Michael’s remarks in memoriam for Robert A M Stern
Michael was asked to deliver some remarks at the December 9, 2025 hearing for the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission meeting, in memoriam for Robert A M Stern, a noted NYC architect and educator, who died on November 27, 2025.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_YZTXnf15Zk
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Thank you Angie for asking me to make these remarks.
As it must be with all impactful people, each person who encountered Bob no doubt came away with their own impressions and takeaways. We at the commission knew him as a remarkably effective, avid, sometimes acerbic advocate for preservation, both a defender and a critic of this commission; he was a conscience for the architecture of New York, a place he chronicled, decade by decade, in great detail and with deep insight. We also knew him here as a skilled practitioner, a designer whose practice has enriched our city by modeling how to successfully use architecture to engage new buildings in a conversation with their historic surroundings that will remain a standard.
But when i personally think of Bob I think of him primarily as my teacher, both as an undergraduate in my first design studio, and again, when I was in grad school, learning from him while i was teaching beside him in that same studio as his TA for two more years. Having lived with Bob on my mind for so many years now, having his ideas shape my professional practice and career, my first thought is that the lessons that i took from him may not have been the ones he intended to impart. But like a parent, a teacher can only throw their guidance out there and hope it somehow is valued by their pupils as they grow. So while what Bob gave each of us lives on in all of us - his many students, his partners and mentees and readers, all of the people he affected through his eventful, impactful life - I can only talk about what he gave to me.
The first lesson I think of when i think of Bob was to not be afraid to copy. All architects copy, knowingly or not. Copying got a bad rap in modernism’s heyday, derided as inauthentic, unheroic. Bob taught that the best architects have always copied, synthesizing from their heroes. Copying forces you to look hard, to make your hand follow your eyes, internalizing forms and shapes, lines and ideas more deeply and more viscerally than only looking could achieve.
He taught us that copying never works: no matter how hard we might try, we will fail to copy well. Our own skills, tastes, and biases have a way of working their way into everything. Our first assignment as architecture students was to copy: we picked from a list of revivalist classics, from Hunt and McKim to Voysey and Lutyens, and drew one of their [inevitably huge, complicated] designs: plans, elevations, and sections, rapidograph on mylar: I did Castle Drogo, officially the newest British castle. In having us start by copying Bob was reviving a traditional Beaux Arts style of architectural training, a method only then being rediscovered. So since then i have been and continue to be a proud copier.
Through copying, and through his often caustically frank critiques, Bob taught us how architectural styles worked. Bob was trained as a modernist and loved the modern canon, but taught us to view modernism as one style among others, all understandable as systems with syntaxes and structures no different than languages. Once you understood these rules - by looking, learning, and copying - you both demystify the design process by understanding how the architect got to the design, and paradoxically you also can admire with greater depth the truly magical achievement when a designer transcends his precedents and synthesizes something fresh, creative, and exciting. When we look here at historic buildings and their proposed modifications every week i draw on Bob’s stylistic structuralism.
When i decided to set up my own architecture practice I met with Bob to ask for his advice. He told me to get involved, to join organizations, to volunteer, to become useful while getting to know people and organizations: just like Bob did in his youth, starting his solo career by joining and then leading the Architectural League. So as the good student I always aspire to be, I followed Bob’s advice, volunteering and joining architectural organizations and community groups. One of these was the Bronx Borough President’s Historic Buildings Commission in 2008, which led directly to my longest volunteer commitment to date, the most rewarding one for me, my time spent here on this commission.