RIP Robert Stern
And be sure to follow our X account... soon
Clubland USA continues on a much-needed editorial holiday for this month. Please enjoy some of our past articles and feel free to share ideas for new ones.
(Yes, we’re working on an article about cigar-friendly clubs for those who’ve asked, both in-person and online.)
Next week, we will be releasing our X (or, for those of us traditionally minded, Twitter) account for your following. Feel free to send your first club hot takes and maybe we’ll tweet them out!
Ishaan Jajodia also shares a small memoriam to Robert Stern, architect and clubman extraordinaire, which can be found below.
RIP, Bob Stern
If you walked into a clubhouse in New York City or Boston around 1925, you could flip a coin: heads for McKim, Mead, and White, and tails, for everyone else. The dominance of the architecture firm amongst club architects was so significant that if you had to expand or build a clubhouse in the preceding decades, you would, without fail, turn to McKim, Mead, and White.
The University Club of New York and the Racquet and Tennis Club, only a few blocks away, were both McKim, Mead, and White buildings, as were the Harvard Club of New York City, the Metropolitan Club, the Century Club, the Colony Club, and the Harmonie Club.
If you’ve been around any of these buildings—you know the look, the style, the grace and the elan, amidst a steadfast grounding in authoritativeness. We treasured these buildings not only because of their architectural brilliance, but, also, by the time we came to inhabit them, the moment of their gilded splendor had long gone past us, replaced with a dull, drab steel and glass and concrete, a style that was found it utmost perfection in Minoru Yamasaki’s World Trade Centre and I. M. Pei’s iconic Louvre pyramid.
And then comes Robert A. M. Stern (1939–2025), who passed away earlier last week. Stern, the dean of Yale’s School of Architecture from 1998–2016, was a versatile architect who found acclaim across America and beyond it. He was the last of the surviving great American architects with New York City ties, from when Manhattan truly was the centre of the post-war world. And, if McKim, Mead, and White hadn’t happened, his firm, Robert A. M. Stern and Associates (RAMSA) would have become it, defining club life and the physical plant that we all treasure so dearly.
One of Stern’s most famous clubs is the Anglebrook Golf Club in Westchester County, New York. Looking at the dining room and the locker room, one would be hard put to think this to be a project completed in 1998. Nor does this belong to the Gilded Age, however, and to the love of the Beaux Arts that dominated it. The clubhouse is remarkably modern and elegant, without having the baroqueness of a revivalism.
Another Stern-designed club, the Kiawah Island Beach Club in Kiawah Island, South Carolina, bears the same hallmarks, trite as they seem to us to-day: modern yet decorative, simple yet elegant, and rooted in place.
Two other clubs—essentially residential clubhouses—that Stern and his firm are responsible for are Miami Beach, Florida’s Shore Club, currently under construction, and the Talisker Club Park in Park City, Utah, nestled in rolling hills, with an eye to Talisker Deer Valley.
All of Stern’s buildings have a sense of place and time. He drew from the Arts and the Crafts movement, from country estates, from Westchester golf clubhouses, and from everything high, low, and in between. And yet, to his credit, he managed to get it all right.
Let me put it this way: if I had to design a club, I would call Robert A. M. Stern. - IJ