Robert A.M. Stern, a New York architect who built museums, schools, houses and libraries with little notice outside his profession before winning international acclaim late in life by designing what was then the most expensive condominium building overlooking Central Park in Manhattan, died today at his home in Manhattan. He was 86.
His son, Nicholas, said the cause was a brief pulmonary illness.
Like many of New York’s most elegant residential buildings, Mr. Stern’s crowning creation — opened in 2008 and hailed as a rebirth of prewar luxury — was known only by its address, 15 Central Park West. It consisted of two limestone-clad structures: a 19-story front on the park with the terraced setbacks of a 1920s facade, and behind it a modern 35-story tower with to-die-for city views. They were linked by a glass-enclosed, copper-domed rotunda-lobby and a circular porte-cochere driveway.
Coming from the drawing board of an architect of traditional buildings that included college residence halls and courthouses, his condominium on the park was an unusual coupling of grandeur from the past and the clean lines of an ultramodern high-rise. Its lavish amenities also reflected those of a more gracious era, dazzling even to the flintiest cognoscenti.
“It was my breakthrough,” the 84-year-old architect said in an interview for this obituary. “I still don’t use a computer,” he noted. “I draw everything by hand.”
Glowing reviews drove a stampede of celebrities to 15 CPW, overshadowing the competition from sleek glass towers that had been the rage in Manhattan early in the new millennium. Some of the world’s richest people owned the cloud-banked aeries, but many used them only weeks in a year.
Mr. Stern had convinced his developers, Arthur and William Lie Zeckendorf, that what would really sell, and what the city needed, was a luxury building that felt like the architectural dowagers that lined Fifth and Park Avenues, where the old money lived in pre-World War II splendor with paneled libraries, formal dining rooms, up to eight bedrooms and wine cellars. At 15 CPW, Mr. Stern replicated those and added private screening rooms, a 75-foot pool, a waiting room for chauffeurs — and something else.
“The Zeckendorfs had figured out that nothing appeals to people, particularly rich people, like something new that doesn’t look too new,” The New Yorker’s architecture critic Paul Goldberger wrote in Vanity Fair. “What Stern actually designed, it turned out, was a building in which every apartment looked like an old Park Avenue apartment after someone had renovated it.”
All the apartments at 15 CPW were sold before construction was finished, and at the highest prices of any new building in the city’s history up to that point. Buyers included celebrities like Sting and Denzel Washington, the sports commentator Bob Costas, the television producer Norman Lear, the banking mogul Sanford I. Weill and a bevy of hedge-fund titans. Sales topped $2 billion.
For Mr. Stern, nearly 70 at the time, it was the artistic pinnacle of his career, a realization of his dream to merge the past and present. It also reaped bonanzas of publicity, propelling his career to new peaks a decade later when he built several residential skyscrapers in Manhattan.
Mr. Stern was a small, wiry man with a high-pitched voice and an impatient energy that pulled in the focus of a classroom or a sales pitch. He knew almost everyone in New York architecture and real estate. His trademarks were butter-yellow socks and pocket squares, worn with suede loafers and chalk-striped bespoke suits.
In a half-century career, Mr. Stern founded his own New York firm, employed hundreds of architects and designed homes, workplaces and commercial and institutional buildings for hundreds of domestic and international clients. He also taught at Columbia and Yale Universities, and led Yale’s School of Architecture from 1998 to 2016.
For all his accomplishments, he was not a household name with a distinctive architectural style of his own and, with his respect for traditions, he was hardly an innovator. His jobs were largely commercial and institutional: hotels, planned communities and lots of dormitories. With few start-up commissions in New York, his early work consisted mostly of private homes in the Hamptons and Westchester County suburbs.
He later designed Disney World’s yacht and beach club resorts in Florida; the George W. Bush Presidential Center in Dallas, the Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy in Ann Arbor, Mich., and Philadelphia’s Comcast Center 58-story skyscraper and Museum of the American Revolution.
In teaching, he was open to many architectural styles — an approach, critics said, that was lacking in his own work. What he called the “traditional modern” aesthetic of his buildings appealed to quietly dignified tastes in a business always searching for flashy new ideas.
Mr. Stern was interested in unflashy older ideas. He was an early exponent of postmodernism, which held that instead of trying to invent a new aesthetic style from scratch, architects should look back into history for inspiration. He argued that architecture had a responsibility to put function before form and attend to clients’ needs rather than drawing attention to itself.
“Many Modernist works of our time tend to be self-important objects, and that’s a real quarrel that I have,” he told The New York Times in 2007. “Buildings can be icons or objects, but they still have to engage with the larger whole. I’m not considered avant-garde because I’m not avant-garde. But there is a parallel world out there — of excellence.”
In the 1970s and ’80s, his unifying concept had been to adorn his classically modern buildings with details from the past: cornices, pediments, arches and other touches of prewar luxury. By the ’90s, however, he had given up grafting bits and pieces of the past onto his new buildings. Instead, in a radical change that he could still call traditional, he began designing entire buildings to reflect the spirit of the past.
“He has tossed away the pastiche in favor of replicating models of the past more directly,” Mr. Goldberger said in a 2007 article in The New Yorker that anticipated the debut of 15 CPW. “Stern is big on fitting into context: His business school at the University of Virginia is pure Thomas Jefferson; his Norman Rockwell Museum in Stockbridge looks like a classic New England meeting house; he’s done sprawling Shingle Style houses in East Hampton and Spanish Colonial ones in California. Stern knows how to do a building like 15 Central Park West better than anyone.”
The project was risky. The Zeckendorfs had paid $400 million in 2004 for the land, a block bounded by Broadway, 61st and 62nd Streets and Central Park West, and were betting that recreating an old Manhattan apartment house would be more than an architect’s dream.
From the start, prices at 15 CPW went wild. The hedge-fund executive Daniel S. Loeb bought a penthouse for $45 million, then the most ever paid for an apartment in the city. And the feeding frenzy continued for years. Resales climbed to $88 million for a penthouse in 2012.
In 2013, Justin Davidson, New York magazine’s architecture critic, put Mr. Stern’s work on a lofty pedestal, writing: “While so much new residential architecture has been grinding away at New York’s texture, turning a stone city into a glass metropolis, Stern’s buildings exert a quiet friction against change — or at least against too much cheap change. He has helped shape the city’s constant self-invention by championing its glory days.”
Robert Arthur Morton Stern was born on May 23, 1939, in Brooklyn, the elder of two sons of Sidney and Sonya (Cohen) Stern. His father sold insurance, ran a hardware store and drove a cab. His mother sold china at the B. Altman department store in Manhattan.
At the old Manual Training High School in Brooklyn, Robert excelled in Latin, geometry and trigonometry, and was interested in drama and real estate. He loved walking in Manhattan and marveling at classical edifices of the 1920s and ’30s. Before graduating in 1956, he set his sights on a career in architecture.
Columbia College had no undergraduate architecture program, so he majored in history and received a bachelor’s degree in 1960. He earned a master’s degree in architecture at Yale in 1965. After a year as a curator at the Architectural League of New York, he worked for the architect Richard Meier and for the city’s Housing Preservation and Development Corporation under Mayor John V. Lindsay.
In 1966, he married Lynn Solinger, a fine arts photographer whose father was president of the Whitney Museum; they divorced in 1977. In addition to their son, Nicholas, Mr. Stern is survived by his brother, Elliot, and three grandchildren.
In 1969, Mr. Stern and a Yale friend, John Hagmann, opened a New York architectural practice that ran for eight years. In 1970, he joined Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation and directed its Temple Hoyne Buell Center for the Study of American Architecture from 1984 to 1988.
In 1977, he founded Robert A.M. Stern Architects, which employed a staff of up to 300. His honors included the Vincent Scully Prize in 2008, the Richard H. Driehaus Prize in 2011 and the Louis Auchincloss Prize in 2019.
Mr. Stern lived at the Chatham, a 32-story condominium building in Manhattan that he designed, and had a home, also of his own design, in East Hampton, N.Y. He wrote or co-wrote more than a dozen books about architecture, including a six-volume encyclopedic history of New York City’s architecture from the Civil War to recent decades.
He also wrote an autobiography, “Between Memory and Invention: My Journey in Architecture” (2022, with Leopoldo Villardi). In 1986, he hosted an eight-part PBS documentary, “Pride of Place: Building the American Dream.”
He was the subject of books and articles that in recent years described him as one of the nation’s richest architects. His residential towers in Manhattan included the 70-story 220 Central Park South, where a triplex went for $238 million in 2019, and the 82-story 30 Park Place, where a son of one of the world’s richest men, Bernard Arnault, bought a half-floor penthouse for $18 million in 2023.
Earlier this month, Mr. Stern reflected on his teenage years walking around Lower Manhattan and observing the beauty to be found at street level. “Of course, I loved the tops of the buildings,” he told The Times, “but I really loved the bottoms: the great entryways, the rich marbles and granites.”
Pedestrians today, he lamented, have their eyes glued to their phones. “You’re not looking around,” he added. “When I was growing up, all I ever did was look around.”
Robert D. McFadden was a Times reporter for 63 years. In the last decade before his retirement in 2024 he wrote advance obituaries, which are prepared for notable people so they can be published quickly upon their deaths.
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