As the world's financial and cultural capital, New York demands the best in innovative architectural design, balancing the pressure to build with the need to preserve the historic fabric of the city. Author Robert A. M. Stern and his colleagues trace the rise and fall of the real estate market, the impact of the designation of historic districts and new zoning on development, and the emergence of new commercial and residential centers. Organized geographically, this survey moves north from Lower Manhattan to Harlem and on to study the Bronx, Queens, Brooklyn, and Staten Island.

New York 2000 documents the milestones in the city's architectural history--the development of Battery Park City, the rebirth of Harlem and Times Square, the creation of the cultural precinct around the new MoMA, the reclaiming of the waterfront along the East and Hudson Rivers as recreational parkland--and celebrates the achievements of internationally recognized architects including Sir Norman Foster, Cesar Pelli, Richard Meier, and Renzo Piano....

This is the fourth volume in architect and historian Robert A. M. Stern's monumental series of documentary studies of New York City architecture and urbanism. The three previous books in the series, New York 1900, New York 1930, and New York 1960, have comprehensively covered the architects and urban planners who defined New York over the course of the twentieth century.

In this volume, Stern turns back to 1880 -- the end of the Civil War, the beginning of European modernism -- to trace the earlier history of the city. This dynamic era saw the technological advances and acts of civic and private will that formed the identity of New York City as we know it today. The installation of water, telephone, and electricity infrastructures as well as the advent of electric lighting, the elevator, and mass transit allowed the city to grow both out and up. The office building and apartment house types were envisioned and defined, changing the ways that New Yorkers worked and lived. Such massive public projects as the Brooklyn Bridge and Central Park became realities, along with such private efforts as Grand Central Station.

Like the other three volumes, New York 1880 is an in-depth presentation of the buildings and plans that transformed New York from a harbor town into a world-class metropolis. A broad range of primary sources -- critics and writers, architects, planners, city officials -- brings the time period to life and allows the city to tell its own complex story. The book is generously illustrated with over 1,200 archival photographs, which show the city as it was, and as some parts of it still are....

Architecture should be an affirmation of place—that is, the physical product of a truly environmentally responsive approach. To work with the place and its traditions is not to be trapped in a dull set of conventions. The tension between timeless ways and the all-too-timely circumstances that call a new building into being should lead to a vital architecture. The tension between the past and the presence of the past should foster an architecture more culturally resonant than one that is either is all about the past or all about the present. —Robert A. M. Stern

Robert A. M. Stern is dedicated to the synthesis of tradition and innovation. In more than thirty-five years of practice, he has produced a wide range of building types with a variety of stylistic influences, all inspired by the great legacy of American architecture. His firm, Robert A. M. Stern Architects, was first recognized for its distinguished houses, and residential design remains the cornerstone of the practice. This beautifully illustrated monograph—a companion to the best-selling Robert A. M. Stern: Houses—presents twenty-six of the firm's most memorable houses.

Located in diverse settings across North America—from a valley in Colorado with sweeping views of the Aspen mountains, to a bluff overlooking Long Island Sound, to an island off the coast of British Columbia—these remarkable houses reveal the architect's emphasis on the importance of context and his dedication to exploring the nature of place. Each house invokes the vernacular architectural heritage particular to its region, while gracefully reflecting its unique natural surroundings. Whether they are shingle style "cottages" by the sea, colonial Georgian country estates, or elegant Regency designs, Stern's houses are unique both for their timelessness and their ability to evoke a conversation with the past—a dialogue he believes lies at the heart of architecture....