In its forty years, Robert A.M. Stern Architects has honed a contemporary practice that is in close dialogue with the past, making it one of the most admired architectural firms today. Even in its growing global reach and expanding practice areas, the firm maintains a close attention to form, context, local culture, and received tradition, as well as to the demands and needs of the project’s future occupants.
These principles have served the firm particularly well in cities, where they often confront the most challenging constraints. Robert A.M. Stern Architects has created residential towers, luxury hotels, serviced apartments, condominiums, and pedestrian garden enclaves, each growing out of the preexisting character and urban structure of the site itself–whether that be the Upper East Side or Chelsea in Manhattan, Taipei, Kazakhstan, or Moscow. In each case, this traditionalist firm with a deep understanding of the contemporary metropolis has looked beyond America, beyond the established canon of European modernism, exploring underappreciated masters and undervalued vernaculars across time and place. In their buildings, the present, interacting with memories of the past, can create something that can be interesting in the future.