Robert A.M. Stern & Frank Gehry R.I.P.

No category

The American dream has always depended on the dialogue between the present and the past. Robert A. M. Stern

Architecture should speak of its time and place, but yearn for timelessness. Frank GehryThe

A couple of days ago, I got a text from Beth Stelluto, saying, “So sorry to read that one of your architectural heroes died. 96wow! Love his creativity.” I texted back, “And Robert A. M. Stern died two weeks ago.” The exchange started me thinking about Stern and Gehry and how much they, in particular, and architecture in general have enriched my life, which led me into the infinite rabbit hole of the World Wide Web and the realization of how much of their work I missed and how much they have formed our world.

To start at the end, the world of architecture, all of us really, lost two of our most influential architects recently: Robert A. M. Stern, who died on November 27, 2025, at 86, and Frank Gehry, who died on December 5, 2025, at 96. Each began their careers at the high-water mark of Mid-Century Modernism, and each reacted in entirely different ways to the great majority of their fellow architects. They ostensibly ended up occupying opposite ends of the design spectrum – one, Stern, almost a classical architect until you look closely, and the other, Gehry, pushing Mid-Century Modernism into sculpture – were both ultimately committed to the same thing: making buildings that absolutely demanded to be seen, discussed, and remembered, enriching our world. For almost diametrically different reasons, they are two of my favorite architects.

Robert A. M. Stern became the master of pre-Mid-Century Modern (for the lack of a better definition). He was born in Brooklyn in 1939 and built his architectural practice on the idea that buildings should be contextual and honor the site’s longer cultural lineage. Stern wasn’t a nostalgic purist, but, in his own way, a rebel who asserted that elegance and history were vital components of contemporary urban life. His aesthetic was rooted in echoes of the past and a desire to fit in, as seen in his limestone-clad, 550-foot-high residential tower at 15 Central Park West in Manhattan (on the far left, below).

Except that he never changed his name, Robert A. M. Stern reminds me a lot of Ralph Lauren (and, believe me, that’s a compliment). Both were outsiders who took the establishment’s worn-out accoutrements and revitalised them; in other words, both got rich catering to the bourgeoisie ( bourgeoisie in the Marxist context of the capitalist class who own most of society’s wealth and means of production as opposed to the proletariat). I went to a lecture at, I think, an AIA conference about thirty years ago when Stern was the featured speaker. One of the shocking things he said was that more than fifty percent of his commissions had no budget for either architecture or construction.

Frank Gehry, born Ephraim Owen Goldberg in Toronto in 1929, was a revolutionary who spent years designing modest shopping centers, designed and built on budget, before his creative explosion. It wasn’t until the transformative remodeling of his own Santa Monica home, using a chain-link fence and corrugated metal, that he began to show his talent. He went on to become one of the most influential architects of our time, forever reshaping skylines with his striking, sculptural works, such as the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, the Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles, and 8 Spruce Street in Manhattan.

Looking at these two buildings in New York, the classic facade of the Stern condo, and the rippling curves of the Gehry apartment, these two titans of architecture, for all their differences, represented the full, rich spectrum of American architecture. Robert A. M. Stern and Frank Gehry built different worlds, one of dignified grace echoing the past and the other pushing design freedom, both leaving behind a profound and lasting legacy. We’ll miss them.

Finally, here are a couple of their building that I don’t think need architectural identification.

On the road to Yangshou

China, No category

Back in 2009, Michele and I flew from Guangzhou, China, to Guilin, China, and then traveled by car to Yangshou. Guangzhou and the surrounding cities, like Hong Kong, make up the largest metropolitan area in the world with about 70 million people. It is modern and cosmopolitan. The airport was surreal: huge, gorgeous, clean, busy; all under one huge, vaulted space. The flight was about an hour: takeoff, a long level-off period, long enough to pass out some sort of nut thing, and then landing. The Guilin airport was back to another, older China. Sort of like what I imagine the Bakersfield airport to be like.

Our hotel had arranged to pick us up at the airport, and we had an hour drive on the new toll road to Yangshou. The scenes – without the power poles – on the drive were classic Chinese watercolors (on steroids).

The very smoggy, extraordinary landscape felt ancient. For millions of years, it has seen change come and go, the great majority of that time before we even existed as a species. Four hundred million years ago, this area was a huge inland sea. For fifty million years or so, shelled sea creatures lived and died in this sea, sinking to the bottom, forming an almost 10,000-foot-deep hard layer of limestone. About 250 to 200 million years ago, as the whole mess was moving north across the equator, the Yangtze Plate bumped into the North China Plate, raising this area, drying out the lake, and turning the new landscape into dry land.

Later, much later, from about 40 million years ago to today, the Indian Plate, at the end of its wander from somewhere near South Africa, plowed into the Eurasian Plate, creating the Himalayas. The ripple effect from this event, almost 2,000 miles away, pushed this region up even further, to be shaped by weathering and erosion driven by heavy monsoon rains.

For most of the recorded history of China – of the world, really – this area was only known from legends and paintings. It was always too remote, across too many rivers, through too much not-friendly territory for many people to make the journey. But now Yangshou is only two hours away, by plane and toll road, from a megacity of 70 million souls. It was adjusting rapidly.

“To Change The Subject”

China, No category

We are always the same age inside. Gertrude Stein

…but not on the outside. me

My first business partner was Sam Berland, and he had two pet peeves: people who said “Consences of opinion” because consences already includes opinion, and people who said “not to change the subject” and then changed the subject of the conversation. I used to argue with him on the use of the second peeve. And now, maybe forty years later, I think he might have been right. In my defense, when Sam and I owned bas in the 1970s, Sam liked to hold a weekly staff meeting. Like a lot of City Council meetings I’ve sat through, the staff meetings would often get bogged down by unimportant details to avoid the real problems. I would try to change the subject, not to change the subject, per se, from what seemed unimportant to me, but to what I considered actually important.

In this case, I want to change the subject away from what I think are the important issues of our time to something much less important, a trip to China 16 years ago. Issues like Ukraine is locked in a war of attrition with Russia (that Ukraine is either winning or losing, depending on where we get our information and what that particular commentator originally predicted). Issues like Trump running amok, or Trump and Epstein having sex with young children, or even whether Taylor Swift is really writing a screenplay inspired by her relationship with Travis Kelce, are all more important than an old trip to China.

Well, maybe not more important to me, but more reported on. I want to re-post on Michele and my trip to China twenty-six years ago for three reasons. When I first started this blog, I was using a platform called Typepad, which is now defunct, and I read that everything I blogged will soon be permanently deleted (shortly after I started blogging, at Michele’s prompting, I switched to WordPress as my platform, so most of this blog will stay around). When we went to China, we were twenty-six years younger, and much of that trip was to areas that would be much harder, if not impossible, for me to do today. Lastly, I process my photographs with Adobe Lightroom, which has vastly improved over the last twenty-six years, and I want to reprocess the pictures taken in China in 2009, when it was incredibly smoggy, making the photographs flat and grey.

In 2009, we flew into Hong Kong with no reservations except for a hotel reservation for the first night and tickets to fly out of Shanghai three weeks later (which, even then, was easier than it sounds because of the internet). I’m going to skip repeating Hong Kong and Shanghai because they are cities and, while very different than San Francisco or New York, or Paris, for that matter, are still very familiar with streets bordered by sidewalks and lots of buildings with stores on the ground level. The two things on our agenda were the karst formations around Guilin and the Li River and the Zhangjiajie area’s canyons, which we had read were similar to Zion National Park.

This photographic remembrance of our trip to those areas starts somewhere between Guilin and Yangshou.

Burying The Lede And ….Awww!!! Is Anything On The Web Real?

No category

As part of an innovative regional protection program, AAA is providing a limited number of Premier Roadside Assistance Collections to residents in your area.

Since last May, my life has pretty much revolved around my bladder cancer. Actually, it is more accurate to say that since last August, after two relatively painless surgeries, my physical life has pretty much revolved around the cure for my bladder cancer, not the cancer itself.

My body is still reacting – overreacting in my humble opinion -to past BCG-TICE treatments. In a way that seems almost random, the pain moves around. Yesterday, my shoulder was stiff, and the pain slowly moved up my neck to give me a headache. Today, my right hand is sore and weak. The pain, where and how much, has taken over my life. It seems to always be there.

A side effect of this is that I spend hours scrolling on my computer, waiting for my hands and arms to hurt less so I can pay more attention to something else, anything else. Gemini tells me that this scrolling aimlessly even has a name, Zombie Scrolling Syndrome: This term was coined to describe the effects of cell phone addiction, specifically “mindless scrolling out of habit, with no real destination or benefit.”

All the above is true, but it was written three days ago. Over the weekend, after being off BCG-TICE for three weeks, everything is calming down (relatively speaking, my shoulders and neck still hurt). More importantly, my doctor thinks I am cancer-free. I know I should scream, I”M CANCER-FREE, but it seems too early for that. My next cancer checkup is in three months, and then, maybe, I’ll start yelling.

In the meantime, all that scrolling has changed my opinion of the internet. It no longer seems like the repository of all the world’s information. I have learned that my web portal, and probably everybody’s portal, is stuffed with scams and misinformation.

About three weeks ago, give or take a couple of weeks, I got an email saying I would be getting a gift. All I had to do was go to the AAA website. Well, it wasn’t actually the website; the website was something like AAA.gift, and Google told me that it was a possible scam and to stay away (in slightly more time than it took Michele to yell from across the room, “Don’t go there,” after I commented on our gift).

The next day, I got another email from – allegedly – AAA with the same offer. Since then, I’ve been getting essentially the same offer – allegedly, again – from a variety of companies, many of which I have no relationship with. Today, I got basically the same email that started with Hello valued Tractor Supply member (what are the chances of getting a hit on that in Coastal California?).

Way before I was sent that probable scam, over in YouTube land, I saw a video – my feed is very heavy in cat videos – that showed a hero cat. It sure looked real to me then, and it still does.

Recently, I saw this cute interaction. Although I’ve never had a cat like this, and I’ve had seven, it seems real

Then I saw this.

Then I saw this with the bear sort of running through the fence at the end.

This short clip, clearly marked “AI”, seemed very real.

Now, looking at the first video, I’m far from sure it’s real. First, it starts with a shot of the dog from the other side of the car. How did that happen?

Now I think that trusting the web is a little like trusting a random stranger. They may be telling the truth, but don’t bet on it.

Odds and Ends

Americana, Current Affairs, Politics, Psychological Musings

I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in the stride toward freedom is not the White Citizens Councillor or the Ku Klux Klanner but the white moderate who is more devoted to order than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says, “I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I can’t agree with your methods of direct action”; who paternalistically feels that he can set the timetable for another man’s freedom; who lives by the myth of time; and who constantly advises the Negro to wait until a “more convenient season.” Shallow understanding from people of goodwill is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. An excerpt from Letter from Birmingham Jail by Martin Luther King, Jr., where he was imprisoned as a participant in a nonviolent demonstration in August of 1963.

I’ve grown up thinking that the Democrats were liberals, but I was only half right. The Democratic Party during my growing-up years was Fiscally Liberal with Social Security and Medicare, and, except for President Lyndon Johnson and a few others, controlled by the socially conservative southern Committee leaders. Just as the world has changed since I was growing up, so has the Democratic Party changed. It happened right in front of my eyes, and I didn’t even see it. Today’s Democrats are Socially Liberal and Fiscally Conservative. There are outliers like Ocasio-Cortez and a few others who are both Fiscally Liberal and Socially Liberal, but the Party, en masse, is Fiscally Conservative.

On the other hand, according to Anthony Scaramucci, Trump says his supporters are Fiscally Liberal and Socially Conservative. Not counting, I guess, rich tech entrepreneurs who Trump keeps around with big tax breaks and are fiscally conservative and socially liberal.

We live in a society where money has become so important that it demands special treatment. By that, I mean money – and making money – has the status of being more holy than secular. When Trump threatened to have the U.S. Federal Communications Commission unapprove a major merger between Paramount Global, which owned CBS, and Skydance Media, a deal that many in the media said was contingent on appeasing Trump by firing the late-night comedian, Stephen Colbert, over his anti-Trump comedy, the media didn’t blame CBS or Paramount Global. The general attitude was along the lines of They had no choice.

The unspoken inference was They had no choice because it would cost their stockholders money, and that is of a higher value than doing the right thing. The unspoken part of the inference, BTW, is that the top executives will get more money at the expense of employees further down the totem pole. – I think that the Right Thing, the right choice, the moral choice, is to say “We believe in freedom of speech, which we have a moral obligation to protect and is guaranteed by the First Amendment, especially in political commentary, even though it may cost us money; therefore, we will not bow to political pressure.”

Sort of on the same subject, a couple of days ago, I heard William J. Haynes II interviewed on NPR. Hayes was with the Bush Administration on 9-11 and was one of the people, along with the more infamous John Yoo and Alberto Gonzales, who gave Bush the Younger political cover on attacking Afghanistan after the attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

Haynes was being interviewed on the Trump Administration’s use of the US Military for a strike on at least four vessels that originated from Venezuela, killing more than twenty people. The pretense was that the boats were smuggling drugs into the US, drugs that have “killed more people than have died in the World Trade Center attack”.

Haynes thought the use of the US Military to attack the boats was illegal. I don’t remember exactly why, or how, but, somehow, Haynes came up with because al-Qaeda was attacking us with intent to harm us, they were a legitiment military target. The boats from Venezuela were not attacking us, even though their cargo killed lots of people; all they are trying to do is make money, so we couldn’t legally use our military.

Speaking of NPR, sort of, I noticed that their commentary is now better, more insisive without being partisan, than I am used to. I think this is because NPR is no longer receiving funding from the Government, and they no longer have the Government looking over their shoulder with the implied threat of cutting off their funds if they were too partisan.

A couple of months ago, every newspaper I read and almost everybody I talked to was outraged that Trump was going to cut off NPR’s funding. I don’t think most people, including people in the Trump Administration, were really thinking about what would happen if NPR funding were cut off; they were just reacting to Trump, ad hominem. Trump is a petty little man who is vindictive and seems to take pleasure in hurting people. He’s a punch down, kiss-ass up kind of guy, and it is very easy to be critical of everything he does, but sometimes, what he does is better for all of us, and I think making NPR truly independent is one of those times.