1 · POSITION
Architect, historian and for eighteen years dean at Yale. His practice’s 30 Park Place holds the Four Seasons Hotel New York Downtown — LHL-H-002 — above which sit the residences that made the tower’s economics work.
2 · WHY HE IS IN THE LIBRARY
Stern supplied the visual grammar the branded-residence business needed. His towers argue that the pre-war Manhattan apartment building was right the first time — limestone, setbacks, a lobby with a floor — and that argument turned out to be worth a premium per square foot that modernist towers could not command. Part VII exists because buildings like this one made the model bankable.
3 · WHAT THIS MODEL DOES NOT SOLVE
A new building that borrows the manners of 1929 is open to the charge that it borrows the authority too, and that the premium is paid for association rather than for quality. The Library records the model’s commercial success and the criticism together, without resolving which is the better account of it.