Legendary architect Robert A.M. Stern on designing New York City's 'it' buildings, including one that's home to the most expensive home in America, and why he refuses to use a computer
- Robert A.M. Stern is one of New York City's most legendary architects.
- He designed 220 Central Park South, where hedge-fund billionaire Ken Griffin set a real estate record with his $238 million penthouse purchase in early 2019.
- Another one of his Manhattan buildings, 15 Central Park West, has been called "the world's most powerful address."
- Business Insider recently sat down with Stern to talk about what goes into designing an "it" building in NYC, the hallmarks of a Stern building, and why he refuses to use a computer.
- Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.
It's 10 a.m., and Robert A.M. Stern is reading the news - not on his cell phone or his computer, but a physical newspaper. In fact, Stern rarely uses his cell phone and never uses a computer.
He reads printed-out copies of his emails and handwrites responses, which his assistant then transcribes and sends. He even has his staff print out blog posts for him to read.
This strategy seems to have worked out well for Stern. Over his 55-year architecture career, the New York City native has designed some of the most prestigious buildings not only in Manhattan, but in cities like Philadelphia and Chicago, too. He's designed private residences in France and Singapore. At 80 years old, he's still the head of an award-winning firm of 265 architects and interior designers.
220 Central Park South, where hedge fund billionaire Ken Griffin spent $238 million last year in the most expensive real-estate purchase ever in the US? That's a Stern. Fifteen Central Park West, the building that's home to Wall Street CEOs and celebrities and has been called "the world's most powerful address"? That's a Stern. And 520 Park Avenue, where the duplex penthouse sold for $70 million to the guy who used to own the UFC? You guessed it: Stern is behind that one, too.
Earlier this year, Stern sat down for an interview with Business Insider. The following interview has been edited for length and clarity.
On designing New York City's "it" buildings - with limestone instead of glass
Katie Warren: You're known for designing these "it" buildings in New York like 15 Central Park West and now 220 Central Park South. Are you designing them with that intention?
Robert A.M. Stern: I think I was surprised. I think everybody was surprised by how successful the building was in the marketplace and remains in the marketplace. Some people have labeled it "The Limestone Jesus." It certainly set a new standard for apartment buildings in Manhattan and perhaps internationally in a way.
So those are many reasons why the building was successful. I think people thought it was beautiful. But surprisingly, it hasn't influenced certain developers who insist on building glass-skin buildings, which nobody seems to really like - except maybe some international buyers who want high-level glitz.
But even when we were designing 15 Central Park West, the question was, if you have a building that has punched windows in the facade as opposed to an all-glass skin, will you take advantage of the views?
So we made huge mockups in our office to convince our clients that in reality, the views were captured brilliantly. These windows are very large, but they are windows framed in limestone. We elected to build the building in limestone, having studied buildings around town that had the highest prestige: the Metropolitan Museum, the Empire State Building, but in particular residential buildings like 740 Park.
KW: So you wanted it to have the prestige of the old New York buildings, but with all the modern amenities.
RS: Yes, because the old apartments had, for example, a great many servants' rooms. People having servants was very common; not only very rich people, but even middle-class people had live-in help. It was a different world before the Second World War.
But now, people want family rooms. Even if they have domestic help, the help doesn't want to live in the apartment and they don't want the help living in the apartment. So there's a whole section of floors of apartments that owners in the building can buy and make available for their domestic help. Many people bought those apartments and use them for home offices - that's another radical change in the way people live. You have people who come from California, they go into their apartment, but they need a place to do some work, so they use these as offices.
15 Central Park West has a library. It has a screening room. It has children's play rooms. It has a health club beneath the building with a skylit swimming pool.
The surprising thing about the building is the press makes it seem like because the people are rich, that they have no family life. If you go there at four in the afternoon on a typical weekday, the swimming pool is filled with kids who have come home from school and are blowing off steam in the swimming pool and maybe taking some swimming lessons. It's very much a family building.
KW: Did you design 15 Central Park South with New Yorkers in mind? Who did you envision your residents to be?
RS: No one seems to ever be able to get that right, including the architects. When we designed the Chatham, the famous real-estate maven Louise Sunshine said, "It's all going to be filled up with foreigners." And I didn't think that was right. I said, "No, I think a lot of people are gonna buy these apartments who have houses in Westchester and Greenwich, who may keep those houses for weekends or whatever or may get rid of them, and they want to move into the city." They want to live in the city, but they want to live on a scale similar to their houses in the suburbs. And that turned out to be the case.
Also, a lot of people from California. I know everybody thinks California is the Golden State, but if you actually spend a lot of time in California, you want out. You want a place with convenient restaurants, with more action in general. And you don't necessarily want to be in a one-industry town, even if you're in that industry: entertainment.
On what makes a Stern building
KW: What are the hallmarks of a Stern building?
RS: First of all, you know it's a Stern building when you look at it from the outside. It's very important that buildings are designed - any building - with the public in mind.
After all, maybe there are 100 or 200 apartments in a building, but think of the thousands, maybe even millions of people who know the building from the outside.
So it's not only how it looks, which should be lively and add to the pleasure of the city, but also how it functions, how it fits the street, how we articulate the entrance.
At 220 [Central Park South] for example, and 15 [Central Park West], and even at 520 Park, the entrances are relatively modest scale, just a little bit bigger than a fancy townhouse. We try not to make it look like a hotel. But in the case of 15 and 220, we also have these courtyards, which came about having to do with the zoning and other factors. The courtyards become motor courts where you can drop people off. So that turns out to be a signature.
And the skyline. For a very long time, I've been critical of skyscraper design development in New York and elsewhere. It looked like you're cutting off the top of a soft-boiled egg. Everything was cut off at flat tops and very uninteresting. How a building meets the sky is extremely important.
KW: And I imagine some of the design elements - like the courtyard - also have to do with privacy for the residents.
RS: Well, that turned out to be a kind of wonderful byproduct. Again, it goes back to the Dakota, because at the Dakota, you drove in, they opened the gate, your carriage and horse came in and then you drove around the courtyard, and that's where you would be left off at your apartment.
That idea translates into the courtyard at 15 Central Park West and also the courtyard - which is not yet quite finished - at 220 Central Park South. It provides a level of security, and these days, let's face it, people are concerned about security.
In the old days before air conditioning, almost any decent apartment in New York had to have at least two exposures. It was called cross ventilation. So you could open the windows at one side and another and catch some kind of breeze. It means you can look in the morning at Central Park and in the evening see the sun setting over the Hudson or looking south, if you're in the end of the building, toward Times Square or towards the George Washington Bridge.
That's true of all of these buildings [we design]: multiple vistas. So it becomes more like a house. Because the kind of apartment that was being built for a very long time after the Second World War usually had windows only on one side. You get a bit of cabin fever in that kind of apartment.
KW: So you're designing these buildings years before people are going to move into them, right?
RS: If there's no economic hiccup, you need a good two years between the time your client comes in the door and says, 'Would you be interested in designing such and such?' and the time the construction begins.
We know that people will buy an apartment and then they may call in their own architects or their own decorators and make changes. The apartments are not sold as white boxes, but they are sold all ready to move in. So some people do move in as is. They're happy enough to put some furniture in, maybe hang a few paintings on the walls. By the way, all our apartments have wall space so you can hang art. Some of these glass buildings are so glassy and there's no place for art. You even see people with their television sets in front of the windows. It's horrible.
We've been very careful to make sure that our windows go as low to the floor as possible, because when you're on a high floor, you want to look down at the harbor or the skyline or the park. You don't want to have to go up to the window, you want to be able to sit on your sofa or whatever. If the window goes down to the floor, the view is more available.
On grandeur and the new rules of luxury
KW: I saw you speak at Bloomberg's luxury summit a couple of months ago and I thought it was interesting how you said that it's not a building's height that gives it its sense of grandeur. So, what are the factors that give a building a sense of grandeur?
RS: I would say that it's the luxury of the materials, a sense of detail, the proportions of the windows, the variety of the windows. Then, the elegance of the lobby. The lobby, if it's very elegant, it doesn't have to be very big. At 520 Park Avenue, the lobbies aren't very big, but the details of the materials are scrumptious. Luxury also means good facilities for people who are very interested in physical fitness - a swimming pool, an exercise room.
And then when you go into the apartment moldings that aren't three inches high, but proportioned to the room. High ceilings are very important. The eight-foot ceiling, which was standard when I was in architecture school, is totally a thing of the past.
The nine-foot ceiling is okay, the 10-foot is better, the 12-footer is better still, and in some cases we have 14-foot high ceilings.
Of course, if the ceiling is very high and the rooms aren't big, it's out of proportion. Proportion is a crucial element in design.
KW: You said you were partially inspired by the landscape roofs at Rockefeller Center. What are other buildings or areas of New York City that have inspired your work?
RS: Well, the apartment houses from the 1910s and '20s and early '30s before the depression put a kibosh - all inspiring.
KW: When you're looking at the New York skyline - I think you've made it pretty clear that you think a lot of those buildings south of the park, you think they're not very attractive.
RS: The new buildings. The older buildings like the Essex House or the - I can't think of the other wonderful hotel from the late '20s, early '30s on Central Park South - have marvelous skylines.
KW: So how do you think about fitting a building into the skyline?
RS: There are many things that control the design of the building that are not aesthetics that you need to turn to your advantage. Like zoning: How high can you go? And then the zoning tells you have to begin to set back and you can have percentages of the total floor area on the tops of the buildings. So the question is, what do you make of that?
KW: If you were redesigning the whole New York skyline, which has changed so much even just in the past five, 10 years with Hudson Yards and all those Central Park towers, how would it be different?
RS: Well, the skyline that existed when I was growing up was the skyline from the tens, '20s, and '30s. And it was a series of towers rising from base buildings that filled up their lots. Henry James described it as pins in a pin cushion. And each pin was different. They were very memorable. Then after the Second World War, from the '50s to the '80s, the architecture became like Chase Manhattan bank, which is a nice building but huge in scale, flat, slab-like, and absolutely flat at the top. It cut the variety. The pins suddenly got sheared off.
So coming with the opportunity to build in the 2000s and the late '90s, we're trying to recapture that kind of romantic skyline. That's all. It's a simple thing. We just don't want to do flat-top buildings.
And even when we have flat tops, like at 15 Central Park West - the lower building is relatively flat. We took the opportunity to make elevator overrides, a stair that needs to come up to allow maintenance work on the roof, to become like pavilions on the roof so that it becomes like a garden, not just like a roof.
On growing up in Brooklyn, living in the Upper East Side, and saying no to computers
KW: It's been reported that you live in the Chatham, is that right?
RS: That's right.
KW: Is there another neighborhood in the city where you would live right now?
RS: It's unfortunate on the Upper East Side that so many retail stores are disappearing and maybe a few more restaurants could come back to life. But I'm perfectly happy there. I know quite a few people who would love to live on the Upper East Side and have another place to live down in Tribeca and go there for the weekends.
I'm the kind of person who doesn't like to move anymore. I have a weekend house on Long Island and I go there in the summer. But I enjoy the different neighborhoods. And I used to live in 25 Central Park West, the first of the twin tower buildings. But the neighborhood was nothing like it is now. Columbus Circle was a disaster and the West Side was just clawing its way back to respectability then.
And I lived at Central Park West and 70th street in a building - number 101 - a wonderful building, filled the whole block, but it didn't have towers, it was just a block-like building. So I've lived in different parts of town, and I grew up in Brooklyn. I never go back, but Brooklyn, I probably wouldn't recognize it. We are working in Brooklyn, but not exactly where I grew up.
KW: What part did you grow up in?
RS: Well, when I grew up, we thought we lived in Flatbush. But the post office was called Kensington. So it turns out we might have lived in Kensington. But then I see the real estate ads in the Sunday Times section, and I might have grown up in Lower Windsor Terrace.
KW: I hear you don't use a computer. Is that right?
RS: That's right. Everybody else uses the computer. I try to get people who are designers in the office to actually use the computer as little as possible, to draw.
We get new employees, some of them coming out of places like Columbia, I'm sad to say, which doesn't seem to put any emphasis on drawing. So we're now starting a class to teach people to do hand drawing. When I was a Dean at Yale, I put a tremendous amount of emphasis on hand drawing and people were very generous to fund classes in perpetuity and a month in Rome for all the second-year students, where the requirement is: draw.
KW: So what do you think is the advantage?
RS: When you draw, first of all it's a physical act. It's very boring to draw a grid endlessly. So you want to draw curving shapes of moldings or whatever. You are connecting your hand to your eye and, one hopes, to your brain. In the computer, you're always trapped by some program that has been developed by some software engineer. We do have people in the office who can use the computer brilliantly even to draw classical architecture when they want, but hand drawings are better.
A traditional classical sculptor would model in clay and then eventually turn it into stone or bronze or whatever. Michelangelo didn't work on a computer. Seemed to get the job done. The computer has great advantages. Later this morning I'm going to do a virtual reality look at a project we're working on. We do use it, and it's exciting. And you do see things that you can't see in drawings, even computer drawings, but the sketch, the hand drawing, handmade model are the heart of our work.
A day in the life: Meetings, printed-out emails, and sandwiches from Pret a Manger
KW: Could you walk me through a typical day in your life?
RS: The alarm goes off at seven, but I kind of manage to dawdle around. I used to bolt up out of bed, but I'm getting old. But I get up at seven, I get to the office roughly 9:30, having had breakfast at my own: cereal, yogurt, blueberries, and orange juice. And then I read the emails because I have a cell phone but I never use it, never turn it on really. I use it to call people if I have to.
KW: So do you read your emails on your phone?
RS: No, they're all printed out.
If I have to answer one, I handwrite it out and my assistant types it up and shows it to me because I hate to send them out with typos. Most emails are filled with typos because people don't take the trouble to reread. I'm not that kind of person. So I get it printed out, I might edit it, so forth.
And then a succession of meetings begin. I'm working on a book with our research department. Then I'm doing virtual reality for a project I can't tell you about. And then we're working on a master plan for a resort in Turkey facing the Aegean [Sea]. Then I have lunch usually at my desk: a sandwich from Pret a Manger and half a cookie.
And then I often take a nap.
I also read at lunch: journals, contemporary journals and all the blogs that have to do with the real estate world and the architecture world that we get. They're all printed out. And we distribute them to people in the office. People are inundated by email and they don't look at their email. It's a problem. Then I'm meeting with some people who are organizing our effort to recruit upcoming graduates from the architecture school at Yale. And then I have a meeting about Hudson Yards. Then I go home.
On Hudson Yards, NYC's $25 billion neighborhood
KW: So, what are your thoughts on Hudson Yards?
RS: We are going to build a building in the West Yards. When we were first asked if we would work there, it was going to be a residential building, but now it's being planned as an office building.
KW: Can you tell me about the building?
RS: We're still working on massing and floor plans. In office buildings, there are lots of people who come in at the request of the developer, because you're marketing to different corporations and there has been a dramatic change in what corporate tenants want. They never used to want big old floor plans. Now they want big open floor plans, but now there's a reaction against them. People are kind of fed up with the WeWork look or the Bloomberg look.
It's a total headache. Our clients, Related, are trying desperately to anticipate what the market will be like five years from now. It's hard. In apartments, maybe people want three-bedroom apartments, maybe they want two-bedroom apartments and this and that, but they still want bathrooms and kitchens and whatever. And there are many rules that control the disposition of space in a residential building.
But an office building is just neutral floors. Now people want terraces in offices. We have a terrace one floor below. We use our terrace as soon as the weather gets nice, if we have a lecture or a presentation afterwards, we go out and have drinks on the terrace. It's nice.
KW: What do you think Hudson Yards is going to be like in five years?
RS: It'll take time until it finds its own. It's beginning to find its own genius. It's a dramatic change, but I don't know how to predict it in the future. But I can say this: it has changed the map of Manhattan. There are now kind of three major centers, lower Manhattan, Midtown, and Hudson Yards. And that's pretty impressive.
People are moving in - big companies, lawyers, abandoning Park Avenue. But then other companies, like JP Morgan, tearing down the largest building ever torn down and building a bigger building on Park Avenue. I mean, let's face it, Hudson Yards is at the edge. The number seven [train] is its lifeline, whereas at this office, people jump on the subway, they get to Grand Central in eight minutes.
KW: Right. Hudson Yards still isn't quite that convenient.
RS: They are trying to figure it out ... If you read the press, you seem to think that Steve Ross is sitting there and moving the chess people around with nobody watching. Oh no. The rules that the city has imposed on Hudson Yards are very stringent and restrictive. So it's complicated. And building over train yards and having the trains never miss a beat. Wow.