culture.
His long deanship at the Yale School of Architecture (1998–2016) expanded his influence even further, shaping a generation of architects who experienced firsthand his passionate commitment to architecture.
