In Defense of ‘Starchitects’ and Stern

Two interesting pieces in Sunday’s New York Times. One describes how Robert A.M. Stern has opened Yale University’s School of Architecture to all kinds of design aesthetics, creating “a vibrant nexus of ideas and debate,” even as his own firm’s work remains relentlessly traditional. The other looks at criticism of so-called “starchitects” and finds it “churlish.” And also — in the case of John Silber, the former Boston University president whose new book is called Architecture of the Absurd: How “Genius” Disfigured a Practical Art — “glib.”

The Stern piece was written by Robin Pogrebin, who covers architecture for the Times. It notes that when Mr. Stern (right) was appointed architecture dean at Yale nine years ago, he was dismissed as the “suede-loafered sultan of suburban retrotecture” by Reed Kroloff, who was then editor of Architecture magazine and later became dean of architecture at Tulane University and, more recently, director of Cranbrook Academy of Art and Art Museum. Mr. Kroloff now says Mr. Stern “may be the best school of architecture dean in the United States,” while the architect Frank Gehry says that Yale’s architecture school is “probably the most exciting school in the country right now, maybe in the whole world.”

Meanwhile, Mr. Stern’s 325-person New York-based firm prospers, designing luxury-condo towers and, most likely, the George W. Bush Presidential Library, expected to be built at Southern Methodist University. “I’m not considered avant-garde because I’m not avant-garde,” Mr. Stern told the Times. “But there is a parallel world out there — of excellence.”

The starchitects essay is by Nicolai Ouroussoff, the newspaper’s architecture critic, who says that attacks on the designers of flamboyant buildings are often “a rehash of the old clichés” about cost overruns and leaks (exactly the issues that have dogged the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Stata Center, designed by Mr. Gehry).

Mr. Ouroussoff goes on to say that the “more serious criticism comes from those inside the profession” who worry that high-profile architects are selling out by accepting commissions from big developers — commissions that some think of as Faustian bargains “in which the architect is nothing more than a marketing tool, there to provide a cultural veneer for the big, bad developers whose only interest is in wringing as much profit as possible from their projects.”

Mr. Ouroussoff isn’t worried himself. Working with mainstream developers, he writes, gives architects “a chance to step out of the narrow confines of high culture and have a more direct impact on centers of everyday life that were once outside their reach, from shopping malls to entire business districts.”