2016 DeeDee and Herb Glimcher Lecture | Architect Robert A. M. Stern & Paul Goldberger

good evening everyone welcome to the Wexner Center for the Arts on one of our very distinguished evenings each year so when we first approached Robert Stern some eighteen months ago about presenting the urban DD glimmer lecture he was in the midst of planning celebrations for the 100th anniversary of the Yale University architecture school and naturally found it kind of difficult to commit to a date we had to relent but here we are nothing if not patient and sort of nothing if not tenacious and that persistence has now been rewarded to our great delight so for those of you who have followed the glimmer lecture over the years you've probably come to expect a somewhat different generation of architects to take the podium names like Thom Mayne Liz Diller Steven Holl David oj or the late Saha Hadid but tonight we chose to celebrate the remarkable career of a true eminence grise of the profession one whose career spans 50 years of prolific architectural thought writing teaching and practice Robert AM Stern was seemingly born to build his fascination with architecture and urban design emerged apparently very early on when as a kid he would be shuttled on the F train from Brooklyn into New York City and always insisted that he stand at the front of the car so he could see the skyline emerge when they came out from the tunnel and I think it's fair to say that there is no architect on the planet no other living architect certainly that has altered that streetscape as much as Robert Stern having received his master's degree in architecture in 1965 he emerged on the scene at a seminal moment if his peers we're not necessarily always his compatriots but they included the likes of Michael Graves frank gehry Richard Meier Peter Eisenman Jacqueline Robertson and Charles Moore it was a heady time of fiercely contested design principles and sometimes shifting allegiances but then as now Robert Stern possessed the courage of his convictions as someone who's not afraid to admit that he loves limestone and by the way maybe the most masterful manipulator of that material someone who unabashedly admires the great buildings of an earlier era in New York think McKim Mead and white but not slavish Lee so and someone who looks at the past not with longing or nostalgia but with a determination to remix the best attributes for the present day and therein one might say lies the crux of what once led New York Magazine to refer to Bob Stern as unfashionably fashionable that article goes on to note that rather than indulging in all manner of gimmickry Stern beguiles with details subtle moves that quote accumulate into a patina of understated opulence which tends to make him a target for everything from quiet condescension to withering critique especially in certain academic circles but in others he is revered as Dean of Yale School of Architecture for nearly 20 years he not only rejuvenated the school but led it to the pinnacle of respect and renown among its peers nationally and internationally Yale's trustees senior leaders faculty and students rarely a united front all universally agree and gratefully acknowledge that Stern made a profound impact there and don't imagine that his legacy will be limited to pedagogy and fundraising impressive as those have both been the incoming Yale class of 2020 one will be accommodated in two brand-new residential colleges the first created in over sixty years and in some ways the single most expansive project that that college has ever undertaken as well as its most expensive that complex will be designed by none other than Robert AM Stern let me also add that when I contacted my colleagues here at the Knowlton school to tell them that we had secured a date they were absolutely ecstatic but whether ardent admirer or outspoken detractor everyone in the field agrees on two things Robert Stern stands among the most knowledgeable practicing architects in the field with an almost encyclopedic command of the history of architecture particularly American architecture and Robert Stern is the architect who used that knowledge to save Times Square not many of you may know the story but you should last year a record 59 million tourists flock to Times Square as their starting destination in New York attracted to its glittering larger-than-life signage and all of the activity all of the the combustion of that place but a visitor who may have arrived there 30 se years before would have found a very dismal experience indeed it had become really a shameful embarrassment to the city but when the 19 when in 1992 the city put in place the 42nd Street Development Corporation to study that spot and to transform it who did they hire but Robert AM Stern and I suspect that the city will be ever in his debt while he could have held the stage solo this evening he pervert preferred a conversational format and I immediately thought of Paul Goldberger as the ideal interlocutor Goldberger of course has a long and distinguished career as an architectural critic some 30 years at the New York Times partially overlapping a 15 year stent at the New Yorker and now as a contributing editor for Vanity Fair I've known Paul and followed his work for a very long time I think we first met gosh decades ago in Frank Gehry's office while we were both wandering around and of course among his many insightful books over the year is a brand new biography of Frank entitled building art the life and work of Frank Gehry and as it turns out Paul just recently moderated a discussion among Robert Stern and his partners for a new book entitled city living which covers fifteen different projects completed in New York as well as another similar number of works currently underway Paul clearly takes an ecumenical and erudite approach to the field he is among the few critics I know that on the one hand can be talking with Robert AM Stern on the other with Frank Gehry and give both their due I know he can toggle back and forth relatively easily between the rival camps of neo-traditionalist and radical iconic class it's among our pleasure to bring figures of this stature and this accomplishment to the Wexner Center year in and year out we are so grateful to DeeDee and herb glimpse for underwriting this endowed lecture series and with great appreciation to them and to my team at the Wexner Center and the Knowlton school please join me now in a warm welcome for Robert AM Stern and Paul Goldberger wonderful thank you lovely thank you Thank You Shari that I think that was the best part of the evening well it was reduction thank you very much sure you could not could not have been nicer thank you all for being here and Bob thank thank you we're going to start by just talking in general for a few minutes and then in a little while we will switch back to slides and move more towards some of your buildings and give you a chance to talk somewhat about more specific buildings but let me let me ask you first some more general general things it was an interesting piece that just appeared in the Columbia College magazine about you that refers to our quote you is referring to architecture or defining architecture as the Janice faced arch looking both backwards and forwards yet as sherry reminded us you've chosen in your own work to look primarily backwards and that forwards can we talk a little bit about that and about the decision to make history the sort of guiding principle of your work well when you say I look backwards you make it sound like I want to go backwards okay I I don't I don't make it sound like that you you explain please I I think not that I want to compare myself to Picasso a quite but artists like Picasso in another related field often went to look at work from the past to refresh themselves and particularly if they finished a certain phase in their work and felt datings mind that direction they wanted to go somewhere else I think that architecture as historically practiced has always looked backwards for inspiration for rules and discipline we live in an undisciplined error in many arts including architecture and painting and sculpture I would say but some are of us in those fields do respect the discipline that was evolved over a long period of time especially over period from a period before the digital age before machines and so forth when things had in the architecture world had to be built and had to one-column I say this is the Wexner Center but I know haha when I won one law it with 20 columns come down to the ground I rose up from the ground so I I think we or matsa took I think one goes backwards to study to learn what brings things from the past to go forward and I have no problem with that and I many of my colleagues of sherry mentioned them and I'm pretty good friends with quite a few of them but they spend all their time trying to be ahead of each other I'm just they're happy to be in the rear view mirror coming along doing buildings that I think set the stage for the next step and the next step they can try to break the mold I want to keep the mold shape it and reshape it and refine it where does that position let's say for that point how does that jibe with the urbanistic question of background versus foreground do you see yourself as a maker of background buildings more than foreground buildings or is that not even a valid distinction oh I think the distinction and between background buildings and foreground buildings is extremely important Paul Rudolph my teacher said that modern architecture could not modern architecture could were incapable of making good background buildings and he would point to the researches of a Camillo citta with Austrian theorists city planner pointed out of the something like 500 churches in Rome I'm making up the number but something like 450 had only one or two at the most three sides visible and they were embedded into the wall or the fabric of the city so most buildings should be background bill now that doesn't mean a library or some other civic building shouldn't be a foreground building but even a foreground building should orchestrate and intensify its setting not throw a pot of paint at the setting as a to mix my metaphors really going badly tonight but Ruskin in a metaphor or whatever and so I do lots of foreground buildings with pleasure and my welcome to do more if asked but I think it's very important to make the contribution to the city but the city is not and of course my references cities like New York or London Columbus is in a different stage of evolution beginning maybe to become more urbanized than it has been for a long time but a city is made up of streets and the buildings along the streets can each be very quite different but they have to share characteristics and the attitude of a building to the public way to the street is very important in a building that just says me to is not very good my way of thinking as a city building Louis Hockey said Khan once said us the street is a room by agreement right which I always thought was a wonderful and very poetic way to put that point by by agreement of Architects by agreement of generations communicating with each other in my generation of architects not necessarily Peter Eisenman but definitely say Jack Robertson is a little out of the coin or alan greenberg or tom Beebe we came on the scene at a moment when modernist architecture the glass box and its variants were dominant nobody could imagine any other kind of building really to speak of Mies van der Rohe was in charge of the world architectural speaking and his firm of Skidmore Owings and Merrill which we would call three blind Mies we're everywhere right but we looked around and we realized that architectures were complex as Richard and it's a narrative art you tell stories about things what does it mean to build for a certain institution or not so I have quarrels there's no doubt about it with a lot of stuff built by my friends I mean they certainly have quarrels with me but my quarrels are often the buildings are about the architects and not about the places they're built or even the activities that take place in them and we see many museums for example where the art fights the building I'm on the side of the art you know that's a that's a common trope would say about museum architecture but let's pick up on that for a moment I mean first is there such a thing as true neutrality it seems to me as if a white box is an aesthetic statement of its own of a certain sort no no what I'm not interested in true neutrality I don't know cats on Sunday I was a beautiful day like you have every day in Columbus but we get along and in New York I decided I would pay a visit to the Metropolitan Museum which had a couple of new exhibitions which I was anxious to see and then to go to met Breuer which is the Oh Whitney I've met the Medus taken over and in in the met broiler I mean the building is gloomy it was gloomy I was there the day it opened I still think it's a gloomy building I think the art looks horrible in the building and most people look kind of horrible and gloomy in the building what else can I say they did a beautiful job restoring gloom that would argue them it's gloomy ER than ever crowd it is almost but the Metropolitan Museum and I'm sure all of you have visited it some time or other the art student Chicago and a few other museums of great size I'm referring to but you go in and rooms are different the building itself has a civic presence on the street or in the edge of the park and the Mets and the Mets case and then you go in and they the Greek art is in a room in rooms that bespeak the art of Greece and room and then when they had they used to show the impressionist art in a kind of white box it was like a shoebox right I think they realized that the art was being robbed of context of richness and great art can stand up to appropriate architecture but I'm not in favor of the white box at all okay so you're what about while we're on a roll about other museums what about the Guggenheim it's a great building not such a great museum people go there because of the building and even returned someone like me I just like to go in there from time to time some art works very well right in the Guggenheim a lot of art doesn't work so well it swamps the art so it's an eccentric building it opened up the game that we seem to be very much still at playing of art museums as self referential temples of ego mm-hmm have I gone too far well we were with Bob we want you you you were invited here to go to far right I'm going to be loved but well let's stay with that for a moment because I think if there's a common thread between your observation about the Guggenheim and what you said about the Metropolitan it's that in fact not all artworks no one building is right for everything and in fact there needs to be some relationship between the container and the thing contained let's say the art the art and it's being displayed in the building that it's being displayed in well the Guggenheim is an interesting case not so much along the lines here trying to get me to sink myself into but Frank Lloyd Wright actually wanted to get him to be in a park and he saw it as an object building right right and that is one of the great problems say the Metropolitan Museum of Art is now and building it's a long facade by a number of architects and then they've added around it and it has an object side from the park but on Fifth Avenue it's a great City facade and it's a civic building so why why must mediums be object buildings well I can't they engage into the fabric of the city and anyhow I just am interested in the city I'm interested in the street I'm interested in the relationship of buildings to streets and I'm interested in buildings that you can stand in front of and read where they came from where they cite them in situate them in the present and imagined in the future one of the problems with imagining buildings for the future is thinking about how you add on to them that's another problem with the object building the Guggenheim is very difficult to add on to his Charles quad right or discovered with dismay dismayed the brewer Museum cannot be added on to the two major architects tried three three three truck each failed some of it was political but a lot of it was just the sheer objects obduracy of the building so you know my feeling for the Whitney or the met brewer was that what they really should have done was hire you or alan greenberg or someone else to build to the south a sort of colonnaded row of traditional houses and then in a few years people would have said what a shame they tore down the north end to build that building actually funny you say that when I was teaching at Columbia long in my early middle period or whatever right I assigned the Whitney as a project because I knew a lot about I'd done the Whitney as my thesis in school but the Whitney was expanding and a student who actually comes from Cleveland so it's pretty close to him and Richard I can't think of his last name I'm horribly embarrassed anyhow he did this scheme saying that you should add a classical building to the Whitney and it had great volumes and so forth and Arthur Drexler I'd been invited him to be on the jury he was so smitten with design he put it in the seems collection oh wow so I mean there was already in the early 80s a sense that the way to go forward was the way to go via going back we've lost too much not everybody would agree but some would I mean look at this building the lexer building the center I mean after all Peter rebuilt a portion or an interpretation of the building that was torn down why did he do that some inner psyche part of his psyche said he need to connect well maybe somebody told him to do it I don't know I don't know how well it was at the time that post-modernism was still sort of on the ascent and I think that was in a way Peters somewhat contrary an interpretation of the postmodern impulse I think he called me up and told me I'd like it ah and was he right no comment okay not my favorite building as Jeff Kipnis who's I think in the audience know right right right let's talk about post-modernism in fact I mean it you were very early and active in that movement and it seemed to be born out of a desire to forge some kind of synthesis between historical form and different and invented form for one of a better term and your work early on seemed very influenced by Robert venturi there was Michael Graves his own Direction somewhat different and then after a few years it sort of petered out a bit and you your work became more literally traditional others seem to go in a somewhat different direction from it and now we're in the odd position of having more glass boxes than ever it is amazing isn't it it is amazing to think that sort of what was post-modernism all about and what as its historical impact and meaning given all that when I think post-modernism is two different things the theorem is do you applied to two different things one in in architectural stylistic terms it was as Paul described a a recap Turing of forms from the past sometimes it got a bit out of control bit jokey a bit right maybe too playful but then architecture could use a little bit of plate smiles and play every now and again takes itself very seriously but post-modernism is really an important is the defining philosophical movement of the last third of the 20th century and it exists in literature it exists in music and painting and virtually every philosophical and creative discipline it has to do with recognition in the very simplest level that there is no single stream of ideas at any moment we're not living in the Middle Ages where the church was dominant in the society and everything else ascribed to a doctrine of singularity and that and it goes beyond that but suppose we are still in a pure postmodern period and the fact that a Frank Gehry who might like is a person and I do actually like quite a few of his buildings and his museums do work better than many others and they're often given credit for I agree right but I think that you know Frank can do one thing and then if you need some lab returned a frank flying in space and then if he has to do a concert hall for a struggling Symphony in Miami just a very simple box that that ability to design each project on its own terms and do what is at least the architect and the client and maybe the civic group think is appropriate as opposed to just ramming something down this is the style of the moment we all must adhere to it is a postmodern gesture so we are in a period of post-modernism when I go back to teaching it Yale and for I think I'm going to give a seminar it's going to be more work for me and I don't know if any students will take it but I'll take the risk what was and what is postmodernist I think young architecture students are suddenly extremely interested which if you know in any discipline a generation of about 3035 years they want to know the new the new new thing but the new new thing they say oh my god it's the old thing just come back right right right everything old is new again everything old is new again anyhow post-modernism the style probably has run its course I think Paul described quite rightly some of us said let's not play with the past let's really learn about the past and in order to work in the languages of the past now I speak as a schoolmarm you have to learn how to do that architects up until 1950 who disciplined on how to draw columns ornament maybe too much emphasis was put on ink washes and things like that but they knew how big things were and how mouldings took the light and why if you did it one way or another would react differently how to compose a building the word composition is dropped out of architecture as though it was kind of cardinal sin that has symmetry asymmetry balance and so forth so I you know we've tried to reintroduce it at Yale other architects are trying to do it but we have as a generation my generation had to teach to ourselves we are in that sense autodidact and how do you learn by looking at buildings you made a reference a moment ago to the sort of what I guess we could call the tectonic nature of architecture the fact that at the end of the day it is about the real physical object how much are we in danger of losing that in in a digital age when so much experience is virtual when also so much designing is done now through digital means and not on paper is there an equivalency between the physical act of drawing with a pencil on tracing paper and the real physicality of a building as opposed to the digital world of designing through CAD and so forth well that you have a bundle there bundle of questing bundle but they all have certain lists start about drawing please I'm feel free to unbundle I think many psychologists and people who deal with brains and the mind will agree that the connection between a drawing a mental print of perception and what you see is fundamental to the creative act not only for artists but for people who write for people who make notations so I think you know Frank Gehry for example this many people think of him as mr. digital hardly knows how to work a computer that's correct yeah he draws and these drawings are little wacko sketches and many more models right and you build up a cesky makes a very important distinction between the computer as an act of creation and the computer is an act of execution the computer is a great tool and it helps a great deal in in the production of drawings for buildings and it is going it is already making possible traditional forms of buildings unimaginable because you can now quarry stone in Indiana ship it to Canada where they're more sophisticated and put it on precast panels which have all been designed meticulously the stone has been carved digitally based on hand sketches by people and then you ship it to New Haven and you have two new Gothic colleges they're gothic they're brick and stone and and so forth so it's it makes possible things that people said 30 years ago we're no longer possible but I believe we have to as a society be very wary about the computer and a digitalization robotics because this is a problem people don't have jobs and if the robots are doing all this stuff what are people going to do so we need trained people who want to be trade and how to make things how to carve how to draw how to assemble things if you go to the Albert show you see Meiji a furniture he designed it he made his own furniture as I believed it I can't think the architects name but it's he's in the in the show next door Lauren okay Lars Coker right so um you know the computer is here to stay I'm a little scared about when it's driving the car I'm in or somebody else in but worried about maybe but I do believe I'm not afraid of the computer but I don't think it's a substitute for the way art is made and indeed how come in the world of galleries in Chelsea or here in if the waxer Center you don't see very much computer are on the wall right it's not very interesting right painters are still painting they're still drawing from life got why I'm fascinated by what you said about the creation of those new colleges at Yale in a way it's not unlike Frank Gehry making a facade that is full of a thousand different kinds of pieces that could only be assembled digitally even though they look very different and they may represent different ideas they actually emerge through a similar process well many people in the room probably don't know the tradition of gothic buildings at Yale goes back to building in the 19th century right and the buildings were built in the more or less traditional way like some of your buildings here around the oval at Ohio State but by the time the 1920s Yale expanded enormously and built these so-called residential colleges they built them in the Gothic style but largely because they thought they connecting to Oxford and Cambridge and the monastic tradition would elevate the students past the banality z' of football weekends and things like that they were in part correct only imparted in part but people lamb Lampoon the architect James gamble Rogers who designed many of them because they were steel framed buildings with concrete slabs he didn't he wasn't against modern know what he wanted to make modern buildings yes uh and and those buildings are the ones that you know everybody cherishes or so our buildings to new residential colleges nine hundred students that's a lot of students arc are in that tradition and how did we get to that tradition I never drew a gothic building in my life we we my myself my partners many people in the room in the office we measured we walked we studied we read stuff by paul goldberger and others proposed one of the first people to say James gamble Rogers is serious art yes so so everything is possible if you don't have horse blinders as an architect the problem with modernism was it imposed those kinds of horse blinders that this is what modern architecture is going to be about and the vocabulary as Paul Rudolph my teacher said ran from quoting a comment on Katharine Hepburn's actor acting abilities that a critic in may the modern architectures vocabulary runs from A to B right right that's right enough set right right and whereas it is amazing to think that at the end of the day the least important thing about the James gamble Rogers buildings was the style itself I mean it was really about proportion and scale and being a modernist the style is very important but but well let me say what made him really good it was a student coming out of some high school somewhere in America who's been in some building that looks like it's been designed like a reformatory for kids and they go to a place like Yale and my god they connect with a thousand-year tradition of architecture and the monastic tradition the scholastic tradition all of that's involved it's how the buildings look how they perform as well as other thing it did it for me when I went to Yale excited about the modern buildings and then I fell in love with these gothic buildings that you weren't supposed to like if you were serious about architecture and I kept trying to come to terms with why were they giving me such pleasure then I mean was this something dirty like sex that you weren't supposed to like all this traditional architecture well the pleasure principle in architecture is almost never discussed yeah aesthetics these days is hardly ever discussed in public and probably not even in private there are all kinds of other issues that are constantly being paraded out but architecture is an art it should make beautiful things and beautiful things connect I mean the the painter john curran who's quite well known when he graduated the Yale School of Art of course that's why I mentioned him but he paints in a way that is figural everybody said figural art is dead well that's ridiculous the humans of being is subject of very interesting endlessly interesting to each of us that's why we go to we go to the standard hotel so we can look out the window or we grow standard to standard hotel look at the are people in the window near the Whitney downtown anyhow I just think I grew into architecture at a time when everybody told me not me personally but us you can't do that you can't do this it's not done it's not modern baloney mmm everything is possible if you do it with passion intelligence quality discipline that's the things you measure work of a work of art the notion that there is a style for the time is probably the most fraudulent of all concepts I suppose and after all if if one might argue that if Gothic is is wrong today how could it have been acceptable when James gamble Rodgers did it it's not as though 1920 was all that much closer to the Middle Ages it's another yeah I mean what is what is another 75 years mean when you're talking a thousand so it's either it was either not valid at all after you know 1100 or 1200 or it's valid in both times it seems to me well I think it was a great expression of passion and an art in the Middle Ages and it survived in a weakened way as the classical revival of what we call the Renaissance tradition about it by the 19th century it was very much back in full bear as a as a antidote or a compliment but I mean the idea of buildings a style for the time nobody nothing looks more dated than a 1980s dress or suit nobody wants to wear hip hugger pants anymore so okay fashion you throw it out or you put it in the back of your closet and you revive it later or you give it to the Costume Institute or whatever but buildings can't be just for the moment they're for hundred years maybe a thousand years so you have to build buildings think about the big tradition again I quote my teachers I believe in education and if you have great teachers which I was lucky to have Philip Johnson what came to Yale went to the chalkboard they had them we still have them and he wrote on the board you cannot not know history and this was Ron Johnson who brought the international style to America it studied under Gropius and was a passionate advocate for Mises architecture he realized it was a dead end had to no go back to go forward so that's where I am I'm still going forward Paul we start Lee you're not going to put me back in the back I'm not trying to but I do want you to tell me a little bit more about the pleasure principle and what it means in architecture since it's you who brought in that phrase well when I look at certain buildings by some of my colleagues and I see jangling shapes going this way and that way for no visually apparent reason to me and I see a rampant use of materials that are best suited for foundations and highway abutments I can't imagine what building that you saw this afternoon might be prompting those thoughts actually and I see ramps that look like they were from the LA freeway as opposed to an easy way to get from place to place and just simply agonize the journey I'm not getting much pleasure out of that when I see other buildings with beautiful brickwork or stone work beautifully laid up beautiful joints carefully compose facade great around arch like you have a remnant Romanesque building um oval wonderful roof lies how buildings meet the sky everything jumps of shape it gives me pleasure gives a lot of people pleasure if it didn't everybody would try to live in houses made out of reinforced concrete with ramps going this way in that money come home well wait a minute I'll drive up the ramp and you'll get there I mean it's not that hard to do a nice building you really have to work at it to make a really bad building mm-hmm let let let's talk before we go onto slides for one moment about that Romanesque building on the oval that building I agree with you it's a wonderful building and brings forth all the positive and pleasant associations you mentioned but it certainly does say 1880s to me it's not as though it's not marked by its time in a very clear way every building I would say speaks of its moment but if it only speaks of its moment then when that moment passes what have you got whereas those Romanesque Revival buildings in the Richard Sounion tradition of the late 19th century when HH Richardson reaches maturity didn't live to be more than 48 years old rising what he accomplished and he influenced a whole generation of architect but when he got to his maturity he went back to Europe where he studied at the occult a Mozart and he went to the South of France and the north of Spain only to look at Romanesque buildings and he bought postcards which was the easiest way to well in bringing all that was not going to shoot with his smartphone you know oh yeah exactly i and so those that building has a memory and it has its place in its time and that's fine even this building on the outside you you can look at the mercial an auditorium you say well it's a kind of late gasp of the Art Deco it's probably 1948 if I put anything on it but I don't really know so he get it connects but it but a lot of the buildings we have are only of the moment and consequently maybe not so interesting at when the moments over time will fill and yet also things often fall very dramatically out of favor and come back I mean look at our deco from the 30s look at Victorian architecture from England I think you always want to get rid of Grandma's architecture right you actually want to get rid of Grandma when you're young he has bad breath she's always telling you what to have nice table manners she does all those terrible things then if you're lucky enough and grandma lives long enough and you come to your own senses you realize grandma had wonderful things to contribute and we need to appreciate grandma and that's the way of the world but and I Paul has been very involved in preservation certainly and so if I and protecting grandma from her grandchildren is really a full-time job rush I think Sir John Summerson one throat that I I think all architecture has to die before it touches the historical imagination with another I think we have to sort of hate it before we come back and really exact accept it for the long term but not to beat this horse deader than I've been be together than grandma already is but the typical corporate building of the 50s and still being built in one form or another is a clip on architecture so you build a steel frame or a concrete frame and then you have a curtain wall of typically of glass but sometimes on the front you can unbolt that damn thing and put something else up I've done glass buildings and if it won't happen to me but for my buildings but I think that if you build them in a more complex way with materials and integrated systems like leucon you can't tear down a leucon do not easily no not you thankfully no weights mine no one's run well we don't know good never know what's going on let's look at a couple of images and talk a little bit about a few of your interesting and unusual projects here's a building that was not built this was your proposal for the Chicago Tribune late entries competition that that was away in the early days when you're a young architect quite right way I would argue and I would support any young architecture school here or wherever you want to make a lot of noise write yourself out there and wonderful opportunities do come up people architects and design competitions that's often very expensive painful way to make some noise if you're lucky but Stanley Tiger Minh and a few architects in Chicago to celebrate I guess it was the 60th anniversary of the Chicago Tribune Company yeah so famous the first competition international might have actually even been the 50th it was 24 so 22 2012 well maybe 60th yes ever okay so I thought well there was a famous scheme for the competition which was never given a prize but it was designed by the famous Viennese architect Adolph Lowe's and he was one of the only Europeans who had actually ever been to America and moreover he had worked in Chicago so he knew what a newspaper was and he knew that newspapers had colonists so he designed a column classical gum and there's an argument that it was a joke but I don't think I've used totally serious and it's a very interestingly and well worked out building so I thought well what not my homage to Lowe's using glass by the way and showing that glass instead of being this neutral surface that nice and in Chicago advocated having no material without qualities in a way we would use colored glass which was becoming very popular but impossible and that way that was our scheme and it's a provocation that's all good of course I'd be prepared to behind it here's what some of those ideas have matured into in a real building you've just finished in lower Manhattan just we just inaugurated this building which is a Four Seasons Hotel and luxury condominiums above it's a free-standing Tower banter of the image should you there be any doubt here yeah I hope there was never but it's right next to the World Trade Center site and it was built by developed by Davari silverstein whose name you may know from reading about the efforts to rebuild the Sun Trade Center he's been a kind of hero but also very successful here I've financial has success anyhow this was my the closest I've come yet to pay homage to those buildings with sherry said I could see out the front window of the subway going into the skyline of Manhattan and I should point out I mean I was born in 1939 just before the Second World War nothing had happened in New York of any consequence architectural from 1929 until like the late 1950s pression quicker cailed all construction and then the Second World War and it took a while for the city to get its mojo up again so the skyline of the city of my youth when I was 10 12 14 years at age was the skyline of the 1920s there were no big fat stupid flat buildings all of which should deserve to be taken down realated they ruined the great orchestration of manmade towers which lower Manhattan was so I'm trying and some other architects as well in the Woolworth Building which is our next-door neighbors being restored at great cost we're trying to reappraise by preservation but preservation is enough isn't enough you have to take what you admire and make more of it here's something else from your early years a house that's still there and on Park Avenue right it's the same sentiment at work in a way but you to make a building that was part of the wall of the street it was an anomalous sight at a wonderful client you it was a townhouse here but it tore my stove it down it wasn't very distinguished maybe the history might say this wasn't so distinguished but it's protected by landmark so it'll be here forever but to make to show you could make a kind of classical composition an implied pediment but I was very timid I was scared as an architect to do this I mean what would what would my teachers think some of them what would surge jamya say you hated me for destroying modern architecture Walter Gropius was just cool in the grave I mean so but this was young noble I don't know way they're up last pilasters on the side there's a strong symmetrical organization to the building there's the two doors you don't know where the front door is and of course I was thinking of the corbusier's Villa wrodar I'm right no it's Dinoco yeah so there are many memories of this inside there's a kind of free-flying I don't know what of the slide you picked of it free-flowing interior which regrettably doesn't exist anymore because it was a fire inside the house and it's not there good here's another house from I guess a little bit later in New Jersey yes but this is a pool swimming pool added on to a georgian house very kind of dull but impressed but substantial house and this is an indoor swimming pool and there they are northern new jersey where the weather isn't like Columbus Ohio it's cold and nasty and and they wanted an indoor swimming well most indoor swimming pools are horrible places they reek of chlorine they have no charm so I thought I would actually saw an interior by Hans whole line in Austria and he'd had columns to get people to go to Israel was it imagined Israel tourism in the center of Vienna and you get a kind of sense of what was going on and I said Wow we'll make an oasis there and many other materials are used and so forth but it's a pleasure palace it don't go in there and it's fun it's not for torture there's a it's interesting that there really aside should be fun and if it isn't fun don't exercise I don't actually really is a theme of sensuous pleasure and that brings a lot of this to here's one of my favorite houses actually because I think I put this on the cover of a book once regrettably gone not the book the house not the book the book is still available basically the books out of print too so it's all it's all I had to tears but you had to tear it down yeah it was was a wonderful commissioned a little house right on the dunes facing the Atlantic Ocean for a guy just gotten a divorce and he said I'm never going to get married again the first time was the worst time I've ever had my life so we built this little house and I was a student of instance skully's and the book of the shingle style was one of the most important art historical texts of the second half of the 20th century certain America and so I this was my maybe my first best shingle style house why did we tear it down well for one thing it was an object building and the guy got married and he called me up and said I want to add on to your house I said Tom you told me you were not gonna get back you promised and adding on to it which is like having a thing sticking I couldn't do it but the rising sandy tide and although it became dangerous that be changer so we built a new house and four new owners pulled back from the water we sat here at around oh isn't and we're moving out of postmodernism but clearly not yet oh no sir these are the oldies but goodies this is like watching something on public television yeah as you visit it this is it we're watching the Turner Classic Movies all right that is our group no alive yes right do you really want to see them what they look like aged 65 when you remember them when they were 30 or 25 okay Elena it's fun in her classic movies time this is Ellie but this goes to the point of what was in my view the problem with modernism corporate modernism this is an office building speculative office building for the great developer Gerald Heinz the first one time I had a chance to work with him and it's just a glass box all of that is glass but you couldn't as in the chicago tribune competition scheme you could work with the colors of the glass and give a suggestion of masonry but Jerry likes masonry and he loves stone in particular from IFS Portugal at that time said can't you throw some stone at this project so we made a frontispiece based on the work of clove Nicola Madhu was being much discussed in the revival of classicism among modernists and anti-modernist alike at this moment made this entranceway so you could take a speculative box in a suburban office building and give it a dignity and presence which it didn't have at the time using classical Tropes another single star house we could go through many many of them but it does show that we had an American architecture of great power coming out of Richardson and others after the post-civil F's a civil war and it went to Frank Lloyd Wright and he took it in a kind of eccentric but brilliant way but this tradition by the time I was in school people didn't even think these kinds of buildings were designed by architects so Scully's book reintroduce it gave it an intellectual framework and some of us robertson whose I am I mentioned it was built here at OSU and out in New Albany in Easton and I and others we realized this is a language of architecture that had classical elements and American barn traditions goes back to the very earliest settlers buildings in New England and speaks to people and you can find this tradition in the nineteenth century all the way to the 1950s all across the country and we just simply gave it a little a little injection good and you began to go international now this unfortunately that you can't from this photo yeah appreciate what this is is actually in the middle of a street right it chases the birth of Belaga in Amsterdam and it's to department stores occupy it but but we were brought in because the city of the city of Amsterdam has something called the beauty committee it's not it's a torture I assure you but and they never know quite what is beautiful but they know what they think isn't beautiful right and we went through a process and this building which is a long facade with shop windows below and attic story above is an interpretation of one of the great traditions that evolved in Dutch architecture the so called Amsterdam school and its progenitor is right across the street the great building by Breuer prologue the proviso it's very important this is it's not quite finished and these are of mannequins in the window and this is a do you think really wanted to see all these buildings well we can go quickly thoroughly this is a fine art studio of the UC Irvine campus one of the new California campuses when California had put something marked on a great expansion it's a studio building it's typical academic building where every department which had been begging for some space got that much you know pencil storage for your department but and but this is a more interesting story I would say because I began to work with the Disney Company and and under Michael Eisner the president of the Disney Company at the time he and I got on famously because water Disney buildings about they tell stories and his idea was you go to Disneyland or Disney World you and you've seen Disney movies why can't you live the experience of the Disney movies not only in rides and so forth but when you put your little head down on a pillow at night so theming the hotels instead of just making them look like they were anywhere by Hilton or whomever he did that and then the animators and this is the really important part of the story going back to drawings the animators were in a death battle to prove that hand drawing could survive and Roy Disney the nephew of Walt was their champion so we built this huge building and it expresses this the bravado and spirit is right next to the main freeway that leads into Burbank Burbank and of course the street is the Disney studio because a lovely complex the buildings in and of itself the campus and and then we they said you have to have a special office for Roy Disney because he smokes cigars and you couldn't smoke on links so what I did a sorcerer's hot car and that's his office so that was his office office but now if you look at this building in detail you see everything from films sprockets and that you see the deco of Khem Weber's campus across the street so it needs attention to that you see a dynamism which relates to the freeway I always wanted to have a building that when they did traffic reports they could say traffic is building up on the 134 and animation and they do so it was it fun most architects don't have fun I tried to have fun most clients don't have fun there if you really enjoy the process but when they do Wow magic occurs this is a library at a boarding school in New Hampshire it's a school that has a gothic tradition of building that goes back to the 1850s they were needed a new library we started around 1990 just at the moment of the switch people will begin to think of digitization in libraries but it is a building that you can see is photographed under a gothic arch of a chapel across the way by the great architects henry vaughan but the it had a connecting piece to a building that got torn down by Bertrand Grover would you okay so in our and Architects in the 19th century designed it a whole different styles yeah and why do we have to have more SVP pigeon-holed into one style or another it's ridiculous even fashion designers get to fiddle around so why can't architects get they've talked already these are these are busy hotels yeah that's my own house the great reward for being a famous architect as you get to live in a remodeled 1930s one one-bedroom house which you turned into something more how every model a bedroom and this is celebration and that's very brings I think if we stop with the slides with this I probably we're running out of time but you have just a couple more New Albany so will which I had a little hand in at the beginning when Wes Wexler and Jack Kelso had this idea of building a town and we really were living with Jack Robertson whose name has come up and Jerry McHugh the Dean then at Harvard the Graduate School of Design and we went to Europe we looked at things we studied and so forth and we looked at Bexley which has this charming little enclave of houses which I'm sure many of you know and so New Albany is not as urban as the town some of us may have had in mind right but then the Disney Company Michael I said I think we should build a town we had this site they didn't have any conceivable use for it it had a lot of wetlands who had to be addressed and he set out to build a town Michael gets into things very deeply as great clients like less well couldn't get into things deeply so Robertson did the golf club house in one end we worked together on the town center both of us as architects we did one building next to the other persons building can you imagine Eisenman and Gehry and others doing buildings next to each other to create a street I frankly cannot that's called that's called the University of Cincinnati oh yeah the boulevard of broken dreams one of the worst examples of Court of non coordinated planning coordinating the planning that's right now quickly before we adjourn it a couple of more recent things here you should go to celebration it's a great place to see a town that's ayat that truly become a success here you experimented with the Stanford Mediterranean Spanish mission yeah it's there at Stanford when you are about ready to send your kids to Stanford it's a great University and they always show you pictures of the buildings of Richardson and his partners run designed they don't show you the rest of Stanford it's a mess it's a mess but they have this rule that every building has to have a red tile roof on it so they're wearing Lilliana cos these buildings nobody it look ridiculous and they are not good buildings but so we were given this commission and Graham Wyatt is here in the office he worked on this to work on Bill Gates was giving the first gift he'd ever given he wasn't even married yet when he did this and then but Paul Allen gave another part of it and it was the computer science that's the God at Stanford and we everybody wanted a traditional Scott a Stanford building loop and it works and we reopened a quarry in Santa Barbara to get the stone it didn't turn out so good so we got it from Minnesota but you can revive a language and inside this building there were robots wandering around on the day it opened so it has nothing to do it's a building about Stanford robots have gone on they're probably wearing red tile Rouge on them it's a bath place it's about the memory and when Richardson partners came out there with Richardson built the campus which was brand new in a place that had nothing no architectural traditions he remembered the Romanesque southern Spain and that's what he laid one right and he put palm trees in it which your point is that that was largely abandoned and you yeah well yes yes and this is a restoration and this is a library in Landy Miami's just at the end of the Art Deco district people don't support libraries they talk about how important libraries are but they don't support them and they don't and you can't very hard to get money out of the local government they did get money for this library and next door across the street is an architectonic and ballet school and across the way is a museum that Issa sake was trying to remodel I don't know I think it's not going so well but um we did a library that belongs in Miami Beach right I think it does right and you did a very different one in Nashville the Athens of the south and and opposite it's on the axis right - this is one of the great state capitals in the United States and one of the great classical buildings ever William Strickland's Statehouse for Tennessee and they talk to each other and the slides don't give you a chance to your job and I have to believe me of course good I always talk honestly about my buildings and then use it something very different in Chapel Hill yeah because this is an addition to a hideous 1950s building so we're not going to and we had to remodel it and we're not going to lay upon that building some mummies are not like that oh right right right right good Eero Saarinen the great architect died very young and what left a great legacy of buildings and he had a theory which was derided in my days as a student and long after the style for the job he said every project has its own meanings and you're our job as an architect is to find the right meaning and give it form which is why you did a glass skyscraper for Comcast I mean what Comcast isn't going to want to be in a class in a classical building they they want to be they want to take over a Silicon Valley and everything else and they they and it's a high tech company and this is a glass building but it's a glass building with a profile that's suggests an obelisk it uses two kinds of glass so it has corners that hold themselves and it has an amazing if I must say so myself lobby in the bottom of it which is be a major public place in the city of Philadelphia now so I'll put even a corporate office building can't-can't a wonderful Plaza which Laurie Olin who worked on New Albany Laurie Olin worked with us on it it's a great public place not a box it's not another store the other point I think and here's a quick view of what may be the most famous recent building in New York well it belongs to the history of real estate as well as realize for your market anchor it's a condominium building facing Central Park and it's all clad in limestone the limestone was put on panels in Canada and concrete panels and brought down and assembled so it's as it's more modern in construction than many glass buildings that you see but it's filled with memories and details and a deliberate evocation of what New Yorkers think are the great buildings of the pre-war era the defining buildings and it's met with I'm happy to say great success among New Yorkers and Americans and certain international people but it's mostly filled with America including a rod moved there so you were there for what I write writing the exact when deviously yes but now Bob here's a building you've just finished in Taipei right that looks to me not that dissimilar so well as wonderful Cabul air ok at the lady who built this building appeared in our office and she introduced herself she's beautifully cloth and dressed and she said I'm welding a building in Taipei and I want to hire an architect buzz and you come to the right place went to fifteen Central Park West we got her in which is hard harder to get in Fort Knox um and and she said I want that and we said well you think it's right for taipei she said it's right so we went to Taipei there are so many horrendous classical ripoffs of buildings in Taipei they needed this building that's a great desperate way so of course is an entry live in a global there's a whole other issue we can see we could keep these people trapped in here for another hour global versus local what the exchange of ideas what you do but you know if you go to the bund and Shanghai you see some of the most wonderful miniature classical Deco skyscrapers of the 1920s and 30s it was a cross pollenization but if you look at those buildings carefully there's a lot that's really Chinese about them so if you looked at this building carefully you would right are very different from 15 central port and that thought you have to skip over this and end with this which speaks to your point I think well this is a very complicated project you're going to be here for an hour now um how even tell us quickly the investor and prominent philanthropist Stephen Schwarzman with established with 100 million dollar gift of his own and raised 300 million all actually much more now to establish the equivalent of the Rhodes Scholarship but situated on the Chinua campus in Beijing Ching hua is one of the literally top universities like MIT of China and I it will bring it has brought because it's now open for business American students a certain percentage Chinese students a certain percentage and international students a certain percentage and unlike the Rhodes Scholarship where scholars like Bill Clinton would live in a college one of the residential colleges at Oxford here the students live here because of the language problems and because it's an immersion of one year intensely so Stephen had a little competition of Architects and some perfectly nice architects gave them some perfectly nice buildings which you would find on perfectly nice American campuses he said why does that have to do with China the problem with China is people go to China today they see the beautiful cities being and neighbourhoods being torn down they see buildings being built that could be in Kansas with all due respect Columbus Ohio what's going on I want a Chinese building and so this is modeled on a Chinese house could Chinese our traditional Chinese architecture never grew much more than the scale of a house and it always had principles of courtyards and gardens and so we set out to build this house its building it's very hard to build a traditional building in China because the craftsmanship has almost all gotten killed in the throat I am really I am paying the cover well I learned I guess ooh and we went noted I am pays variety only it's interesting I am paid to concrete buildings all over the world when he did his only Earth's first going in China he did a traditional Chinese style clothing what this is called country he knew what so we did this and people learned how to build and I'm very proud it's the regular Beijing brick people can't tell about a bracing brick it's ugly material I said look around this Forbidden City everything is made of this beautiful material on and I don't want to bore you all it's there it's being used and these it's giving people who come here and also coming here this is meant to be also like the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard where great international academics and politicians and some come spend a day or two live with students or not give lectures people come here and they say this make sense on this campus because if you saw this campus it was designed by Joseph Stalin yeah it's pretty hard I'm beyond beyond a pretty uh pretty grim granted it makes OSU feel like the University of Virginia yeah something on yeah ironically the original building for Ching hua is modeled on the University of Virginia and was done by a Yale graduate the circle is for there well I I knew we would find a way to conclude with a mention of Yale that's what I think about but in the end hailey push the brand you know it is about sense of place in the end I mean is that a memory mission memory place the courage one gets when one knows things not to go on and if ever ever but if you if someone says to you you're and they meet your son or your daughter and they say they look just like you don't you feel proud or if a kid is said oh I know who you are you look just like your mother or you haven't come don't feel connected to something bigger than yourself that's what building should be about it's a wonderful line on which to end Bob thank you very very much and thanks to all of you for being here thank you for company thank you you you

Channel: Wexner Center for the Arts

Views: 4,001

Rating: 4.826087 out of 5

Keywords: architecture, architecture critic, Robert Stern, Robert A. M. Stern, Paul Goldberger, lecture, architecture lecture, discussion about architecture, Wexner Center, Wexner Center for the Arts, Ohio State University, OSU, OSU Lecture, School of Architecture, RAMS Architects, urban architecture

Id: SwoVTWO2sQ4

Length: 75min 18sec (4518 seconds)

Published: Wed Nov 16 2016