Walter Luther Dodge House, 950 North Kings Road, Los Angeles, California. Designed by Irving Gill and built in 1916, the home and garden were razed in 1970. Gill said he left the ornamentation to nature.
“In the 1920s and 1930s, when we built suburbs in the United States, many good architects that you’ve never heard of—I’ve never heard of them—designed houses. They were thoughtful and true to certain time-honored, vernacular architectural languages, and they were nice houses.”
Robert A. M. Stern (b. 1939) is an American architect and dean of the Yale University School of Architecture. He is also a teacher and a writer. While known for his commercial buildings and large-scale condominiums—he has designed some of the tallest structures in America—many of Stern’s early works were private homes, and residential architecture continues to be part of his practice.
His architectural style, which he describes as “modern traditionalist,” is generally classified as postmodern with a particular emphasis on context and continuity of traditions. His residential work, in particular, relies heavily on local vernacular. Deeply influenced by traditional forms in home design, Stern hosted the television series Pride of Place: Building the American Dream (PBS, 1986).
Stern is a fellow of the American Institute of Architects. His work has been exhibited at numerous galleries and universities and is in the permanent collections of museums across the world. In 1976, 1980, and 1996, he was among the architects selected to represent the United States at the Venice Biennale.
Stern worked initially as a designer in the office of Richard Meier in 1966, prior to forming the firm of Stern & Hagmann. In 1977, he founded Robert A. M. Stern Architects (RAMSA), now a 320-person firm, where he is senior partner and personally directs the design of each of the firm’s projects, including many single-family homes. The Brooklyn-born Stern has written a series of acclaimed books about the evolving architecture of his hometown, such as New York 1900 (Rizzoli, 1983) and New York 1930 (Rizzoli, 1987), which was nominated for the National Book Award. On the question of tradition and change, Robert Stern warns against innovation at any cost or, as he puts it, “a kind of fetishization of new materials that often aren’t tested in the house environment and are challenging to live with.” Many of his residential clients prefer to live in a “traditional environment,” and he sees nothing wrong with that: “To abandon the classical or the vernacular traditions is to cut yourself off from a vast reservoir of experience and meaning.”
How has the American home evolved over time?
Robert A. M. Stern: First of all, America, more than any other nation in the twentieth century, is a nation of house builders. “The American home” is the wrong phrase, by the way. You can have a home anywhere. You can have a home in a tree or an apartment. Houses are buildings. The various surveys of American houses often are freighted with stylistic prejudices leaning to the traditional styles or to the modernist style. Modernism has become a style and, like other styles, it goes in and out of fashion. One of the attributes of American house building is the wide range of taste, and it’s not just highbrow versus lowbrow. People have many different feelings about the character of the house they want. For example, many very sophisticated people who collect contemporary art still prefer to live in a “traditional environment.” There are no essential characteristics except variety. The Maoist characteristic “let a thousand flowers bloom” comes to mind. Or, a thousand flowers do bloom.
I think most Americans prefer a house that doesn’t remind them of their office or factory environment. I think that’s one reason modernist houses have not generally succeeded. For most people, modernism defines the environment of the workplace, and therefore people hunger to connect with a more craft-oriented, preindustrial environment in their homes.
What current trends in residential architecture do you feel compelled to subvert?
Stern: The current talk of architecture is that we live in a chaotic or fragmented world, and therefore buildings should express that fragmentation by being fragmented. But I believe houses, and buildings in general, should address that fragmentation with images of calming and by drawing people together. Certainly, in a house, I don’t expect to have my breakfast with my angst. I’d rather have my breakfast with somebody else’s angst on the television. Of course, all modernist architecture is not about fragmentation. But modernism in general tends to be distrustful of the status quo. It tends to search for the Holy Grail of a perpetual avant-garde. It gets harder and harder to be avant-garde because you’re like a rat in a cage—you’re always running faster and faster, chasing your own avant-garde tail. But I think houses, places where people live, should provide quietude and a state of calm.
Modernism has many sides. The modernism I grew up with, as a young architect, was basically the modernism of the 1920s, rehashed in the 1940s and 1950s. It was very narrow, overly trustful of and bounded by technology, overly dependent on functionality, and short on the psychological demands for enclosure that a house implies. Today’s most avant-garde modernism is about fragmentation and the revival of technology. So we get, in our architecture, a kind of fetishization of new materials that often aren’t tested in the house environment and are challenging to live with—for example, hard and sometimes even aggressive surfaces. I don’t think that’s the generally held idea of what a house should be about.
It almost seems as though you feel a moral responsibility to those who will live in the house.
Stern: I get nervous with the word “moral” because I think morality and architecture are not necessarily good bedfellows. And that wonderful, incisive book by David Watkin, Morality and Architecture, deconstructed the modernists’ claim to a high moral ground for their point of view.
To what extent is it accurate to characterize your work as postmodern?
Stern: The postmodern condition is generally acknowledged in virtually all the arts and probably other disciplines as well. Really, “postmodernism” is the proper term, not “postmodern,” because we’re still in the modern era, no matter our stylistic inclinations. Postmodernism simply argued that the modernism of the early and mid-twentieth century was over. It had exhausted its energy as it searched for technological and functional solutions, and it had also exhausted its formal capacities because it refused to allow for connections or inventions based on the forms of the past. Now we know that you cannot not know history. As Philip Johnson has said, the great modernists of the 1920s, by whom I mean Mies van der Rohe and Le Corbusier, knew their history very well and were always contemplating historical models.
Postmodernism argued that you can go back to go forward, and I still think that’s true. In fact, the revival of modernism today is a postmodernist phenomenon, if you can follow that line of reasoning. That is to say, Charles Jencks pronounced modernism dead in 1972, which was as good a date as any. We now find architects, particularly young ones, reviving the modernist houses, such as the Case Study Program houses of the 1940s, 1950s, and early 1960s in California. When I first encountered the Case Study houses, I thought they were thin and diagrammatic, the most boring works of architecture I’d ever seen.
The kind of postmodernism that I have become very interested in is modern traditionalism. Many styles—form languages—have grown up during different eras. Some were willed into being by scholared architects, such as the high classicism of the Renaissance; others grew out of the local soil of the vernacular. And, like any other language, it can be argued that stylistic language does not end when conditions change. It evolves but continues to have its own deeply rooted cultural meaning. To abandon the classical or the vernacular traditions is to cut yourself off from a vast reservoir of experience and meaning. Hence, I am a modern traditionalist.
Now, I don’t always do modern traditional buildings. If I’m doing a skyscraper that’s 975 feet tall, as I am in Philadelphia, I can assure you my building is glass and sheath and is quite daring technologically and in other ways. However, I’m still thinking about formal models of tall buildings—obelisks and other shapes—that come to us from earlier and simpler times. I also think about the experiments of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries by various architects who were making super-tall buildings, which we call skyscrapers.
With houses that I design, I’m not trying to rebuild Monticello or a Palladian villa. I’m trying to use the language of Palladian villas, which themselves came from a study of the classical architecture of Rome. They integrated that history with the technology and sensibilities of the northern Italian vernacular to create a new synthesis in the middle-class houses. From that, hundreds or thousands of houses and other buildings emerged, some quite excellently inventive, some more conventional. A continuous chain of events ensued, which could be called a growing, living language of architecture.
I think that self-consciousness with respect to the past is a fundamental modern trait. And it goes back, at the very least, to Palladio. It flowered in the late eighteenth century with the rediscovery of sites in Rome and Greece and the influence of the English architect Sir John Soane, who was one of the most gifted architects who mined the past. The notion that the past is there to be studied, appreciated, and emulated is, of course, a self-conscious act.
All works of art that have any worth are self-conscious with intention. The people who think they should only build to the moment of their own time are not unconscious so much as dead to the larger possibilities, trapped in their moment.
Would you say that the Grove development, at the historical Farmers Market in Los Angeles, is a positive example of modern traditionalist architecture?
Stern: I think the Grove is a very successful environment. I guess it’s because I’m such a New Yorker, but it seems to me that everybody everywhere wants to get out of the car or off the subway and be in a place with different scales of buildings with different scales of uses where you can buy fresh fruit, eat, shop, mingle, and so forth. Of course, in Los Angeles, you have to drive to such a place. In some ways, it’s a mall, not a street like in New York. But then, even in New York City, Fifth Avenue has Rockefeller Plaza. You can’t have only streets. I see the Grove as a sign that the city—or a developer—is addressing what I believe is a largely untapped need for urbanity in Los Angeles.
Contemplating the future, what design directions are you appreciating and engaging in?
Stern: In the 1920s and 1930s, when we built suburbs in the United States, many good architects that you’ve never heard of—I’ve never heard of them—designed houses. They were thoughtful and true to certain time-honored, vernacular architectural languages, and they were nice houses.
Many of my clients want their houses to be big and comfortable and meet their program, but be quiet. In fact, that’s often why we use the traditional styles. They prefer them, and we try to use them in traditional neighborhoods so our buildings will fit in. Instead of celebrating the moment, they celebrate the place.