Time for another entry. Today, I’m talking about Robert A. M. Stern and his architectural firm, another group of which I’m a big fan. From RAMSA’s web site:
Robert A.M. Stern Architects, LLP, is a 300-person firm of architects, landscape architects, interior designers, and supporting staff. Over its thirty-eight-year history, the firm has established an international reputation as a leading design firm with wide experience in residential, commercial, and institutional work. As the firm’s practice has diversified, its geographical scope has widened to include current projects in Europe, Asia, South America, and throughout the United States. The firm maintains an attention to detail and commitment to design quality which has earned international recognition, numerous awards and citations for design excellence, including National Honor Awards of the American Institute of Architects, and a lengthening list of repeat clients.
Stern’s architectural firm is quite large, but I would like to include the bio about the man himself from the firm’s site:
Robert A.M. Stern is a practicing architect, teacher, and writer. He is a Fellow of the American Institute of Architects, and received the AIA New York Chapter’s Medal of Honor in 1984 and the Chapter’s President’s Award in 2001. He received the Athena Award from the Congress for the New Urbanism and the Board of Directors’ Honor from the Institute of Classical Architecture and Classical America in 2007. As founder and Senior Partner of Robert A.M. Stern Architects, he personally directs the design of each of the firm’s projects.
Mr. Stern is Dean of the Yale School of Architecture. He was previously Professor of Architecture and Director of the Historic Preservation Program at the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation at Columbia University. Mr. Stern served from 1984 to 1988 as the first director of Columbia’s Temple Hoyne Buell Center for the Study of American Architecture. He has lectured extensively in the United States and abroad on both historical and contemporary topics in architecture. He is the author of several books, including New Directions in American Architecture (Braziller, 1969; revised edition, 1977); George Howe: Toward a Modern American Architecture (Yale University Press, 1975); and Modern Classicism (London: Thames & Hudson; New York: Rizzoli, 1988). Mr. Stern’s profound interest in the development of New York City’s architecture and urbanism can be seen in his books, New York 1900 (Rizzoli, 1983) coauthored with John Massengale and Gregory Gilmartin; New York 1930 (Rizzoli, 1987) coauthored with Thomas Mellins and Gregory Gilmartin, which was nominated for a National Book Award, an unusual distinction for a book about architecture; New York 1960 (Monacelli, 1995) and New York 1880 (Monacelli, 1999) coauthored with Thomas Mellins and David Fishman; and New York 2000 (Monacelli, 2006), coauthored with David Fishman and Jacob Tilove.
Fifteen Central Park West - New York City, 2008
Fifteen Central Park West is designed to complement its neighbors. The nineteen-story House joins the palisade of park-facing apartment houses that stretches for more than two miles along Central Park West. The thirty-five-story Tower takes its place among the 1920s towers punctuating that palisade – the Century, the Majestic, the San Remo, and the Eldorado – as well among as the post-war towers that line Broadway to form a back range to the skyline. On the west, shopfronts will participate in the active pedestrian life of the stretch of Broadway between the great cultural anchors of Lincoln Center and Jazz at Lincoln Center, now located at Columbus Circle.
Fifteen Central Park West is completely clad in limestone, complementing the light-toned brick and stone of the older towers and contrasting with the dark reflections of the newer buildings around Columbus Circle. The warmth and natural variation of limestone has made it the material of choice for New York’s most important buildings, those with the highest architectural ambitions, from the Metropolitan Museum of Art to the Frick Museum to the Empire State Building to some of the great apartment houses like 998 Fifth Avenue and 740 Park Avenue; no material takes the light more beautifully.
Superior Ink condos - New York City, 2009
Superior Ink offers 67 apartments and seven townhouses in a 15-story, 160,000-square-foot-building on West Street in New York’s Greenwich Village. The tower faces the Hudson River with large expanses of glass with metal detailing inspired by the industrial aesthetic of nearby factory buildings. The building’s rusticated limestone base, string courses, and cornices take their cues from neighboring classical buildings. Each townhouse presents a unique front to Bethune Street, carrying forward the heterogeneous fabric of the Village.
The Chatham - New York City, 2001
The brick and limestone facades and the building’s massing recall those of the highly-respected luxury apartment buildings along Park Avenue. The two-storey base is limestone and above the facades are brick with limestone accents. The facades are articulated with French balconies, bay windows, and subtle changes in plane in the shaft of the building. The top of the building consists of a series of setbacks culminating in a lantern.
222 Berkeley - Boston, 1991
The familiar Boston palette of red brick, granite, and limestone has been adapted to a complexly massed office tower, shaped in response to the different urban pressures on each of its sides, and resolved in a pavilion-like crown to create a distinctive skyline silhouette that places the building firmly within the American tradition of classical skyscrapers.
600 Thirteenth Street - Washington, D. C., 1997
600 Thirteenth Street NW is an eleven storey, 255,000 gross square foot office building in downtown Washington, D.C., covering the full width of a city block between F and G streets. The building massing is articulated in a classical manner, characteristic of Washington’s major institutional and commercial buildings built prior to the 1950s. Two large drums add vertical emphasis to the top of the building as it is approached along Thirteenth Street, giving the building a distinctive presence in the eastern business district of Washington’s downtown. The 260-foot-long Thirteenth Street elevation is modulated by two towers that each support terra cotta-tiled temples. These stone-clad towers have protruding metal colonette bays which add further vertical emphasis to a long facade that is organized by a rigorous five foot fenestration module required by modern office planning.
Jacksonville Library - Jacksonville, 2005
A public library is the most democratic of our institutions: it has the capacity to draw in the young and old, from every ethnicity and background. A great library must be much more than a depository for books or a facility for information exchange: it must be a great collective civic place.
Nashville Library - Nashville, 2001
Nashville is “Music City USA”; it is also, and has been for much longer, the “Athens of the South,” with a strong, distinct classical tradition that permeates its architecture, from William Strickland’s Tennessee State Capitol to modest houses. Our library design, which won a national design competition, recognizes that tradition, not only in its exterior massing and formal language, but in the clear, axial organization of its most symbolically significant public areas – the Main Entry Lobby; the Nashville Room, housing the local history collection; the Gallery; the Grand Reading Room; the skylit Grand Stair; and the Courtyard – all of which are located on the axis of the Capitol, helping to strengthen the dangerously frayed fabric of the civic center complex as a whole.
Spangler Campus Center - Boston, 2001
This 122,000 square foot campus center for the Harvard Business School serves as the on-campus social center for students, faculty, and alumni, providing dining rooms, meeting rooms, lounges, study rooms, an auditorium, and a variety of student services facilities. The building has been carefully sited to build upon and reinforce McKim, Mead & White’s 1927 master plan for the campus. The strategically complex plan, with three distinct points of arrival, marks the transition between the historic business school campus which faced north to the Charles River and Cambridge and Harvard University’s future growth to the south facing Western Avenue and Boston. Of the building’s north-facing entrances, two align axially with entrances to Aldrich Hall, the school’s principal classroom building, to the north, while a third opens onto the Gordon Drive Circle to the west, the principal vehicular access road for visitors arriving on campus. Two more entrances open to the Center’s south-facing courtyard and to the parking lots beyond.
Nesbitt Residence - Seaside, 2006
The design of this 2,700-square-foot oceanfront house in the influential New Urbanist planned town of Seaside, Florida, adheres to the town’s strict code requirements for its particular lot, yet is subtly unique. Its design combines the elegance of 1930s Swedish Classicism with the charming vernacular of turn-of-the-century wooden American seaside resort houses.
Nesbitt Residence - Seaside, 2006
The compact plan looks to the traditional urban townhouse model but employs a side entry through the garden. Children’s bedrooms are located at the garden level with the great room at the piano nobile, both with porches overlooking the ocean. The master bedroom suite, with sweeping vistas of both the town and the ocean, occupies the third level. The interior architecture continues the simplified wooden Classicism consistent the exterior design.
Nesbitt Residence - Seaside, 2006
The west facade, which faces the town, employs superimposed orders to create a public scale. The oceanside porches are organized with stacked orders of fluted and inscribed Greek columns in antis culminating in a trussed and trellised roof supported by a single Ionic column which gives the house an iconic identity from the beach. The siding at the lower level is rusticated wood meant to imitate stone, rising up to beveled clapboard at the upper levels which culminates in a batten copper roof and an open rafter eave embellished with decorative caps. The overall effect is a balance of naivete and sophistication.
Superior Ink condos and townhomes - New York City, 2009
The GrandMarc at Westberry Place - Fort Worth, 2005
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