Robert A. M. Stern

Robert Arthur Morton Stern was an American architect, educator, architectural historian and author, and the founding partner of Robert A.M. Stern Architects (RAMSA). From 1998 to 2016 he served as dean of the Yale School of Architecture, where he remained a teacher until 2022. He died at home in Manhattan on 27 November 2025 at the age of 86, after a brief pulmonary illness.

Born in Brooklyn on 23 May 1939 to a Jewish family, Stern spent early years in Manhattan before growing up again in Brooklyn. He earned a bachelor's degree from Columbia University in 1960, studying history and literature and working closely with the Avery Architectural Library, and a Master of Architecture from Yale in 1965 under the energetic school led by Paul Rudolph. He cited the historian Vincent Scully and the architect Philip Johnson as formative mentors.

After Yale he curated at the Architectural League of New York, briefly designed in the office of Richard Meier, and worked at New York City's Housing and Development Administration. He then practised with Yale classmate John S. Hagmann as Stern and Hagmann before founding the successor firm Robert A.M. Stern Architects in 1977. RAMSA became known for contextual, often classical or traditional residential towers and civic buildings, including 15 Central Park West, 220 Central Park South, 520 Park Avenue and 30 Park Place in New York, the Comcast Center in Philadelphia, the Museum of the American Revolution, Yale's Pauli Murray and Benjamin Franklin Colleges, and work for cultural and campus clients across the United States and abroad. In the 1970s and early 1980s Stern was associated with postmodernism, including a facade for the 1980 Venice Architecture Biennale Strada Novissima; later critics linked him to New Classical architecture. He received the Driehaus Architecture Prize in 2011.

A prolific writer and public voice, he co-authored the multi-volume New York architectural history series culminating in New York 2020, hosted the 1986 PBS series Pride of Place, and published the memoir Between Memory and Invention. Before Yale he taught at Columbia GSAPP from 1970 to 1998, directing the Buell Center and later the Graduate Program in Historic Preservation. As Yale dean he rebuilt visiting critics, studio life and the school's public presence over an eighteen-year tenure.

In 1966 he married photographer Lynn Gimbel Solinger; they had one son, Nicholas S.G. Stern, who leads the construction and planning firm Stern Projects, and divorced in 1977. Stern lived in The Chatham, an apartment house of his own design in New York. He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and received the Vincent Scully Prize, the Topaz Medallion and other honours.

Robert A. M. Stern died on 27 November 2025 in Manhattan after a short pulmonary illness, his son Nicholas told The New York Times. Colleagues at Yale and RAMSA remembered a frank, witty and exacting teacher whose buildings, books and students continue his work.