Robert A. M. Stern: Buildings And Towns

Robert A. M. Stern: Buildings and Towns

About the AuthorArchitect, educator, and architectural historian Robert A. M. Stern is the founding partner of Robert A. M. Stern Architectus and dean of the Yale School of Architecture. In addition to monographs on the firm's work, Stern has written a series of books on New York's architecture and urbanism, including New York 1880, New York 1900, New York 1930, and New York 1960.Vincent Scully is the Sterling Professor Emeritus of the History of Art at Yale University. Scully is the author of more than a dozen influential books of which the best known are The Shingle Style and Stick Style: Architectural Theory and Design from Richardson to the Origins of Wright, Architecture: The Natural and the Man-Made, and Modern Architecture and Other Essays.Central to the work of Robert A. M. Stern is a commitment to architecture that reinterprets the past to serve contemporary life. Buildings and Towns explores the application of that principle to a wide range of building types, including libraries, university buildings, cultural centers, offices, health care facilities, courthouses, and recreational complexes completed throughout the world over the past twenty years. The sequel to the highly successful Robert A. M. Stern: Buildings (1996), this volume also incorporates master plans for towns and campuses. Among the sixty-five featured projects are the Miami Beach Public Library, the new campus for the Darden School of Business at the University of Virginia, multiple projects for Disney including the Ambassador Hotel in Japan, and a range of apartment towers culminating with 15 Central Park West, the largest residential structure in New York City, opening in fall 2007.Review"Stern ably tells his stories, as do the spectacular photographs and drawings in this weighty tome. Unlike many neo-conservatives who genuflect at a monolithic altar of the past, Stern has a playfully pluralistic relationship to architectural history and contemporary design. And unlike the hippest of the hip, he has no need to dadaistically defy or defame the architectural canon . . . For that and more, this book warrants our appreciative attention." -Norman Weinstein, ArchNewsNowExcerpt.