Robert A.M. Stern, Architect (1939 - 2025)

[NYguy]

Sad news indeed. His work will live on.


https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/27/arts/design/robert-am-stern-dead.html

Robert A.M. Stern, Architect Who Reinvented Prewar Splendor, Dies at 86
He designed museums, schools and libraries before winning international acclaim late in life for 15 Central Park West in Manhattan, hailed as a rebirth of the luxury apartment building.


By Robert D. McFadden
Nov. 27, 2025

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.”

[Busy Bee]

One of these shoykd be merged. I started a thread earlier. It's in city discussions.