I must confess that I had never heard of architect-entrepreneur Robert Stern until I read Martin Filler's NYRB review of Stern's recent autobiography -- which is called Between Memory and Invention: My Journey in Architecture. How could I have been so behindhand, so ill-informed?
Filler's evaluation of the memoir is sharp-elbowed. He plainly doesn't like Stern himself although he grudgingly grants that he was a successful dean of architecture at Yale. His critiques of Stern's buildings are unfriendly and a bit wicked: of Yale's two newly-constructed colleges, Filler claims that "first-year students might imagine that they've wandered into a themed Disney resort called Academialand." The Comcast Center in Philadelphia, he says, is of "surpassing banality"; the George W. Bush Presidential Center in Dallas "resembles a branch bank in a suburban shopping mall." Moreover, Filler is is both scornful (and possibly envious) that Stern married into lavish wealth (his wife was a Gimbel heiress). Is it wit or is it bigotry to deride Stern's progression from a working-class Brooklyn Jewish family to a big time Manhattan success as a typical "rugelach to riches story?"
It was when I learned that Stern was a Brooklyn boy that my interest was provoked and I trotted over to the Boulder Public Library to procure a copy of Memory and Invention. I doubt I would have read the book from cover to cover except for its neighborhood relevance. Robert Stern, it turns out, was not only a local lad but he was born in exactly my year, 1939. He attended public schools and had hoped to attend Erasmus Hall High School, which would have made him my classmate, but, he claims, he lived outside of the district and so was shunted to Manual Trades High School (famously featured in the grimy novel and film, The Blackboard Jungle). It was a surprise to me that he grants a sentence to one of his junior high school classmates, the "diplomat" Matthew Nimetz, whose name I remember from my four years at Erasmus but whose person, as far as I can recall, I never encountered. I have to doubt that Stern was districted out of Erasmus. Manual Trades was a school that students chose, like Stuyvesant or Brooklyn Tech. Stern misremembers. He probably decided to cast his lot with Manual Trades because it was reputed to be a "hands-on" school. It's doesn't much matter: he would have been just as unhappy at Erasmus. He craved Harvard and Manhattan and notoriety and money, and none of the local schools would have filled the bill, certainly not EHHS.
Although the lengthy accounts of Stern's buildings might enlighten and inspire a specialized readership, I myself found the book dispiriting. There is lots of information about commissions procured by sucking up to the mighty and a heck of a lot more about infighting among the high-flying architects than I needed to know. In addition, the book overflows with self-congratulation and is replete with assiduous and triumphal name-dropping.
It's not for me to judge Stern's achievement, but I cannot disagree with his contention that architects should be fully steeped in but not restricted by the architecture of the past. I gather that Stern is a "neo-traditionalist' and Filler, his reviewer-critic, a "modernist." I cannot say how many buckets of talent (Filler would say "none!") that Stern brought to his game, but however many they are, they are only drops in an ocean of ambition.
Despite it all, I was intrigued by Stern's Brooklyn childhood, especially where his history bisects (or veers away) from my own. His grandparents, like mine, are folks of eastern European shtetl origin who struggled without much success to adapt to the new world. They landed in Brooklyn, which Stern seems to have resented. He yearned for "the city," Manhattan. I myself did not sufficiently appreciate Brooklyn, and like Stern, I wanted out. Nowadays, it's embarrassing for me to recall that the one big idea of this Brooklyn "yoot" was to leave the old country, Flatbush, behind. Stern, on the other hand, is unembarrassed: "I disliked Brooklyn--it was a place to be from and get out of (his italics). The difference between us is that he knew that he wanted Manhattan; I didn't know what I wanted, I just wanted to go somewhere else, which I have managed to do, having spent most of my life in the mountain west and in green New England.
Stern also knows what all of us old Brooklynites know -- that our once provincial and disrespected borough has become a bit hoity-toity. The realtors have taken over. Stern says that his childhood neighborhood "is now alternately called Windsor Terrace and Kensington, but at the time everyone just called it Flatbush." Which is exactly my recollection. If you had asked me in 1950 what part of Brooklyn I hailed from, I would have said "Flatbush." But now the PS 217 catchment area is called Kensington or Ditmas Park, expressions that I had never heard until the last decade or so.
One curiosity about Between Memory and Invention: unlike every other Brooklyn reminiscence I have ever read, Stern never mentions the Dodgers. Quite a telling omission, I think, if you think about it for a moment. Nothing about either food or sex, either. An uncharacteristic Brooklyn childhood.
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