Robert AM Stern, architect dubbed ‘King of Central Park West’, dies aged 86 | New York

Robert AM Stern, an architect who shaped New York’s skyline with buildings that sought to evoke pre-war splendor but with modern luxury fit for billionaires and movie stars, has died at the age of 86.

Dubbed “the King of Central Park West” by Vanity Fair, Stern was credited with the design of 15 Central Park West, which in 2008 was considered the most expensive new apartment building in New York history.

With sales of approximately $2 billion, it was also considered the most lucrative apartment building in the world and a tribute to an earlier era of the city’s classic architecture of the 1920s and 1930s. The exterior was covered in more than 85,000 pieces of limestone.

Hedge fund managers, financial moguls including Lloyd Blankfein, CEO of Goldman Sachs, tech entrepreneurs including Steve Jobs, and celebrities such as Bono, Sting, Denzel Washington and sports commentator Bob Costas have called it home.

Stern resisted the trend of Richard Meier’s modernist glass condominiums, and again the later fashion of ultra-tall “shadowmakers.” Instead, he chose to make the old new again – “traditional modern”.

“That was my breakthrough,” the 84-year-old architect told The New York Times of 15 Central Park West in an interview for his obituary, adding that he did not use a computer and drew everything by hand.

Central Park West’s backers, the Zeckendorf family, understood – according to Vanity Fair – “that nothing attracts people, especially the wealthy, like something new that doesn’t look too new.” The building featured the classic layout of the old Park Avenue apartments, as well as screening rooms, a copper-domed rotunda lobby, a 75-foot swimming pool, and a waiting room for drivers.

At the height of his career, Brooklyn-born Stern ran a 300-person architectural firm and produced encyclopedic volumes on the city’s architecture and was dean of the Yale School of Architecture.

“I became an architect because I loved the buildings of my city, New York, and I imagined that one day I would make similar ones. The New York of my youth is still today the main subject of all my work in architecture,” he wrote in 1981.

Stern also designed beach resorts for Disney World in Florida, and his firm developed the master plan for the infamous Disney “new town” of Celebration. He had a wide range of projects, designing the George W Bush Center in Dallas, the Museum of the American Revolution and the 58-story Comcast Center in Philadelphia.

Small and with a high voice, Stern wore pocket squares, suede loafers, buttery yellow socks and tailored suits in chalk stripes. Modernism was not one of his interests. “Many modernist works of our time tend to be important objects, and that’s a real problem I have,” he told the New York Times in 2007. “Buildings can be icons or objects, but they still have to engage with a larger whole.

“I’m not considered avant-garde because I’m not avant-garde. But there is a parallel world – that of excellence.”