In over thirty years of practice, Robert A.M. Stern has developed an architecture committed to the synthesis of tradition and innovation and, above all, to the creation of a meaningful sense of place. Initially gaining notice for its residential work, his firm, Robert A.M. Stern Architects, has designed a wide variety of buildings in a range of stylistic vocabularies, all appropriate to their function and site, all deeply involved in the search for an American Architecture.
Robert A.M. Stern: Buildings is the first monograph to focus solely on more than fifteen years of the firm's non-residential work. Divided thematically, it contains over thirty projects, each thoroughly documented with extensive photography and drawings. The introduction to the book, aw well as those to each section, is an unusually personal essay, discussing Stern's education in the era of functionalist Modernism, his efforts to further and even reestablish traditions, and the social, cultural, and symbolic obligations that must inform all successful buildings.
Highlights include the just-completed Colgate Darden School of Business at the University of Virginia and the William H. Gates Computer Science Building at Stanford University, as well as a series of commissions for the Walt Disney Company. Other notable works are the Ohrstrom Library at St. Paul's School in Concord, New Hampshire; the Norman Rockwell Museum in Stockbridge, Massachusetts; and the Roger Tory Peterson Institute in Jamestown, New York.