Symposia
Putting Architecture in Its Place: Robert A.M. Stern and His Scholarship
The Yale School of Architecture will host a day-long symposium honoring former dean Robert A.M. Stern (1939–2025), who led the school from 1998 to 2016. This convening will reflect on Stern’s prolific scholarly output, reverence for history, and legacy as an educator.
Sessions will explore Stern’s formative experiences as a young architect, from his time at Yale as a student to the stylistic debates of the 1970s and ’80s, and investigate the long-held convictions that undergirded Stern’s scholarship and built work.
Organized by Edward P. Bass Dean and J.M. Hoppin Professor of Architecture Deborah Berke and Architectural Record managing editor Leopoldo Villardi, this symposium brings together academics and practitioners in the spirit of its titular subject. Participants include Barry Bergdoll, Joe Day, Melissa DelVecchio, Kyle Dugdale, Mark Foster Gage, Sam Jacob, Níall McLaughlin, Mary McLeod, Eeva-Liisa Pelkonen, M. Surry Schlabs, Robert Simonson, Jennifer Stone, A. Krista Sykes, and Graham Wyatt.
Symposium Schedule
All attendees must register for the symposium. Seating will be limited and registration does not guarantee a seat in the lecture hall. Overflow spaces will be available.
9:30–10:30 a.m.
Tours of Benjamin Franklin and Pauli Murray Colleges
(limited to first 60 registrants)
Melissa DelVecchio, Robert A.M. Stern Architects
Jennifer L. Stone, Robert A.M. Stern Architects
Graham Wyatt, Robert A.M. Stern Architects
Symposium Program
Robert L. McNeil, Jr. Lecture Hall
Yale University Art Gallery
1111 Chapel Street
New Haven, CT 06511
11:15 a.m.
Introductory Remarks
Deborah Berke, Edward P. Bass Dean and J.M. Hoppin Professor of Architecture, Yale University
11:30 a.m.
Talk: Apropos Robert A.M. Stern—The Making of an Architect
Leopoldo Villardi, Architectural Record
12:00 p.m.
Panel: The Anxiety of Influence
A. Krista Sykes, Harvard University
Joe Day, Southern California Institute of Architecture
Mary McLeod, Columbia University
Moderated by M. Surry Schlabs, Yale University
2:00 p.m.
Talk: Pluralism, with Style
Mark Foster Gage, Yale University
2:30 p.m.
Panel: Persistent Preoccupations
Barry Bergdoll, Columbia University
Sam Jacob, University of Applied Arts Vienna
Eeva-Liisa Pelkonen, Yale University
Moderated by Kyle Dugdale, Yale University
4:00 p.m.
Keynote Lecture: On Continuity
Níall McLaughlin, Níall McLaughlin Architects
4:45 p.m.
Talk: A History of the Vodka Martini
Robert Simonson, New York Times
Concluding Remarks
5:00 p.m.
Reception
Yale Architecture Gallery
Paul Rudolph Hall, Second Floor
190 York Street
New Haven, CT 06511
This symposium is supported by the J. Irwin Miller Endowment.
Speaker Biographies
Barry Bergdoll
Barry Bergdoll’s broad interests center on modern architectural history, with a particular emphasis on France and Germany since 1750. Trained in art history rather than architecture, he has an approach most closely allied with cultural history and the history and sociology of professions. He has studied questions of the politics of cultural representation in architecture, the larger ideological content of 19th-century architectural theory, and the changing role of both architecture as a profession and architecture as a cultural product in 19th-century European society. In exhibitions at the Canadian Centre for Architecture and at the Museum of Modern Art, where he served as Philip Johnson Chief Curator from 2007 to 2013, Bergdoll has offered a series of exhibitions intended to offer more inclusive visions of subjects from Mies van der Rohe (and his relationship to garden reform and landscape), the Bauhaus, Henri Labrouste, Le Corbusier, Latin American postwar architecture, and most recently Frank Lloyd Wright.
Bergdoll’s interests also include the intersections of architecture and new technologies of representations in the modern period, especially photography and film. He has worked on several film productions about architecture, in addition to curating numerous architecture exhibitions. He has written extensively on the history and problematics of exhibiting architecture, and the history of museological practices in relationship to architecture.
Joe Day
Joe Day is an architect and theorist in Los Angeles, where he leads Deegan-Day Design & Architecture and serves on the design faculty at the Southern California Institute of Architecture (SCI-Arc). In both his design and writing, Day explores how architecture orchestrates vision, especially at the intersections of contemporary art, urbanism, and cinema. In 2009, he contributed a new foreword to Reyner Banham’s seminal study, Los Angeles: Architecture of the Four Ecologies (UC Press), and in 2012 and 2022 taught at Yale School of Architecture as the Louis I. Kahn and Bishop Visiting Chairs.
Three monographs, Arrays (SCI-Arc, 2016), Forays (ORO, 2022), and Essays (Inventory Press, forthcoming) gather Day’s prolific diagramming, design, and writing, respectively. His Corrections & Collections: Architectures for Art and Crime (Routledge, 2013) examines new polarities in post-WWII institutions of exhibition and incarceration.
Kyle Dugdale
Kyle Dugdale is an architect and historian. He holds a degree in classics from Corpus Christi College, Oxford, a professional degree from Harvard’s Graduate School of Design, and a doctoral degree from Yale, where he was awarded the university’s Theron Rockwell Field Prize and was selected by School of Architecture students as recipient of the Professor King-lui Wu Teaching Award. A resident of New York City, he has practiced in London, Chicago, and New Haven, and has also taught at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation. At Yale he is active in both graduate and undergraduate programs.
Dugdale’s research has been supported by the Mellon Foundation, the John Hay Whitney Fellowship, the Harvey Fellows Program, and awards from the Society of Architectural Historians, the Bibliographical Society of America, and the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. He is a Senior Fellow in the Andrew W. Mellon Society of Fellows in Critical Bibliography.
Much of Dugdale’s writing and teaching has focused on architecture’s claims to metaphysical significance, with a particular interest in modernity’s monuments as markers of aspiration and belief. He is currently working on the future of classical architecture.
Dugdale’s work has been published in journals including Architectural Record, Classicist, Clog, Image, Journal of Architectural Education, Perspecta, Thresholds, Utopian Studies, and Wolkenkuckucksheim. He is author of Babel’s Present (Standpunkte, 2016), co-editor of Towers in the City (Yale School of Architecture, 2021), and author of the monograph Architecture After God (Birkhäuser, 2023). His most recent book, for a broader readership, is Coloring the White House (White House Historical Association, 2025).
Mark Foster Gage
Mark Foster Gage is an architect, theorist, and Associate Professor at the Yale School of Architecture. He is principal of Mark Foster Gage Architects, whose commissions have included projects for Lady Gaga, Google, Intel, Equinox, the Coachella Music Festival, and the Biden-Harris presidential campaign. His work has been widely exhibited in museums including MoMA, the Royal Academy of Arts in London, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the National Gallery in Japan, and has been featured in most major architectural publications as well as Vogue, Wired, Newsweek, Wallpaper, Surface, and The New York Times, and on PBS, MTV, Fox, and CNN, where he has also served as a design contributor.
Gage has published nine books on design theory, aesthetic philosophy, and technology, including two monographs on his work: Mark Foster Gage: Architecture in High Resolution and Mark Foster Gage: Projects and Provocations. He has authored more than 50 essays in journals such as JAE, Volume, Perspecta, Architectural Design, A+U, and Log, for which he guest-edited Issue 17. He has served as a board member of the MacDowell Colony, and in 2022 he established the Mark Foster Gage Foundation, a private charitable organization that provides grants for innovative architectural research, exhibitions, and publications.
Sam Jacob
Sam Jacob is the director of Sam Jacob Studio for architecture and design, a collaborative practice that makes buildings, places, strategies and objects. Recent projects include a new mixed-use building in Hoxton, offices for Art Review, the V&A Museum’s Cromwell Road entrance, and the Science Museum Group’s National Collections Centre, a new home for the museum’s over 300,000 objects. His work has been shown at institutions including the Art Institute Chicago, MAK Vienna, the V&A, and the Venice Biennale, where he was co-curator of the British Pavilion in 2016. He is a columnist for Art Review and is the author of Make It Real, Architecture as Enactment. Jacob is Professor and Dean of the Institute of Architecture at the Angewandte, Vienna, and, with Sean Griffiths and Charles Holland, was a cofounder of the now-defunct practice Fashion Architecture Taste (FAT).
Níall McLaughlin
Níall McLaughlin is an architect whose work spans education, culture, healthcare, religious buildings and housing. Born in Geneva in 1962, McLaughlin was educated in Dublin and studied architecture at University College Dublin. After working with Scott Tallon Walker, he established his London practice in 1990 winning Young British Architect of the Year in 1998. In 2016 he was awarded the RIBA Charles Jencks Award for his contribution to architectural theory and practice. He was elected to Aosdána for his outstanding contribution to the arts in Ireland and became a Royal Academy Academician in 2019. In 2020 he received an honorary MBE for services to architecture. His practice has been shortlisted four times for the RIBA Stirling Prize, winning in 2022 for the New Library at Magdalene College Library. In spring 2026, he received the RIBA Royal Gold Medal.
Mary McLeod
Mary McLeod is a professor of architecture at Columbia University, where she teaches architecture history and theory. Her research and publications have focused on the history of the modern movement and on contemporary architecture theory, examining issues concerning the connections between architecture and politics. She is the editor of and contributor to the book Charlotte Perriand: An Art of Living, as well as the co-editor of Architecture, Criticism, Ideology and the website Pioneering Women of American Architecture (with Victoria Rosner). Her essays have appeared in journals such as AA Files, Journal of Architecture, Assemblage, JSAH, Casabella, and Oppositions and in books such as Modern Architecture and the Lifeworld, Architecture School, Modern Women, Feminism and Architecture, Building Systems, Architectural Theory since 1968, and Complexity and Contradiction at Fifty.
Eeva-Liisa Pelkonen
Eeva-Liisa Pelkonen is a Professor at Yale School of Architecture, where she teaches both architectural design and history-theory subjects. She received a Master of Architecture degree from Tampere University of Technology, a Master of Environmental Design degree from Yale University, and a PhD in architectural history and theory from Columbia University. Her scholarly interests cover 20th-century European and American art and architecture, art and aesthetic theory, and history of ideas. She has authored and edited several prize-winning books in that area, among them Alvar Aalto: Architecture, Modernity and Geopolitics (Yale University Press, 2009) and Eero Saarinen: Shaping the Future (Yale University Press, 2006), which won respectively the Alice Davis Hitchcock Prize given annually for the best piece of scholarship in the field by North American writer and the Philip Johnson Award granted annually for the best exhibition catalogue and the Bannister Fletcher Award, given by the London Authors Club annually for the best book in art or architecture. Her latest book Untimely Moderns: How 20th Century Architecture Reimagined the Past was published by Yale University Press in 2023. Her scholarly and curatorial work has been supported by Getty, the Graham Foundation, the Finnish Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the Austrian Ministry of Science and Research. In 2010 she received the King-Lui Wu Teaching Prize and the honorary title “Knight, First Class, of the Order of the White Rose of Finland.”
Surry Schlabs
Surry Schlabs is a historian and teacher whose work engages the aesthetic qualities of shared experience, exploring a range of socially charged and participatory aesthetic and political practices, characterized by their distinctly public character and socially intensive contexts. His doctoral dissertation, Waiting for Architecture: John Dewey and the Limits of Modern Art, concerned the specific relevance of Dewey’s Pragmatist philosophy to the evolution of modernist art and architecture in the middle decades of the 20th century, and to a range of projects sharing an implicit aspiration to architecture as a way of thinking, a thing in the making, or an aesthetic limit condition—as perhaps the end of art itself. Before returning to Yale for his PhD, Surry worked for several years in and around New Haven, serving as project manager and designer at both Gray Organschi Architecture and the Yale Urban Design Workshop.
A. Krista Sykes
A. Krista Sykes is a writer and historian whose work examines architecture, urbanism, and the cultural and intellectual forces that shape the built environment. She is Assistant Director, Editorial at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, where she helps shape the school’s editorial strategy and develops feature articles and videos that bring its faculty, alumni, research, and public programs to wider audiences.
Sykes earned a BA in architecture from Princeton University and a PhD in architectural history and theory from Harvard University. She is the author of Vincent Scully: Architecture, Urbanism, and a Life in Search of Community (Bloomsbury, 2023) and the editor of Constructing a New Agenda: Architectural Theory 1993–2009 (Princeton Architectural Press, 2010) and The Architecture Reader: Essential Writings from Vitruvius to the Present (George Braziller, 2007). Her writing has appeared in publications including Architectural Record and Harvard Design Magazine.