People have a wide variety of fetishes: money, power, Munger, feet. There was a kid from Brooklyn, however, who fetishized a rock. His obsession with that rock was so all-encompassing and so passionately expressed at the highest levels of architecture that eventually, the toniest of buyers – and by extension real estate developers – fetishized it too.

Robert A.M. Stern died on Thanksgiving day at the age of 86. We’ll leave the architecture reviews & comprehensive obits to those more qualified – start w/ the Robert McFadden special here and WaPo’s more design-focused one here. What we’ll say is that in the last 2 decades, if you were a New York condo developer hoping to lure the most exacting (read: deepest-pocketed) buyers, it was almost malpractice to not seriously consider Stern’s eponymous studio, RAMSA, to design the thing. His collaboration with the Brothers Zeckendorf at 15 Central Park West ushered in a new era in Manhattan luxury living; it was the first time that a condo had bested the pre-war co-ops such as 740 Park as the ultimate symbol of having made it. The project was widely considered to be the most successful new development in the history of New York. That is, until it was bested by another RAMSA joint, Vornado’s 220 Central Park South, which by ‘20 had crossed $1B in profit (check out our collab w/ the B1M on the incredible backstory of that project here.) His beloved limestone facades captured monied Manhattan in all its golden-hour glory: "Limestone works more beautifully in the sunshine than any other material,” he once said. Developers were falling all over themselves to hire Stern for their moonshots, and rather than stand out, the goal was to blend in - the funniest example of this is when publications would routinely confuse renderings of 220 and the Zeckendorfs’ 520 Park.

And it wasn’t just the top-shelf product on the park: Ziel Feldman tapped RAMSA for the condo conversion of the Belnord, with his HFZ Capital eyeing a record sellout for the UWS. The RAMSA name eventually became an imprimatur of understated ultra-luxury nationally; Jorge Pérez’s Related Group hired the firm to design Miami’s answer to 220, and its Shore Club project for Witkoff has at least one unit in contract for a staggering $11K+/ 🦶. That figure, perhaps coincidentally, is also the blended pricing 😶‍🌫 Miki Naftali is shooting for at his upcoming RAMSA-designed moonshot at 800 Fifth Ave.

Stern became one of the most important advocates of his own profession. “We’re much more interesting than movie stars and much more important, and what we do is much more enduring,” he once said. But what really took it up a notch was that partly through his efforts, displaying an educated passion for architecture became almost a necessity for developers wanting to capture the high-end market: glam shots of developers poring over designs and waxing eloquent at architecture retrospectives weren’t really a thing until Stern came along.

Stern was also ½ of one of the best pieces of new development content marketing we’ve seen.

“Look at what we’re going to have, Larry!” Stern exclaims while glancing out at the Tribeca skyline.
“Yes,” replies Larry Silverstein with a chuckle and a shoulder pat. The 2 boys from Brooklyn then hop into a vintage black Mercedes, and zip about the city.

“There’s just nothing like it,” Stern marvels, looking over New York. He’s right, of course, and he’s a part of why. Enjoy the drawing up there, Bob - you will be missed. - HS