Question: How will George W. Bush be remembered?

Transcript: Now that’s a very interesting question because as the architect of the Bush library, clearly not an . . .  I have to begin to think about it.  And I . . . You know I did study American history in college, so I’m not without a historic knowledge and so forth.  But I do know enough about presidents and the way things are remembered in general.  And architects . . .  Some architects . . .  Some presidents leave in a blaze of glory only to crash and burn through the pages of history.  Others are not maybe so well respected in their own time.  And then when . . .  Especially when scholars get to have access to the papers that we . . .  Nobody knows what kinds of briefings and information and so forth such presidents were given, you begin to say, “Oh my god.  He was really confronting some amazing issues,” etc. etc.  So I don’t know how President Bush will be remembered.  But I guarantee you he will be remembered somewhat differently as the pages of history are turned than he is now.

Question: How will the library make him memorable?

Transcript: Oh now that’s really a tough one, and I don’t know if I’m gonna give that away to the YouTube set because I’m working on that.  I’m thinking about that.  I’m not at the stage where I’m really involved in the design of the building because there are issues about the acquisition of the site which are . . . I am involved with which are, you know, setting site lines and things like that which are very important.  But that’s where we are.  The Bush library sits at the edge . . . assuming the site they’re negotiating with goes through . . . at the edge of the Southern Methodist University campus which is a very beautiful, coherent, red brick, basically Georgian-style campus.  And the Bush . . .  The President – Gerald Turner – of the university would like the Bush library to compliment the campus.  And President Bush and especially Mrs. Bush went to SMU--certainly he respects that.  On the other hand they want this building to be about the presidency and the Bush presidency, as every president who has built a library starting with Franklin Roosevelt, who designed his own library in his own way.  So that’s a very interesting tension, but I don’t have the answer.  But at least you’ve hit the question.

Recorded on: 12/5/07

Question: How is technology changing the way you work?

Transcript: Well in my professional office we have all the computers and lots of the bells and whistles that are around.  I personally still make little drawings.  And I like to use sculptors modeling clay, which I was introduced to by Louis Kahn who used it.  But it goes back in the architectural terms to ________ which is a Beaux Arts tradition in art terms in general to the tradition of sculpture.  And I like to shape things, and mush them around, and play with shapes.  But then of course we use other digital fabrication techniques or whatever.  And then I certainly realize that you can build things in extraordinary ways that you couldn’t do even 30 years ago.  So it affects me, but you know you can’t . . .  You can teach an old dog some new tricks, but you can’t teach him all new tricks.

Question: Is technology dramatically improving design?

Transcript: No.  I still think the Parthenon is about way up there on the top.  So no I don’t think that in that sense.  It’s improving.  It’s made more possibilities, and it has resulted in some buildings of extraordinary beauty as any other situation has.  Frankly I think all of these glass buildings – and now I know I sound like an ancient mariner or something . . .  But producing a bland uniformity in our cities, including our city of New York, that it’s a question of how much glass is appropriate?  And I use glass as the symbol of the new technology.

Recorded on: 12/5/07

Question: Is architecture art?

Transcript: Architecture is a . . . is an art, but it is not the same kind of art that painting and sculpture might be.  For example it’s a public art or a social art.  It requires first of all the support of an enormous amount of people to produce buildings both in the architect’s office . . .  After all most buildings are not done Ayn Rand, Fountainhead style, one lonely architect sitting and drawing away.  It requires many collaborative professionals.  It requires money, which we can sum up as the client.  And it requires the public’s support usually so that buildings can be built within the larger constraints.  And it requires finally that the public in the largest sense support the buildings.  Otherwise why build them?  You can’t just build them for your own personal pleasure.  You can if you’re Philip Johnson.  You build a house out in the country in New Canaan, then you do your own thing.

Question: When does a building become a work of art?

Transcript: When does it?  It should almost always be thought of as a work of art, but a social work.  There are all kinds of art as I suggest.  If you just make buildings that solve problems, well that’s not irresponsible.  That’s perfectly responsible.  But I think for myself and for many other architects and people probably in architecture you might be talking to in a series like this, their aspirations are to have their buildings taken more serious . . . to take it seriously on another level.  But I do find that in the current scene, too much emphasis is being placed on artistic expression independent, in my view, often of good urbanism or even functional response . . . or tectonic responsibility.

Recorded on: 12/5/07

Question: If you had $100 billion to give away, how would you spend it?

Transcript: I would give it to the Yale School of Architecture.  Starting there so that I would put all the students who need to be on financial aid, which is a huge problem.  And it sounds trivial and parochial, but it is a monstrous problem.  And I would spend some more money on training architects.  And then I would sit back and think about what would be the next thing to do.  I don’t know.  The thought had not exactly crossed my mind.  But a smaller amount of money would . . .  We’re working for a $100 million right now, and it would solve our financial aid problem at Yale.  And you know in terms of the narrow focus of education, which I do spend a lot of time on, that is the big problem.  We have these wonderful, prestigious universities.  They are the best in the world – the Ivies and their equivalents.  And we’re charging students much too much tuition in terms of what they can be expected to realize in their professional lives.  And that’s . . .  And we burden them and we send them out into the world with not the . . . not the high ideal . . . with the high ideals we’ve imbued in them and the skills, but with this kind of two ton gorilla on their back called debt.

Recorded on: 12/5/07

Question: Do you have a creative process?

Transcript:  Is chaos a creative process?  No, I’m a little more organized than that.  I like to . . .  I believe in research.  I believe that a new building assignment, one needs to know, “Well what went before that was similar?”  We’re embarked on the design of the Bush presidential library, so we’re examining many things – not the least of which is the previous presidential libraries, including the gold standard at the moment which is President Clinton’s.  I mean it’s a very good building.  How does it work?  What hasn’t worked?  What has worked?  When you talk to the people there, they tell you the only problem they have at any of these libraries is parking.  So there you go.  But then I look at the idea of libraries in the historical type, and of course at this point I know a lot of this, but I’m working with younger people in my office.  So in a way we always start again.  So I want to bring them along in the discourse to the point where somewhere near where I am thinking.  And then research might also involve . . . well having to do with the site, and how you get there, and the problems of the site.  But research can also take you into possibly looking at new materials or techniques of assemblage that might be appropriate in this building.  But finally you get down to organizing the plan according to functional arrangements.  Then trying to reshape that organization, that diagram, into a composition which can lead to a building which will make space and so forth.  And of course the most . . .  Working with one’s clients is very, very important.  Talk to them.  Clients have real ideas you know?

Recorded on: 12/5/07

Question: How has globalization changed architecture?

Transcript: Globalization is another major issue that young architects and all architects face, but that we – speaking as a teacher and as a dean – we address.  I mean the whole issue of how much modernization or modernity is appropriate in countries like the Middle East?  I mean it’s a political issue which buildings are principle talismans of.  Is it appropriate to build a 25 story or a 50 story office building basically sealed in glass and so forth in a desert setting?  Some would say in those countries these are symbols of their rising modernity.  But the people . . .  Often the people in the streets see these as alien invaders.  So I mean I could go on in that.  But the global issue of . . .  The global versus the local is a . . . is a very complicated issue which can raise architectural discourse to the boiling point, and can in fact raise the relationship of nations to each other to the boiling point.

Question: How should architects respond?

Transcript: There are different ways.  A way would always be wrong, and it’s always the context.  If you’re hired to do a building along what can only be described as the strip in Dubai, which is like the strip in Las Vegas – Sheikh Zayek Highway I think is the proper name, or Road – I think the die is already cast.  I mean local . . . there is no local.  And in fact there was no local culture.  But some of the buildings that are being built in that strip, on that strip, are addressing environmental issues to some extent to ameliorate the use of energy – like extreme heat most of the year and so forth.  Others are just business as usual.  So I think that . . .  But if you’re invited to build perhaps in the new neighborhood settings of, say, Abu Dhabi, which is planning to expand to Saadivat Island, I would think in the neighborhood settings where apartment houses are gonna be built and so forth, and the fabric of the city will be much more familiar to the human scale – shall I put it that way – I think there’s lots of opportunities to recall, and reinvent, and re . . . and understand how people have historically built in the desert.

Recorded on: 12/5/07

Question: How does American architecture compare to Europe’s?

Transcript: Well American architecture in . . . in my formative years as an architect was, without question, because of the end of Second World War – we had the money but nobody else much did – was at the forefront.  And we really developed the corporate style of architecture which I think comes into some considerable question both in historic terms and in contemporary terms at this moment.  I think Western European architecture, some of the most important buildings and architects have come out of Western Europe.  And part of it goes back to the sustainability issue where the cost of buildings is in such a different ratio to the . . . to the building itself that architects have been forced to examine certain issues much more carefully – functional issues, mechanical issues, ventilation issues – which have given rise to a certain sophistication of approach that we got rather lazy and slapdash about in this country.

Recorded on: 12/5/07

Question: What is your biggest design mistake?

Transcript:  I’d have to call my lawyer first. The only mistake I would say, to be more serious, is sometimes – and I can’t tell you chapter and verse – I didn’t take a big enough leap.  I didn’t go the . . .   And that’s why you go and do the next building, by the way.  People say . . .  They ask me, but they ask every other architect like me, “Why don’t you give it up?  Why are architects always . . . they never retire.”  Because you’re always thinking, “Well there’s another idea I have, another way of doing it.”

Recorded on: 12/5/07

Question: Why is architecture important?

Transcript: I once did a television series for Public Broadcasting called “Pride of Place”.  And I realized that people were very interested in what I was doing – more interested the average than non-architects than the architects, because the architects all quarreled with my interpretation, as indeed they had every right to.  I was quarreling with theirs.  But the . . .  The average television watcher – the Public Broadcasting television watcher – could engage me and stop me on streets.  And so for a long time I had the false illusion that I was an important person.  And they’d engage me in discussion, because I didn’t always hit them with the word “architecture” like a thunderbolt.  You know the Frank Lloyd Wright, Ayn Rand, Gary Cooper movie.  And I showed them . . .  I talked about things that were quite familiar to them and how they really were architecture.  And they were good architecture.  In any case I do believe that the public is intimately involved in architecture.  And look at all these magazines devoted on the residential scale, which is what people can feel engaged in on a personal basis to build houses, and apartments, and loft living and all that stuff.  And we even look at the travel.  Why do people travel?  Now of course they travel to sit on beaches and things like that.  But why do they go to Venice, one of the most inconvenient cities in the world?  They go for the architecture.  And they don’t go really to poke around in every one of those buildings, because half of them aren’t even available for poking around in.  They go for the experience of an amazing city – canals, urbanism, architecture.

Recorded on: 12/5/07

Question:  Why are there so few women architects?

Transcript: Oh my god I’m gonna. .  This is a complicated . . .  Architecture schools are . . . like Yale have basically 50/50.  Maybe fewer women than men, but not many.  And that’s been true of architecture school since I began to teach pretty much.  It was definitely not true when I went to architecture school, which was a boy’s club for sure.  But women come to the critical points in their career when they embark upon motherhood.  And architecture is a totally time consuming – disproportionate to any amount of any amount of money any architect is paid – business.  Plus the global reach of architecture today demanding unbelievable amounts of travel – national and international travel – has added to the complication.  And so women find it harder.  They get torn between their desire to have a family and be with their family and pursue their profession.  And I think that’s really the reason that, in the long run, women are not seen where they should be at the top of the profession.  Because certainly in terms of their talents and their professional skills, there’s no difference between men and women.

Recorded on: 12/5/07

Question:  Will contemporary architecture stand the test of time?

Transcript: Yes.  I mean certainly some, of course.  Like naming obvious ones of our immediate moment, a building like Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao is an extraordinary object in the city.  It may not be the most ideal museum inside, but it’s certainly something that if you haven’t seen Bilbao firsthand in his setting, you really haven’t . . . haven’t lived so to speak.  There are probably other buildings like that.  I don’t want to get in trouble with my professional colleagues; but you know buildings stand the test of time that aren’t extraordinary.  Sometimes ordinary . . . ordinary using the right sense are every day.  You go to a city like London – and London is my favorite city to visit; and indeed I’d like to live there if I could rearrange my life – you just walk after . . . on street after street not only in the traditional Georgian squares, but in neighborhoods all over a vast, vast area and you see wonderful buildings.  And they just . . . Sometimes they look like the one next to them.  Other times they’re quite distinct.  And they make a fabulous fabric of the city.  So . . . And then some of them go back to the 19th century, many to the 18th century; and what survives from before after London was bombed.  And London was . . . rebuilt itself for other reasons – fires and so forth.  But no, I’m not so worried about that.  I was worried about that when I was 25.  I don’t worry about it so much anymore.

Recorded on: 12/5/07

Question: What is the biggest problem in architecture?

Transcript: Oh my god.  I don’t know.  I mean there are so many.  I mean I think that our sustainable responsibilities are acute.  The public is on our case as architects, as they should be.  The practice of architecture – and this is something we discuss with students in the school quite often – is the tendency, as in many other disciplines, to larger and larger practices.  Yet young, talented people want to start their own world.  And it takes . . .  It’s harder and harder.  When I went to school Paul Rudolph, who I mentioned earlier on, said the ideal office is about 25 or 35 people.  By the time he died he came to realize that by following his own advice as it were, he had been cut off from huge opportunities to design.  He had many more . . .  He could have produced much more work of high quality.  Today offices are, you know . . .  A 100 person office is not even to blink at.  And I shudder to tell you how big an office like mine has become just . . . not because I set out to do it; it just is the way it is.

Recorded on: 12/5/07

Question: How is architecture changing?

Transcript: For one thing new materials, they have of course had a tremendous impact on architecture for the last, let’s say, 150 years since the production of iron and large pieces of glass in architecture.  But today there’s really a proliferation of new materials.  And then the capacity of the computer to imagine new ways of shaping the materials.  The problem is the computer can imagine things – amazing things.  Sometimes the materials can’t perform quite up to the computer’s dreams for them.  And there’s the issues of cost.  And then there’s the old boring issue.  We’ll call it gravity.  And we’ll call it rain.  And we’ll call it wind.  And then another thing that’s on many people’s minds which was never an issue in historic times because buildings were natural in the sense that they were proportioned so you could open a window here, and you could open a window there and the air would blow through in the warm weather.  And in the winter you had curtains, and shutters, etc. to begin to try to close down the elements from the inside . . . from the outside cold.  Then glass and metal had made buildings seem to be that you could just have a thin curtain of closure.  But we now know the price we’re paying, and so people are thinking about sustainable architecture as never before in my lifetime.

Recorded on: 12/5/07

Question:  Does a building have to interact with its environment?

Transcript: Well I don’t think any building can be self-contained flat out.  Even if you build . . .   Or maybe especially if you build on an open site in a rural setting, then you really have to engage with the landscape.  And I think more and more architects are coming to realize how fundamental the landscape quotient is in the overall conception of what architecture is.  Landscape architecture and landscape . . . and architecture and building architecture are two things that need to be seen in some sort of intimate relationship.  In city settings, of course, where there were existing buildings before – and even though the buildings may not always be there; they may evolve and change to other buildings – I think it’s very important that you design a building that is accommodative of the other buildings around.  And lastly – this is probably too long an answer, but most importantly – is how the building confronts or addresses the public realm in a city like New York.  The street – is it friendly, and welcoming, and open?  And that can be done in many ways, but it’s very important that that . . . that buildings not draw back and create veils or walls of closure.

Recorded on: 12/5/07

Question:  What sparked your interest in architecture?

Transcript: I have no idea.  No particular event comes to my mind or whatever.  It’s certainly true that in the post World War II era when I was . . .  I was born in 1939 so you can do the math.  Lots of stuff was happening in New York City.  The United Nations was being built.  Lever House was being built.  I remember seeing Lever House when it was nearing completion for the first time because my dentist’s office was down the block so to speak; things that you could see at the Museum of Modern Art; the various houses that were built in the garden.  I went to all of them with . . . my parents took me to them.  And so let’s say subliminally that interested me.  I did have a teacher in junior high school, and she was the art teacher or an art teacher.  Her brother was a city planner.  And when I expressed my interests I suppose, she connected me to the brother who was living in Cleveland as I recall.  So it was just the fact there was somebody out there who might be interested in what I was doing – making little drawings and so forth.

Recorded on: 12/5/07

Question: Who are you?

Transcript: My name is Robert A.M. Stern.  I am an architect and the founding partner of Robert Stern Architects in New York.  And I’m the Dean of the School of Architecture at Yale University in New Haven. Being born is always a traumatic experience I’m told.  But I was born in Brooklyn, although my parents at that time lived in Manhattan.  But then they moved to Brooklyn.  Go figure that one out. Growing up in Brooklyn and growing up in New York were, in my mind, slightly different.  New York being Manhattan, or Manhattan being New York, and Brooklyn being nowhere.  Now Brooklyn’s very glamorous.  All I wanted to do was get out of Brooklyn at the time I grew up.  Of course that’s, you know, easy to say with hindsight.  You know I’m sure I had a wonderful childhood and so forth.  But in my mind I always thought things happened in Manhattan. 

Question: Who was your greatest influence?

Transcript: By the time I got to architecture school – which I suppose is the most relevant thing to touch on in this context – the chairman of the Department of Architecture was Paul Rudolph.  Amazing teacher, amazing architect, at that time at the top of his game, the great architectural historian.  Rudolph died in 1997.  But the great architectural historian Vincent Scully is still teaching at Yale and was a great mentor to me and remains a good . . . a mentor and a friend.  And I think the third person from the world of architecture was Philip Johnson who saw a certain potential in me as . . . and was always very . . . always showed interest in what I was doing.

Recorded on: 12/5/07