20 Years of NYC Architecture Across 1500 Pages
Architecture Books – Week 44/2025
This newsletter for the week of October 27 heads to New York for the much-anticipated sixth and final installment in Robert A.M. Stern’s series of books on the history of architecture and urbanism in New York City over the last century and a half. New York 2020: Architecture and Urbanism at the Beginning of a New Century was written by Stern with David Fishman and Jacob Tilove, and is published this week by Monacelli Press. This Book of the Week is accompanied by Stern’s 2022 autobiography at the bottom of the newsletter, while the usual headlines and new releases are in between. Happy reading!
Book of the Week:
New York 2020: Architecture and Urbanism at the Beginning of a New Century, by Robert A.M. Stern, David Fishman and Jacob Tilove (Buy from Monacelli Press / from Amazon / from Bookshop)
Released this week by Monacelli Press, New York 2020: Architecture and Urbanism at the Beginning of a New Century is the sixth and final title in architect Robert A.M. Stern’s magisterial series of books chronicling the architecture and urbanism of New York City over the last 150 years. Anyone familiar with the series knows at least a few obvious things about them: the books are big, ranging from around 500 to 1500 pages, with most of them over 1,000 pages; even though Stern usually gets all the credit, he has two named co-authors on each title (in this case RAMSA associates David Fishman and Jacob Tilove); and a fair amount of the word count in each book is quoted commentary from architecture critics writing about the buildings the trio otherwise treat with a predominantly objective but still colorful lens. Having been in anticipation of the latest installment of the series since hearing, in late 2017, that it would in fact be happening, one of my first thoughts actually veered to this last characteristic of the series: How will a book incorporating critical voices work when newspapers have eliminated their positions and architecture criticism has migrated to blogs, first, and then to social media?
Turns out I needn’t have worried, because the two-decade period covered by New York 2020—from the events of September 11, 2001, to the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020—still featured enough critical voices in the page of the New York Times, New York Magazine, Bloomberg, and other print venues to give the authors plenty of fodder, in turn giving readers a sense of how the thousands of buildings featured in the book were critically received upon their unveilings. Familiar critics such as Paul Goldberger at The New Yorker, Nicolai Ourossoff and Michael Kimmelman at the New York Times, Justin Davidson at New York Magazine, Martin Filler at New York Review of Books, James Russell at Bloomberg, and Michael Sorkin at a bevy of publications are found in abundance, as are less familiar names like Michael J. Lewis, Fred Bernstein, Carter Horsley, and Steve Cuzzo, whose “typical role” at the New York Post, the authors write in their occasionally biting prose, “[is] as a cheerleader for new development.” This men’s club is offset, occasionally and therefore only slightly, by a few female voices, including Alexandra Lange, Julie V. Iovine, and Karrie Jacobs. I was surprised and flattered to find myself in the book, both in the introduction and sporadically throughout the book, with quotes pulled from my 2011 book, Guide to Contemporary New York City Architecture—not an overtly critical book but one that benefited in this case by covering buildings the critics above didn’t take the time to weigh in on.
Most readers will surely delve into the hefty book (nearly 1,500 pages, including notes and index) with its nearly 100-page introduction, which is discussed a little later, but one section that foregrounds how New York 2020 is part of a lineage of five other equally expansive and exhaustive tomes is devoted to 57th Street. Also known as Billionaires’ Row, the wide street saw the realization of the five slender residential supertalls that are featured, left to right, on the book’s cover and in the photo below: 432 Park Avenue (2015) by Rafael Viñoly, 111 West 57th Street (2022) by SHoP Architects, One57 (2013) by Christian de Portzamparc, Central Park Tower (2021) by AS+GG, and Robert A. M. Stern’s 220 Central Park South (2019). The last, while one block north of 57th Street, was “intimately tied to the street’s evolution because of a complex agreement” over Central Park Tower’s sightlines to Central Park.
A one-page introduction to the 57th Street section in the “Midtown” chapter provides a rapid, 150-year history of the thoroughfare’s architecture, appropriately referencing the earlier books in the endnotes. Readers, like myself, who own the whole series can look at Mary Mason Jones’s Marble Row townhouses in New York 1880: Architecture and Urbanism in the Gilded Age (Monacelli, 1999; ironically the fourth book published in the series) then pull New York 1900: Metropolitan Architecture and Urbanism 1890-1915 (Rizzoli, 1983) off the shelf to look at Cass Gilbert’s Rodin Studios. Among other buildings, Cross & Cross’s “palatial” Tiffany’s is one of the 57th Street buildings in New York 1930: Architecture and Urbanism Between the Two World Wars (Rizzoli, 1988), SOM’s “artistically provocative” 9 West 57th Street is found in New York 1960: Architecture and Urbanism Between the Second World War and the Bicentennial (Monacelli, 1995), and Christian de Portzampac’s LVMH Tower is a highlight of New York 2000: Architecture and Urbanism Between the Bicentennial and the Millennium (Monacelli, 2006).
Looking back at these and other buildings referenced from the earlier books makes clear the consistencies and differences across the six titles. The rigid scholarship and incorporation of critical voices, as mentioned above, is fairly stable, as is the abundant high-quality photography, with most buildings discussed given at least one photograph or other illustration. The biggest difference is the organization: a shift from typological chapters in the first three books to geographical chapters in the last three books. This is a sensible change, given how the city filled up over these 150 years, thereby making coverage of distant neighborhoods and the outer boroughs necessary, and, to a lesser degree, how larger, mixed-use projects arising in the postwar years complicated long-entrenched typological distinctions. Curiously, within New York 1930’s typological organization is just one geographical section, “Fifty-seventh Street: New York’s Rue de la Paix,” which discusses the thoroughfare’s development but also points readers to the index to find the buildings “in greater detail elsewhere in this book.” Inadvertently perhaps, it seems Stern and company knew something of the street’s importance decades before developers gobbled up unused air rights to fashion the skyline-altering supertalls.
Instead of jumping to page 727 and the Fifty-seventh Street section described above, I began my reading of New York 2020 with the introduction. Mind you, given their length, this and the five other books in the series are hardly cover-to-cover reads; I see them as well-written and -composed reference books that provide small, informative reads on particular buildings, places, and typologies in the individual chapters and sections within them. Given each book’s length and breadth, the introductions are vital in describing, among other things, the arcs of the decades involved, the political players shaping the city, and the major pieces of physical infrastructure that don’t fall neatly into the ensuing chapters.
For New York 2020 that means talking about Michael R. Bloomberg, NYC’s mayor for a little more than half of the book’s chronological sweep. Voted into office on November 6, 2001, two months after the terrorist attacks on September 11, Bloomberg managed to reshape the city’s skyline, shorelines, streets, and parks more than anyone since Robert Moses, who did so without holding public office. Think of any building or landscape built in the city this century and most likely Bloomberg was involved with it, directly through one of the city’s departments, via the numerous rezonings affecting large swaths of all five boroughs, or through a general attitude that elevated the importance of the city’s built fabric. Bloomberg’s focus on the physical infrastructure of the city was unparalleled and is still being felt today, even though his successors—Bill de Blasio and Eric Adams—did not share this focus. Fittingly, the lengthy introduction covers Bloomberg’s three terms at length, setting the scene for the ten chapters and 1,200 pages that follow.
Even longer than the introduction is the first chapter, “World Trade Center,” devoted to the rebuilding of the 16-acre site in Lower Manhattan following the September 11 attacks. Across 116 pages, Stern and company detail the destruction, clean up, architectural responses, masterplan and memorial competitions, and eventual rebuilding of the World Trade Center’s office space, retail, transportation facilities, and public realm, and the addition of a memorial and arts venue. Given the sweep of the destruction and necessary rebuilding, this chapter spans the whole timeframe of the book and can therefore serve as a miniature case study on the city’s development between 2001 and 2020. (In an ideal scenario, the rebuilding would have been completed by the time of the book’s publication, but 2WTC and 5WTC are still in the planning stages.) But the World Trade Center is extraordinary in the circumstances that made it a construction site and in the enormous public attention it was afforded, especially around the Innovative Design Study that began in summer 2002. As such, the amount of detail the authors expend on process over product is unique compared to the rest of the book.
While the World Trade Center has appropriately outsized coverage in New York 2020, other projects and parts of the city were especially important and are therefore treated at some length with their own sections within the geographical chapters. These include the elevated High Line park, Hudson Yards, the expansion of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), the transformation of Lincoln Center, and Columbia University’s expansion into West Harlem—all of which happen to involve, in small or large part, Diller Scofidio + Renfro—as well as The Bowery, Hudson River Park, Times Square, Roosevelt Island, Atlantic Yards, Brooklyn Bridge Park, Long Island City, and the South Bronx, among other places touched by development.
The breadth of each book in the series means New York 2020 discusses thousands of buildings, not just the pivotal projects that have been covered at length elsewhere. (A few of the projects mentioned above, in addition to the World Trade Center and Billionaires’ Row, actually have books dedicated to them.) Yes, this means bland buildings are found in the book—and they are described as such by the authors, with or without the help of critics—but their inclusion helps paint a fuller portrait of the city’s physical transformation at the hands of architects, clients, and the government. Making the portrait even fuller are the occasional unbuilt proposals like Eyebeam Museum of Art and Technology (yet another DS+R project), temporary art and architectural installations, and buildings and (especially) interiors no longer with us. Just as the five previous books in the series provide the equivalent of long-exposure snapshots of their eras, New York 2020 does the same, exhaustively describing the projects, large and small, of the Bloomberg era bookended by its generation-defining disasters.
Books Released This Week:
(In the United States; a curated list)
Rewriting Alberti, by Peter Eisenman, Pier Vittorio Aureli, Mario Carpo and Daniel Sherer (Buy from MIT Press / from Amazon / from Bookshop) — “A fresh, groundbreaking analysis of renowned Renaissance architect Leon Battista Alberti’s five built works, suggesting a new relationship of form to meaning.”
Urban Design: The Basics, by Tim Heath and Florian Wiedmann (Buy from Routledge / from Amazon / from Bookshop) — “[A] brief but compelling overview and introduction to the theory and practice of the multi-disciplinary field of urban design.”
More Than One: Gio Ponti, edited by Manfredo di Robilant and Manuel Orazi (Buy from Artbook/DAP [US distributor for Lars Müller Publishers] / from Amazon / from Bookshop) — “The bestselling volume on the multifaceted career of one of the leading figures in Italian Modernism, now in English.”
Fenix: A Museum as Metaphor, by Anne Kremers, Ma Yansong, et. al. (Buy from Artbook/DAP [US distributor for Skira] / from Amazon / from Bookshop) — “A new museum [designed by Ma Yansong/MAD] in the heart of Rotterdam dedicated to stories of human migration throughout history.”
Exiled in L.A.: The Untold Story of Leopold Fischer’s Domestic Architecture, by Volker M. Welter (Buy from Getty / from Amazon / from Bookshop) — “The first English-language volume to explore the work of architect Leopold Fischer, and the inaugural study of his California legacy.”
Olle Lundberg: An Architecture of Craft (Buy from PA Press / from Amazon / from Bookshop) — “A monograph on the work of San Francisco architect Olle Lundberg, with a foreword by Andy Goldsworthy.”
Up in the Air: A History of High Rise Britain, by Holly Smith (Buy from Verso / from Amazon / from Bookshop) — “How the High-Rise Tower Block came to symbolize the welfare state, and what went wrong—from an award-winning historian.”
Tall Wood Buildings: Design, Construction and Performance (Third and expanded edition), by Michael Green and Jim Taggart (Buy from Publisher / from Amazon / from Bookshop) — “For this expanded edition, a new outlook chapter has been added as well as eight cutting-edge projects…”
Concrete, mon amour: The Raw Imprint of Modernism, by Stefano Perego (Buy from Gestalten / from Amazon / from Bookshop) — “A photographic exploration of modernism’s fearless ambition and enduring impact.”
Full disclosure: As an Amazon Associate, AbeBooks Affiliate, and Bookshop.org Affiliate, I earn commissions from qualifying purchases made via any relevant links above and below.
Book News:
If you’re in NYC tomorrow evening, the Cooper Union is holding a panel discussion, “Plug In, Fold Out, Pop Up: Publishing as Architecture,” a companion to its current Archigram: Making a Facsimile exhibition that documents DAP and Designer & Books’ facsimile edition of Archigram’s legendary magazines. Not in NYC? You can watch the panel discussion via Zoom.
“Is Architecture a Language? No. It’s Like Language”: Mark Alan Hewitt reviews George Lakoff and Srini Narayanan’s The Neural Mind: How Brains Think at Common Edge.
I’m a big fan of buying books directly from publishers, rather than via Amazon, especially when the publishers have deep discounts, like Princeton University Press, which is offering 70% on selected titles until October 31.
I’m also a big fan of architect Luis Burriel’s Instagram feed, especially the photos he takes inside books from his ever-expanding library. Book number 1551, Onno Blase’s Scheve Palen (slanted posts), is especially clever:
From the Archives:
In my review of Robert A.M. Stern’s 2022 autobiography, Between Memory and Invention: My Journey in Architecture, I focused on Stern’s influence on architecture via means outside of his architectural practice: publications, mainly, but also teaching and even broadcasting. Below is an excerpt from my review.
Robert A. M. Stern is exceptional, in my mind, for the way he has managed to take on many different roles and produce many different things—all at an equally high level of quality and intensity. He is an architect who can boast of one of the most successful practices in New York City, due in large part to a spate of luxury apartment buildings but also universities, public buildings, and other projects well beyond Manhattan. He is a historian and author, but not one with the occasional essay here and there; he has written around ten books (books beyond RAMSA monographs, I should note), some of them substantial tomes and partially listed at bottom. And he is an educator, but beyond the teaching that many architects undertake, he notably served as dean of Yale’s School of Architecture for nearly twenty years: from 1998 to 2016, succeeding Fred Koetter and preceding Deborah Berke. For sure, he has not donned those hats alone—his eponymous firm is 200 strong and many of his books are written with other scholars—but somehow Stern has managed to corral the efforts of those around him into a substantial and diverse body of work bearing his name; one that, in the retrospective glance afforded by this autobiography, has clearly made a stronger stamp on American architecture over the last half century than most other architects.
[…]
So, what did Stern write, edit, and curate that made him so influential? It all started with the double issue of Perspecta, the student-run journal of the Yale School of Architecture that he edited in 1965, his last year there as a grad student (his undergrad was at Columbia). The most notable contributions to Perspecta 9/10 are Charles Moore’s “You Have to Pay for the Public Life” and excerpts from Robert Venturi’s then-forthcoming Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture, which was written in 1962 but wouldn’t be published by MoMA until 1966. These two pieces, accompanied by projects in addition to their texts, take up about one-third of the 336 page issue, which overall is a reaction against orthodox modernism and is indicative of the fortuitous timing of Stern’s education on the hinge between modern and postmodern architecture. Although Venturi’s book would come out one year later and Moore’s essay would be reprinted in other books, including one of the same name, the large-format double issue remains a desirable artifact for any architect purporting to have a decent library, myself included.
Stern’s embrace of alternatives to modern architecture would lead him to eventually edit such publications as a special edition of A+U in 1981, American Architecture: After Modernism, and to be involved in, among other things, both the 1976 Venice Biennale, when architecture made a tentative entrance into the exhibition, and the first Venice Architecture Biennale in 1980, when Paolo Portoghesi lined the Arsenale with facades designed by Stern and other postmodern architects. Before these undertakings, immediately after graduating from Yale, Stern served as the inaugural J. Clawson Mills Fellow at the Architectural League of New York, at the prodding of Philip Johnson, whom he befriended while at Yale. Influenced by George Howe, whom he studied at Yale and would eventually write a book about, Stern resurrected the format of Howe’s 40 Under 40 exhibition displayed at the League in 1941, pulling together forty young architects with a “diversity of expression” for the 1966 exhibition and catalog. A few years later came Stern’s first book, New Directions in American Architecture, part of a series put out by George Braziller.
A more pronounced shift toward postmodernism and then eventually “modern traditionalism” occurred in May 1973, when Stern was one of the “Grays” in Architectural Forum’s “Five on Five” issue. His contribution, “Stompin’ at the Savoye,” was one of five articles that countered Five Architects, the 1972 book featuring projects by Peter Eisenman, Michael Graves, Charles Gwathmey, John Hejduk, and Richard Meier, with an introduction by Colin Rowe; according to Stern, his essay “raised the most hackles.” The hackle-raising nature of Stern’s criticism — combined with his strong network of social and professional connections — made him the suitable choice for a PBS documentary series that aired in 1986. Pride of Place: Building the American Dream, with its companion publication, was Stern’s “personal view” of American architecture more than an objective overview of the same; it is also one of the rare TV series devoted to architecture, a subject barely on the radar of even the most educated watcher of public television. Other publications include, most notably, the New York series documenting New York’s architecture and urbanism from the end of the Civil War to 2000—and finally to the near-present, when a planned sixth one is published as early as next year.
[…]
Thank you for subscribing to A Weekly Dose of Architecture Books. If you have any comments or questions, or if you have your own book that you want to see in this newsletter, please respond to this email, or comment below if you’re reading this online. All content is freely available, but paid subscriptions that enable this newsletter to continue are welcome — thank you!
— John Hill
One of your best issues yet! Thank you.