SUMMARY

This interview covers the full career of the architect, historian, curator and educator Robert A.M. Stern. It addresses his family background. It covers his education including his B.A degree in History at Columbia University (1957-1960) and his M.Arch degree at Yale University (1960-1965). It explores his relationship to leading figures such as Paul Rudolph and Philip Johnson in the 1960s and the important moments of his early career, including his curation of the “40 Under 40” exhibition at the Architecture League of New York in 1966, as part of his directorship of the League. It explores Stern’s role in the debates and discourse of the 1970 beginning with his framing of the architectural scene in the United States through his book New Directions in American Architecture (1969) through to his “Young New York Architects” exhibition and symposium (1971) to his framing of the “Whites versus the Grays” debate in the early 1970s with his “Five on Five” publication in Architectural Forum in May 1973. The Interview explores Stern’s teaching career at Columbia University in the 1970s also and his role in creating a new undergraduate curriculum in Architecture. The interview addresses a wide range of events and that shaped American architectural discourse from the 1970s to the 1980s that Stern was a part of, organized, or was affected by, including the Venice Architecture Biennale’s in 1976 and 1980, the “Charlottesville Tapes” (1982), the “Chicago Tapes” (1986), and the Deconstructivist Architecture exhibition at the MOMA (1988). It ends by addressing Stern’s role in forging a relationship between architects and the Disney Corporation from the 1980s to through the 1990s and by addressing his Deanship of Yale from 1998 to 2016.