Stern, despite his nonsexy architecture and his notoriously gruff demeanor on reviews, has done a great job of bringing Yale up to the top. The list of critics for advanced studio is consistently impressive and the school's fabrication equipment is pretty much the best around and with Rudolph's A+A being totally renovated for next year, the facilities will be stellar. Hell, I was even rather impressed by the work the first years did this semester after I walked through their reviews yesterday. The school seems to be attaining a great, forward thinking intellectual energy.

The problem I see with Yale is that it is led by an eminent group of people who are aging very quickly. Stern, Eisenman, and Forster are the big three. Who will lead Yale into the next generation? Yale brings in many important younger voices in architecture to teach advanced studios (Prince-Ramus, Zaha, Tsien/Williams, Lynn, among others), but can architects of that caliber be lured to become part of the permanent faculty and lead the school?

I agree that Stern managed to completely turn Yale around. He brought in a trifecta of new faculty, resources, and money. And he's been surprisingly non-dogmatic. He's encouraged plurality. (Though I was always irked when he'd sneak in and railroad an otherwise interesting review, which he used to do all the time during review season.)

I don't have any first hand experience of this, but it seems like Columbia since Tschumi has kind of merged with the scenery of architecture schools. It's still a good school, definitely, but it doesn't have the stature it had under Tschumi.

What is it, then, that makes a good dean?

I think a good dean is someone who brings in good faculty. And not faculty that has star power, or is an expert in a field of research, but someone who is interested in TEACHING! Just because your big and famous does not mean your a great teacher. I wish my school had a dean that was focused on the students instead of building up the reputation of the school, which I think are two different things.

Good dean, I agree. But the whole neo-classical vernacularisms are blah, and the Bush circus maximus in Dallas has to stop.

To each their own I guess, as they long as they don't try to force it upon anyone else. Stern's own architecture stays in his office and each professor does their own thing. Also, Stern is the man responsible for getting Yale to totally renovate Rudolph's A+A building back its original glory when they wanted to tear it down. Although I guess he's also responsible for letting the (generally accepted as ugly, blah) Gwathmey addition happen. At least it'll be the art historians in there and not us.

At an MED dinner we had two years ago with Bob, we asked him about which Dean he considered as his role model. And, quite humbly, he said, "Bernard Tschumi" ... it was an interesting, poignant moment. Here's Bob Stern indicating that one of his most important influences was not Vincent Scully, nor Paul Rudolph, nor Charles Moore, but Bernard Tschumi. He said something like (I can't remember exactly), "I've learned so much from Bernard."

I'll bet he signed on for five more years just so he could be the first dean to walk into the refurbed A+A.

What I love about Bob is that he's not dogmatic, but he loves to start fights. Most of the Digital Formalists I've met are way more dogmatic about what constitutes architecture discourse than Bob is, even down to defending narrow little slices of turf. One of Bob's greatest tricks is getting all of these dogmatic people in a room together and letting them duke it out, with the students watching and participating.

back in the old days at the AA, Peter Cook used to run his juries by inviting a large number of top-line critics to each review, all very diverse and from opposing camps: he'd have Bernard T, Zaha, Jan Kiplicky, Peter Wilson, Dalibor V, Charles Jencks, etc. the more the merrier.

but the point was that because the arguments were so diverse, and because all these people wanted to express their own point of view, the students came away with too much information, too many possibilities, too many opposing logics for a way forward.

so, what else can the student do but go back to Peter and ask his advice, in which case he was able to give them the direction that he would have given them anyway, but now they were proceeding after having been through the process of an incredibly open critique, but basically where Peter wanted them to be all along. great strategy.

I don't think it's too surprising that Stern would name Tschumi as a role model and not Moore, Scully, or Rudolph. Besides being more his contemporary, Tschumi was also a long-term "career Dean". Moore and Rudolph both served only 5 or 6 years each as Dean and never really removed themselves from private practice and "moved in" to Yale even to the extent that Stern has. Scully is certainly a legend but has never been Dean.

Chase: I've never heard that tearing down the A+A was seriously considered. Plans for the complete renovation and the addition were published back in the early 90s, long before Stern's reign, though Gwathmey is at least the third firm to have the project in the past 10 years.

The Chronicle of Higher Education recently quotes RAMS:

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But he also said that the building “was not beloved by anyone who was not an architecture student or faculty member,” and that it was “a hard sell” to persuade the university to restore it. “Frankly, it’s only standing because it would be too expensive to tear down,” he said.
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http://chronicle.com/blogs/architecture/index.php?id=1015

The building renovation plans have indeed been in the works since at least the days of the previous administration. I'm sure it was a hard sell, and that Stern has had to keep up the sales pitch, but he inherited the project. It's been in the works since the early 1990s.