BY NANCY MEYER
PHOTOGRAPH COURTESY ROBERT A.M. STERN ARCHITECTS, LLP
What should today’s buildings communicate?
My design philosophy has been to design buildings—whether houses, office buildings, institutional buildings—by their design address, their physical, topographical, architectural, and cultural contexts. New buildings require tremendous participation of the community, not just the people who build them. We try to make buildings that address the concerns of larger bodies of people who often don’t have the opportunity to speak for themselves as part of the design process, but should be taken into consideration. I become, in that sense, the advocate of the community, not in a narrow social way, but in a broader and deeper way—trying to solve problems for my clients, providing them what they need, and trying to make something that’s beautiful and enduring, not trendy.
So not starchitecture.
Oh, I don’t know if I’m not a starchitect. That’s a totally different thing. I like to think I have an international reputation. We’ve done buildings around the world. But there are people who parachute into different places and do whatever they do wherever they do it, and then there are others who are equally star-ish, and who try to be more responsive to the local conditions. I like to think of myself as part of that second group. I think we can safely say we’ve come out of the period where cultural and other institutions wanted to have buildings that seemed disassociated from local conditions. I say there’s plenty of room in the world for every different idea, but that’s not my idea.
Characterize your approach to design.
We never think of just the building. We like to think of the next bigger thing—what other buildings will come next to it, but also the siting and landscaping. We work with many distinguished landscape architects, but whenever we present our ideas to our clients, we try to sketch out some setting for the building. Of course, we also are getting intensely involved with the interiors of buildings, and we have done everything from decorating to large institutional planning for offices for academic use or even health facilities.
I see architecture as a whole. Since I became the dean at Yale School of Architecture in 1998, I’ve become increasingly aware of and engaged in the issue of making buildings perform far better than they performed in, say, the 1990s or earlier. At Yale, I’ve brought Patrick Bellew of Atelier Ten in London and Thomas Auer of Transsolar to teach. They not only give lectures, but embed themselves in the design process in the studios. At Robert Stern Architects, we’ve worked closely with Bellew and his colleagues, particularly Paul Stoller of Atelier Ten’s New York office. Bellew is actually the consultant for sustainability for Yale now.
At Battery Park City, we designed Tribeca Green, a LEED Gold residential building. But we don’t wear our sustainability on the sleeve in terms of our public persona or our buildings. We don’t stick the sustainability on the building like people put bling or tattoos on themselves these days. But it’s there.
How important is LEED to you?
LEED is a rating system. It’s like the Academy Awards in movie making. It sets a certain bar and helps you measure your achievements. I think it’s encouraged clients to invest more in the building in relationship to issues of sustainability—because it becomes a little contest. Everybody wants to win the Academy Award, right? So you try to make your movie a bit better. And I think it is good. I do support LEED.
We’re doing a project now in Paris—at La Défense—and the French have a slightly different system called HQE [Haute Qualité Environnementale]; and then there is BREEAM [British Research Establishment Environmental Assessment Method], which is the British system. But our client will also pursue LEED certification for the building: I think they’re really trying to be able to say that a building is LEED certified for international corporations that have offices in multiple places and have employees that are being moved around the world who expect a certain level of accommodation. But because everybody is much more conscious of this, they expect a level of performance in their environment. They want clean air and to know that people aren’t standing on the street pointing to the building they’re working in as a kind of guzzler or an energy hog. That’s all great.
Let’s focus on your revitalization of 42nd Street.
Well, 42nd Street is a great success story. It was a wonderful blending of circumstance, timing—everything coming together. We started work on 42nd Street in the 1980s, assessing the historic theaters and how they might be preserved. But we reimagined different kinds of theatrical productions; in some cases, we even speculated about their being used for other purposes. In the early ’90s, we were once again retained, this time with a mandate to bring the street back to life—in 1990, the state had basically taken over most of the properties, so it was a dead street. There was no crime on 42nd Street in 1991 because there was nobody there. It was a completely avoided street, this horrible dead zone in the middle of the great city of the 20th century.
We proposed strategies that were interim plans, supposed to last for 15 years. But there was a rejuvenation of the economy, and with the impending millennium celebration, the media companies, not the least of which was the Walt Disney Company, realized that 42nd Street and Times Square probably would be one of the focuses worldwide. Suddenly, 42nd Street took off. Now, people say of 42nd Street, “Well, it’s not the way it was.” Well, it never was one way, if you look at how this street evolved. As an entertainment street, it evolved beginning literally at 1900, reflecting the changing business practices and audience tastes for basic popular entertainment.
We’ve heard critics saying, “We miss not having prostitutes and male hustlers there.” I’ve thought, “Well, that’s weird.” And then there have been others saying, “These are just ordinary popular shows”—as if 42nd Street had been Shakespeare Central, which it never was. It’s a democratic public place. It is varied—you have some marvelous live theater, you have incredible movie screens, you have restaurants for popular tastes and some a little bit more expensive, and the whole thing really works. And it’s filled with people. And also, some people have said, “White collar employees, the financial industry, and even the big multimedia entertainment—they’ll never have their offices there.” Well, make the deal right and there they are—and the man and the lady in the gray flannel suits are perfectly able to step out onto the sidewalk and mix with the people whom they should know about because they’re trying to invest these people’s money or sell them their magazine or whatever.
Where do you see the urban core going?
Right outside the window of this office, you can see a good piece of New York’s future, which will be the development of the air rights over the railroad yards called Hudson Yards, which presents Manhattan—and New York City and the New York region—with a fantastic opportunity to grow a neighborhood of offices, retail, educational and cultural facilities, and residential buildings. Now, that will all depend on the appetite of the economy to expand again, but it’s there and it will happen. It ties into the High Line project [the preserving and reusing of a 1.5-mile, elevated railway along Manhattan’s West Side], which I’ve supported from the very beginning. This whole stretch of the West Side—from the meatpacking district virtually up to 42nd Street—is in the process of what will take 20, 25 years. It takes a long time for cities to grow, and it’s better for them to grow over time, because then neighborhoods develop their own character and subtleties and idiosyncrasies. Large-scale planning often is a contradiction to idiosyncratic growth, but most of us, in our daily lives, like the idiosyncrasies. Even Rockefeller Center—people don’t remember it took 10 years to do the main part of Rockefeller Center, and then they built more after the Second World War.
Rome was not built in a day, nor was New York. What else is happening in New York? The recapturing of the waterfront in many parts of Manhattan and Brooklyn and Queens, now that commercial uses of the waterfront are no longer viable. So the recapturing of that waterfront for recreation, walking, jogging, and parks and so forth, is fantastic. I was in an apartment of a colleague of mine in Williamsburg, and the views from that apartment are breathtaking. Now, the problem with getting there was breathtaking also. We need to pay more attention to public transportation.
Is transportation also on your radar?
I’m an architect, I’m not God. Not even Mayor Bloomberg is God. I did read about somebody arguing that a light rail transit system, such as the one on the west side of the Hudson, running up the New Jersey shore, would be fantastic along the east side of the East River, basically connecting Astoria down to Bay Ridge. Now, that may be a very ambitious run, but these neighborhoods have been historically underserved by public transportation, and now we’re pouring new things into them—they need transit-oriented development. You really have to make it easier for people in some neighborhoods to come to work in Manhattan.
You mentioned the recession. Has that made you make adjustments?
You bet.
We have projects that we have brought to a certain point in terms of their drawings, and they’ve been put in file drawers, awaiting a change in the economy. Our clients are fairly optimistic, but the banks aren’t releasing money, so you get a little discouraged. Even your optimism butts up against that. We’ve had several university projects that have been delayed, or in some cases canceled. The better-endowed universities are not canceling projects, but they’re slowing down the construction pace. We don’t have so much government work at the moment, so it remains to be seen whether we might be the professional beneficiaries of some of the money coming out of Washington.
Our international clients are just as hard hit as our American clients. Our New York clients are just as hard hit as our Los Angeles clients. We talked about globalization for a decade or more, and we looked at it as a great positive development in our lives, culturally and business-wise and every other way, but that which goes up together goes down together. It is a global economy. We’ve had to let people go in this office—every office of this size that I am aware of has had to make significant cuts. You can say, “Well, it toughens everybody up.” But that’s a hell of a way to toughen people up. It’s not a good thing.
How does this recession compare to other economic crises?
I was at a conference yesterday where leading economists were speaking. Economics is called “the dismal science.” Their prediction was that this is not a two-year fix—this will take a long time. They were talking in terms of the Depression of the 1930s. One of them said, “You know what the stimulus package was that got us out of the Depression in the 1930s? The Second World War.” So we all hope that isn’t the way we’re going to have to solve this problem, and that it won’t take as long as they said. Certainly Washington is moving faster. But nobody has the silver bullet, the magic solution. It is serious. Architects were very hard hit in the 1930s, and a lot of people left the profession—but there were no other jobs. They were without real resources. For example, the architect Louis Kahn—whom we all regard with great veneration and who was a person I knew—he had no work in the 1930s. His wife, who was a trained scientist and worked in a research lab, was the source of support for him and his family. So there you go.
How do you deal with projects meeting zoning problems and other delays?
You’re always working within the constraints of the body politic. So there are always zoning and building code issues. They’ve become more complex, particularly building code issues, as a result of everything from terrorist attacks to natural disasters, earthquakes, floods, and so forth, as well as the increasing responsibility to providing environments in which people with disabilities are not placed in anything like a second-class situation. They have full access to every part of the enterprise. So that’s part of your work.
NIMBYism [Not In My Backyard] is a problem, and there is no way around it. You have to respect people who are sometimes apprehensive about change—sometimes they are rightly apprehensive about change and sometimes they are not. Of course, each architect thinks his or her project is going to be perfect and everybody will love it. But that’s not always the case. I and my colleagues here spend lots of time, maybe as much time on that, in terms of any given project or certain projects, as on any other part of the project—meeting with community groups, responding to requests from governmental agencies for explanations or modifications or whatever. Anybody who tells you that’s not part of their practice as an architect, in my view, is either practicing in a bubble or not telling you the exact truth.
As educators, we try to introduce our students at Yale to these realities without laying them on with such a heavy hand as to thwart their enthusiasm for the thing they really want to do, which is to design beautiful buildings. But eventually they realize that the realization of beautiful buildings requires all kinds of consultations, and so forth.
Looking at architecture as a profession, do you have any concerns?
At the moment, the narrow-minded concern is the survival of so many people who are not only just out of school or about to come out of school, but also who have been in the profession 10, 15 years, with layoffs all over the place, all over the world. Of course, I worry for them putting bread on the table, but I also worry for the loss of this incredible collective talent. In the recession of the late ’80s, which isn’t talked about so much, students came out of school and couldn’t get jobs. There’s a whole generation, therefore, of people from that age group who went and did other things, and now we’re really short of experienced people. I’m worried about that.
I’m worried about the technological means that have come along to reshape aspects of the practice, the computer graphics and so forth—that many architects will think that those replace, rather than enhance, time-honored ways of thinking about architecture and making architecture. The eye is still best connected to the brain and to the hands through drawing—simple sketches. I’m not talking about making Beaux-Arts renderings. Those are nice, but they’re now being done on computers. I’m talking about a young or old architect looking at something, seeing something in a building or an environment, being able to convey something they see in their mind’s eye to a client or to another architect. I find increasingly that students can’t draw—therefore, they can’t communicate.
It’s wonderful to sit with you; you’re taking notes by hand. And also you’re tape-recording this, so you can check and double-check. But you would have driven me crazy if you had come in here and opened your laptop and sat typing away. I would have thrown you out in a minute, I can assure you.
An important client of mine pinned me down when we toured some buildings around Europe and he took me for our farewell dinner. He said, “Now, Mr. Stern, what’s the building going to look like?” I had to make him a sketch and, by gum, my sketch was pretty good. It wouldn’t hang in the Museum of Modern Art, but it’s what the building is going to look like. I can convey that to him.
First of all, I think he wanted to see the hand of the architect. Second of all, I think he really wanted to know where he was going. He’s putting a lot of faith and money into this enterprise and he wanted to feel comfortable. He didn’t want to wait until he’d gone three months down the road to walk into a presentation and say, “That’s what it’s going to look like? That’s not what I had in mind,” or “I didn’t think you had that in mind.”
To move forward means everything is more complex. Why is it more complex? Because you should know all the new things that are possible, and not forget all the old things that have always been possible or that have grown possible over time.
That goes back to your design philosophy.
Exactly. We look backward to go forward.
