Robert AM Stern, architect dubbed ‘King of Central Park West’, dies aged 86 | New York
Robert AM Stern, the architect who shaped New York City’s skyline with buildings evoking pre-war grandeur but with modern luxury fit for billionaires and movie stars, has died at the age of 86.
Dubbed the “King of Central Park West” by Vanity Fair, Stern is credited with the design of 15 Central Park West in 2008, which was considered the highest-priced new apartment building in New York history.
With sales of nearly $2 billion, it was also considered the world’s most lucrative apartment block and paid homage to an earlier era of classical architecture in the city in the 1920s and ’30s. Its exterior was covered with more than 85,000 pieces of limestone.
Hedge fund managers, financial moguls like Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein, tech entrepreneurs including Steve Jobs, and celebrities like Bono, Sting, Denzel Washington, and sports commentator Bob Costas have called it home.
Stern, like Richard Meier, opposed the modernist trend of glass apartments and again the later fashion for ultra-tall “shade makers.” Instead, he chose to recreate the old fashioned, the “traditional modern.”
84-year-old architect “This was my breakthrough” he told the New York Times In an interview for his obituary from 15 Central Park West, he added that he did not use a computer and drew everything by hand.
The Zeckendorf family backers behind Central Park West figured it out: Vanity Fair said – “Nothing appeals to people, especially rich people, like something new that doesn’t seem so new.” The building featured the classic layouts of old-money Park Avenue apartments, as well as screening rooms, a domed lobby with copper domes, a 75-foot pool, and a waiting room for drivers.
Born in Brooklyn, Stern ran a 300-person architecture firm at the height of his career, produced encyclopedic volumes on the city’s architecture, and served as dean of the Yale School of Architecture.
“I became an architect because I loved the buildings of my city, New York,” he wrote in 1981, “and I dreamed that one day I would build similar ones to them. The New York of my youth has been the main subject of all my work in architecture to this day.”
Stern also designed beach club resorts for Disney World in Florida, and his firm produced the master plan for Disney’s infamous “new town,” Celebration. His range was extensive, designing the George W Bush Center in Dallas, the Museum of the American Revolution and Philadelphia’s 58-story Comcast Center.
Small and with a high-pitched voice, Stern wore suede loafers, butter-yellow socks and pocket squares worn with chalk-striped tailored suits. Modernism was not among his interests. “Most Modernist works of our time tend to be self-indulgent objects, and that’s a real quibble with me.” said New York Times in 2007. “Buildings may be icons or objects, but they still need to connect to the greater whole.
“I’m not avant-garde because I’m not avant-garde. But there’s a parallel world out there: perfection.”
