Most architects now know of Robert A.M. Stern as a successful architect and founder of the firm RAMSA in New York, as well as a former professor at Columbia and dean at Yale. Fewer may know of him as a prolific author who’s written, cowritten, or edited several dozen books, or as a thorough and accomplished scholar who’s coauthored comprehensive histories of planned suburbs and a multivolume landmark history of New York City’s architecture from the late 19th century to the present. But who knew that Stern is also a terrific storyteller, as evidenced by his new memoir? There may be no American architect who has more thoroughly documented his own work—and his own thinking about it—than Stern.
His “journey,” written with the research assistance of Leopoldo Villardi, takes us chronologically through his life and career: his Brooklyn youth (he was born there in 1939); his Yale architectural education from 1960 to 1965, when Paul Rudolph was the chair; his leadership in the New York Architectural League, first in charge of exhibitions and later as president, in two different stints between 1965 and 1977; his early Postmodern phase as a partner in Stern & Hagmann from 1969 to 1976; his subsequent embrace of what he calls “Modern Traditionalism” as Robert A. M. Stern Architects; his professorship at Columbia University, from 1970 to 1998; and his deanship at Yale University’s School of Architecture, from 1998 to 2016.
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