Robert A.M. Stern wins the Driehaus Prize for Classical Architecture

Posted by archipae on 12/15/10

December 13, 2010. Blair Kamin

He’s designed everything from Chicago’s ubiquitous bus shelters to Philadelphia’s tallest skyscraper and the future George W. Bush presidential library. And he’s done it in just about every style.

Acerbic, energetic and incredibly prolific, New York City architect Robert A.M. Stern is, above all, a pluralist, whose free-wheeling formal approach has alienated purists across the aesthetic spectrum. Yet even his critics might admit that he’s had a powerful impact on contemporary design.
On Tuesday, the 71-year-old Stern (left) will be named the 2011 winner of the Richard H. Driehaus Prize for Classical Architecture, adding a jolt of star power to an award that has garnered relatively little media attention since it was established in 2003.

Named for its sponsor, Chicago venture capitalist Richard Driehaus, and given through the Notre Dame School of Architecture, the prize recognizes a leading practitioner of classical or traditional architecture and comes with a cash award of $200,000—twice as much as the older and more prestigious Pritzker Architecture Prize, which was established by the billionaire Pritzker family of Chicago and typically goes to a leading modernist.

Nashville Public Library, RAMSA, 2001

 Asked in a telephone interview what the Driehaus Prize means to him, Stern cited architecture’s polarized factions of traditionalists and modernists, as well as his reliance on principles that date back to ancient Greece and Rome.

“It’s a great honor,” he said. “It’s recognition that in our sadly bifurcated world of architecture one can pursue a great tradition of architecture that goes back thousands of years and bring it into the modern world.” (at left, his Nashville Public Library).

In a career that began in the mid-1960s, Stern made his name—and enemies–by championing a post-modern architecture that departed from the rigid orthodoxy of steel-and-glass modernism.

Comcast Center,  Philadelphia

 Flip through his brick-sized monographs and you find an astonishing assortment of styles—brown-shingled seaside cottages, Art Deco hotels, Gothic revival prep schools, glass-sheathed office towers (his Comcast Center, at left, is Philadelphia’s tallest building), even a baseball stadium (the Anaheim Angels’) festooned with baseball cap-shaped entrance pavilions and a bat-supported marquee.

His portfolio extends to urban design. He helped shape the nostalgic, Disney-backed new town, Celebration, in Florida and played a major role in the tourist-friendly revitalization of New York’s 42nd Street.
Stern’s non-ideological approach has managed to upset both of architecture’s camps—the modernists, who accuse Stern of shaping a stage-set historicism, and the classicists, who claim he takes liberties with cherished archetypes.

Spangler Campus Center at Harvard Business School

 But the eight-member Driehaus jury, which includes the prize’s sponsor and experts from throughout the field, set aside such objections, valuing such robust reinterpretations of the Beaux-Arts as the Harvard Business School’s campus center (left) and Stern’s body of contributions to the field.

Those contributions include Stern’s wide-praised deanship of the Yale architecture school, to which he invites regularly invites leading modernists and traditionalists, and his decades of provocative, literally heavyweight scholarship. He has, for example, co-authored a five-volume architectural history of New York City that has 5,400 pages and weighs in at 38 pounds.

Stern was recognized “for his scholarship, his role as dean, and for his overall impact on the architecture of our time,” said jury member Paul Goldberger, the New Yorker’s architecture critic.
“Bob has brought classicism into the mainstream,” said Michael Lykoudis, dean of the Notre Dame School of Architecture and the chairman of the Driehaus jury

Stern, who will receive the prize in ceremonies on March 26 in Chicago, said he would donate his winnings to a Yale architecture school endowment devoted to teaching the classical tradition in the school’s design studios.

He has never designed a major building in Chicago, but has nevertheless made his presence felt here.

He worked with the late Bruce Graham and Stanley Tigerman on unrealized plans for a 1992 Chicago world’s fair, taught at the University of Illinois at Chicago’s architecture school when Tigerman led it and contributed a memorable entry to the 1980 Late Entries to the Chicago Tribune Tower Competition. His exercise in post-modern classicism sought to marry Adolph Loos’s column-like entry to the original Tribune competition of 1922 with the glass prisms of Ludwig Mies van Rohe.

Chicago bus shelter photo by Chicago Tribune

 In addition the bus shelters, which have touches of classical ornament but have drawn criticism from CTA riders for letting in the wind, his built work here includes two North Shore houses and a remodeled apartment in the Gold Coast. Stern’s current projects include the design for a new law school building at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Like many architects, Stern has had to downsize because of the economic downturn. His office has 220 employees, down from a high in 320 in the fall of 2008. He’s on the lookout for new projects, but his bitingly frank manner may not win him friends, especially at the University of Chicago, where he finds fault with the recent crop of modernist buildings, such as the new business school by New York architect Rafael Vinoly.
“They don’t seem to like their traditional buildings,” Stern said, referring to the university’s neo-Gothic quadrangles but overlooking its new limestone-sheathed dorm—a building whose mix of the Gothic and the contemporary betrays the influence of one Robert A.M. Stern

(Robert A.M. Stern portrait courtesy of Robert A.M. Stern Architects; photos of Nashville Public Library, Comcast Center and Spangler Campus Center at Harvard Business School by Peter Aaron/ESTO; Chicago bus shelter photo by Chicago Tribune)

Source- http://featuresblogs.chicagotribune.com/theskyline/2010/12/the-pluralist-robert-am-stern-his-portfolio-a-stylistic-smorgasbord-wins-the-driehaus-prize-for-clas.html#tp

Learn New Urbanism On Line!

The Principles and Practice of New Urbanism is a self-paced online course offered by the University of Miami School of Architecture, a world leader in New Urbanism. 

 

Looking for an in-depth introduction to the theory and practice of New Urbanism? You can learn at your own pace,on your own schedule, from anywhere in the world, with The Principles and Practice of New Urbanism.

• For anyone interested in a comprehensive introduction to New Urbanism
• Developed by the University of Miami School of Architecture, a world leader in New Urbanism
• Receive a certificate from the University of Miami School of Architecture upon successful completion of the course
• Provides preparation for the Congress for the New Urbanism's (CNU) Accreditation Exam
• The CNU-Accreditation Exam can be taken online via the course web site at the conclusion of the course

Winery Buildings

Mandola Estate Winery
Driftwood, Texas

Casa Rondena Winery
Albuquerque, New Mexico

The Mountain Winery
Saratoga, California

Nicholson Ranch Winery
Sonoma, California

Mission Hill
Kelowna, Vancouver, Canada

Raffaldini Vineyards
Ronda, North Carolina

Yadkin Valley Winery
North Carolina

Meerlust Winery
Capetown, South Africa

Viansa Winery
Sonoma, California

Opus One Winery

Oakville, California

Simple Gifts

From modest cottages at the iconic village of Seaside, FL, to large-scale traditional structures elsewhere, Merrill, Pastor & Colgan Architects celebrates the discipline and purity of form found in traditional building.

By Kim A. O'Connell

from Traditional Building Magazine 

A church is, without question, an expression of faith – faith in a higher power, as well as the power of religion to be a force for good. A church also expresses the faith that community traditions will be strong enough to warrant the time, money and materials spent in its design and construction. Historic beliefs and future hopes alike are embodied in the liturgy, as well as the windows and walls. So it is at the relatively new chapel in Seaside, FL, the iconic traditional town conceived more than 20 years ago by developer Robert Davis and master-planned by the New Urbanist duo of Andrés Duany and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk. Even as some critics have written off Seaside as a kind of traditionalist fairyland for affluent vacationers, the erection of the chapel underscores the fact that Seaside is a real town and a real community. The chapel's spare design, by Vero Beach, FL-based Merrill, Pastor & Colgan Architects, reflects not just the high-minded Gothic of traditional churches, but also the down-home rural roots of the Southeast.


These somewhat countervailing influences represent not a paradox in the firm's approach but a central philosophy. Founder Scott Merrill, AIA, "is in love with the vernacular and classical traditions of architecture," writes Vincent Scully in a new monograph on the firm. "His design shows that he knows and respects them all so well that he is determined to build them correctly, that is, with the exactitude, the sense of discovery, even the originality, they deserve."

The firm was founded amid the traditional renaissance that spawned Seaside – now a model for other traditional neighborhoods, built in what was an otherwise underdeveloped, anything-goes part of the Florida panhandle. There, Scott Merrill designed buildings that were Classical in their purity of form and precision, but also simple and unpretentious as beachfront properties ought to be. Later, Merrill and his partners crafted luxurious private residences that evince a rustic Classicism. More recently, the firm has expanded its scope to include larger public buildings in a variety of locations, forging intriguing design solutions in terms of composition and scale.

 
The Honeymoon Period
As an undergraduate at the University of Virginia, Merrill worked in the historic Rotunda and often crossed the famed Lawn with its Classical pavilions, which he says remain his favorite group of buildings. Although Merrill was an economics major, Jefferson's "academical village" inspired him to consider architecture as a career, and he went on to Yale University to earn a master's degree in the field. The faculty there placed a strong emphasis on broadening students' experiences with visiting critics' studios. "The great thing about the Yale experience was the sheer number of people with different bents and emphases that we learned about," Merrill says. "The Yale campus is like a classroom itself; it's the most amazing set of urban quadrangles. You have this pastoral complex of buildings at UVA and then you have this beautiful assembly of urban buildings at Yale, so I was exposed to the best of both worlds."

By the mid-1980s, Merrill had launched his professional career working for two Washington, DC, firms – McCartney Lewis and Cass & Pinnell (which later moved to Connecticut). At the latter firm, Merrill met Duany and was in turn introduced to Davis, who brought the young man to Seaside to serve as town architect. Merrill would have been content to fulfill that job's main function, which was to oversee the implementation of the master plan and facilitate construction. But Davis and Duany believed in Merrill, giving him the plum assignment of developing a series of rental cottages along the shoreline in the late 1980s.

Called the Honeymoon Cottages after the abode that Thomas Jefferson lived in while he worked on Monticello, the six identical houses face the Gulf of Mexico – a row of miniature Greek revival temples wrought in wood and painted white like the sand below. Jefferson's cottage is built into the hillside, an aspect that Merrill emulated by situating the cottages so that they appear as one-story volumes from the beach but pull up to their two-story height when viewed from the road.

Merrill still finds the Honeymoon Cottages to be instructive. Seaside was planned as a modest American village in which the houses were to be crafted in only a few types, and where the people would be relied upon to provide the local color and diversity. As it developed, however, Seaside's denizens constructed larger and larger houses with fat columns and other details that were "undigested and overscaled," according to Vincent Scully – while the exorbitant prices limited the socioeconomic diversity so praised by the New Urbanists. The Honeymoon Cottages, by contrast, advocate for the original vision of Seaside, which heralded simplicity.
 
"The Honeymoon Cottages are a distillation of a lot of important ideas, a very reducive type, which comes from the program," Merrill says. "They are incredibly simple buildings and very frankly repetitious….This was a chance to demonstrate that Seaside was really about a repetition of a limited number of types, not about the increasing individualization that was happening there."


The Classical Ideal
In 1990, Merrill started his own practice, which he moved to the Atlantic coast town of Vero Beach, FL. A year later, he hired George Pastor, AIA, who became an associate in 1996 and a partner in 1997. Pastor and Merrill had common roots, with Pastor having earned his Bachelor of Architecture at the University of Miami and his master's degree at UVA. During graduate school, Pastor recalls, he spent a summer working at Monticello as it was being restored, gaining a hands-on education in traditionalism. Now he plays a key role in the firm's projects and handles much of its contract administration.

David Colgan, AIA, joined the firm in 1994 and became the third partner five years later while concurrently opening the firm's only additional office in Atlanta. He received his Bachelor of Architecture from Notre Dame. Today, the firm has grown to 11 people, and Merrill is proud of the fact that they have never had to let anyone go.


"I think that Scott and George bring to the table such valuable and complementary skills that working together is never a shoving match for territory authorship, but a well-ordered and balanced effort," says Colgan. "I cannot say enough about Scott and George's ability to manage the talented staff that we have. The ability to assign work with just enough information to explain the task, but not so much that the exercise is rote, allows lots of ideas to be tested before the best are culled and further developed. It is a distillation of ideas that, in my mind, strives for the Classical ideal that nothing can be added or taken away without detriment to the whole."


The move to Vero Beach coincided with the firm's decision to work with Duany and Plater-Zyberk on their traditional resort town of Windsor. There, Merrill and his partners sought to create a distinct pattern language from which guest houses, community areas, and garden features would all be derived – a perfection of the Seaside model. The firm's design for the Windsor town center is first and foremost a beautifully executed plan, in which a group of public buildings form a collective unit that sits at the convergence of five roads. The diverse program is divided among eight separate structures, including two apartment buildings, a small store, post office, fitness club, observation tower and three gardens. The buildings showcase disciplined Classicism, employing Greek columns and Italianate rooflines tempered by warm Caribbean colors and human-scale volumes. A semicircular exedra serves as a focal point.


Throughout the '90s, in addition to upscale residential work, the firm continued to take on projects at Seaside and elsewhere, collaborating on new buildings at Windsor and at the University of Miami with traditionalist Leon Krier, among others. The firm's buildings, Krier has written, "strike us for the total absence of any of the trivia which mark the majority of contemporary buildings; they truly transcend the period." Its design for the town hall at Rosemary Beach, FL, in just one example, emulates Boston's Old State House in massing and form. Partly because of budgetary restrictions, the firm had to find ways to distinguish the building with broad brush strokes, in this case employing a dramatic parapet gable that evokes Florida's Spanish roots.
 
 In 2001, Merrill, Pastor & Colgan began work on the Seaside Chapel. The building – an interfaith worship space for 200 people – remains a special project for the principals because of its significance as a culminating project at Seaside, the undeniable success of its execution, and the fact that it marks a shift in the firm's mission toward more and larger public buildings. Without resorting to typical religious symbology such as a crucifix, the church embodies the verticality of the Christian Gothic style. At the same time, rather than being heavy and foreboding, the white chapel is built in the rural Alabama Episcopal tradition of Carpenter Gothic board-and-batten churches.


"The Seaside chapel is very close to being the building I wouldn't criticize myself on," Merrill says. "It's very simple in its volume, and it has an affinity with the Honeymoon Cottages." "It was one of our first public buildings which we knew would be accessible to large numbers of people," Colgan adds. "It is a building type that is used at important times in people's lives and we hope it enhances the experience." Colgan should know – he and his wife were married there in 2003.

Public Works
In the last five years, Merrill, Pastor & Colgan Architects has undertaken a broad spectrum of design work representing a wide range of building types. These include a federal courthouse, a fitness center, a clock tower, two post offices, a motor court, several apartment buildings, an equestrian center, a small office building and a sales office. "Even though I've been a party to it, I've been surprised at how lucky we are to do a number of different building types, including several projects that are over 100,000 square feet," Merrill says. "This means that we're constantly shifting gears between scale and between regions. You have projects that are in very different settings, and with that you have programmatic and compositional challenges."


The real dilemma for traditionalists, Merrill continues, will be to design large commercial buildings on a human scale and with discipline and beauty, while accommodating a host of modern concerns, from the vagaries of property ownership to building codes and mechanical systems. He is reminded of Frank Lloyd Wright's dictum about building from the inside out – that is, allowing the building's exterior to offer insight to the spaces and layout within. "At the same time, if you're building in an urban setting, there's a thwarting of Wright's impulse to let the outside look like the inside," Merrill says. "There's tussle between wanting to have order on the street while reflecting the internal complexity. Our buildings are starting to work at this level."

The firm's approach to such complex projects is evident in its plan for the Fort Pierce Courthouse in southern Florida, not yet built, as well as in its submission for a design competition for the new West Palm Beach Library (which was ultimately won by Demitri Porphyrios). In both cases, the solidity and import of the structures are evident in the long, heavy facades, but this is considerably lightened by the extensive use of glass, the multi-story pier language, and the asymmetrical massing of internal components, which is most obvious in the roof lines. The firm's neo-traditional mixed-use plan for a new resort in Alys Beach, FL, and its compound of large apartment buildings in the Bahamas speak to other considerations as well, such as engaging and developing the street grid, accommodating traffic flow and determining pedestrian circulation.


When Merrill talks about this work, he sounds much like the eager young architect he was when he arrived at Seaside years ago – eager to apply the time-tested rules of traditional building with rigor, simplicity and imagination. "Composition has become of much more interest to us," he says. "The reductive quality of the Honeymoon Cottages or the Seaside Chapel is only one of at least two distinct strains in our work, with the other being much more freewheeling composition. While the smaller buildings have the design and the details, there's an intermediate layer of composition that becomes the great promise of the bigger buildings." TB

Connecticut's Mount Vernon

1430 Asylum Avenue, Hartford (1911) 

from Historic Buildings of Connecticut

The house at 1430 Asylum Avenue in Hartford may look familiar to those interested in American history.
It is a virtual replica of George Washington’s Mount Vernon, in Virginia, but features some grand additions to its model, including a much fancier entry with a semicircular fanlight and side lights, as well as an elaborate balustrade along the roof. Mount Vernon also influenced the design of other Colonial Revival style houses, like the Hill-Stead, but this house, designed by Edward T. Hapgood and built in 1911, follows the first president’s home very closely, with some early twentieth century aggrandizement.

Connecticut Magazine Top Town 2010

Rating the Towns 2010: Population Under 3,500

With just over 2,000 residents at large across its 34.5 square miles,  

Lyme

is one of Connecticut’s most sparsely populated towns. It’s one of its most beautiful, too, with plenty of frontage on the Connecticut River, salt marshes galore, and the utterly charming Hamburg Cove right in its midst. It seems almost too good to be true that Lyme also has excellent schools, a very low crime rate and a solid local economy.

We move up to Litchfield County for the next four top finishers. Norfolk is the only town in this population group with above-average scores across the board. Bethlehem also offers some well-rounded numbers as well as a pretty good annual agricultural fair.
Way across the state in Windham County, No. 6 Eastford pre­sents a lovely prospect to young families looking to move: good schools (or at least good test scores), a low crime rate and relatively low real estate prices.

A brief word about crime statistics and these very small towns: The “safest” town is Hartland, which averages about five crimes a year, but even the town with the highest crime rate, Union, reports only one crime a month. Crime probably shouldn’t be a factor when comparing these towns.

It should be pointed out that a good score in the “Leisure” category among these smallest of towns generally indicates an active and well-supported library. Only a handful of towns, such as Cornwall and Kent, offer shopping, galleries and restaurants. For the most part these are towns in which historical societies hold sway and crickets provide the nightlife.

	Town	Education	Crime	Economy	Cost	Leisure	Total
1.	Lyme	1	8	2	26	4	41
2.	Norfolk	2	13	12	9	5	41
3.	Bridgewater	7.5	2	5	25	6	45.5
4.	Sharon	19	10	4	18	3	54
5.	Bethlehem	10	6	13	17	9	55
6.	Eastford	9	4	18	7	19	57
7.	Andover	3	7	20	12	16	58
8.	Warren	12.5	5	7	19	15	58.5
9.	Roxbury	7.5	21	1	27	8	64.5
10.	Goshen	12.5	11	8	23	10	64.5
11.	Hartland	18	1	15	8	24	66
12.	Kent	16	20	6	24	1	67
13.	Canaan	12.5	18	10	20	7	67.5
14.	Cornwall	17	24	3	22	2	68
15.	Colebrook	4	15	9	15	26	69
16.	Union	6	27	11	14	12	70
17.	Scotland	25	9	19	3	18	74
18.	Voluntown	24	12	23	2	14	75
19.	Morris	12.5	17	14	21	11	75.5
20.	Hampton	21	3	24	11	22	81
21.	North Canaan	20	22	22	5	13	82
22.	Barkhamsted	5	16	21	16	25	83
23.	Franklin	15	26	16	13	17	87
24.	Sterling	27	14	26	4	21	92
25.	Chaplin	26	19	25	6	20	96
26.	Sprague	23	25	27	1	23	99
27.	Bozrah	22	23	17	10	27	99