From the Archive: When Dad Is a Starchitect

As a part of our 25th-anniversary celebration, we’re republishing formative magazine stories from before our website launched. This story previously appeared in Dwell’s July/August 2004 issue.  

"So, tell me about your relationship with your father" does not typically count as small talk. But the children of famous architects pictured here know why we might be interested: Because they co-opted their fathers’ buildings as playgrounds and were dragged on endless architectural pilgrimages, they’ve acquired a heightened psychological relationship with architecture—a near instinctual sense for the way it orders our experience.

Nathaniel Kahn recalls in his Oscar-nominated film My Architect that his father, Louis Kahn, "left no physical evidence that he’d ever been in our house, not even a bow tie hanging in the closet." The same can’t be said for this group; the houses they grew up in often epitomized their fathers’ work. And yet they all would certainly relate to Nathaniel’s quest to better understand his father—and perhaps himself—through his father’s architecture. While none of them are architects now (a key criterion for this admittedly haphazard sampling), all recognize architecture as a consistent subtext in their lives.

And yet that doesn’t mean their homes are genteel modern showplaces furnished with hand-me-down Barcelona chairs and failed project models. On the contrary, this group exhibits a low-grade restlessness with the spaces of their lives, a calculated introspection about their domestic environments. Having been immersed from an early age in ceaseless architectural searching, they find it a tough habit to break. As a result, the portraits that follow catch their subjects where they are—in the midst of moves, renovations, and domestic sabbaticals. What materializes is a different sort of modernism, not of furniture and line but of vision and personality.

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Nicholas Stern says the Central Park West apartment he grew up in never failed to catch the notice of visitors, even teenagers on their way to the kitchen to steal a beer. The 1967 renovation by his father, Robert A. M. Stern, dean of the Yale School of Architecture and eminent historicist architect, was an early expression of the postmodernism just then being defined. "It explores elements of classicism," says Nicholas, "but deconstructs them," with playful shifts in space and plan. His parents divorced, but his mother—who long ago married another architect—still lives there, and its lessons remain with Nicholas. "I learned my theory of architecture from my father, and I agree with it, whether through osmosis or genetics or just plain good taste."

Work is nearing completion on the renovation of a townhouse designed, of course, by his dad—on a curving street in Greenwich Village for Nicholas and his wife, Courtney, an interior designer at the architectural firm of inveterate modernist Deborah Berke. Nicholas, who is a vice president at Taconic Builders, a high-end contractor, never even considered hiring any other architect, "not in my wildest dreams." While the project is primarily a restoration—"I can only imagine Page Six of the New York Post: Historic preservationist Robert A. M. Stern guts 1847 Greek Revival townhouse for his son, the builder," Nicholas jokes—that hasn’t prohibited a few big gestures, like a flowing staircase in the double-height dining room. He only wishes for a larger budget: "Then we could let Bob be Bob and go to the moon."

Nicholas adds: "I am one of my father’s biggest admirers—if not the biggest." He was even going to follow in his footsteps, going so far as to enroll at the Yale School of Architecture, although years before his father became dean there. He lasted only two weeks.

Until she was three years old, Julia Eisenman was dressed exclusively in white, at the insistence of her father, Peter Eisenman, the theorist/ringleader of the neo-Corbusian architectural clique once called the "New York Five." And it wasn’t just her—all the walls of their Riverside Drive apartment in New York were white. "At school, the girls had Laura Ashley wallpaper and plush carpeting, and I was like, ‘I want Laura Ashley wallpaper!’ And my dad said, ‘No. No. The most I’ll give you is one wall in your bedroom with a color on it.’ So I got one bluish-purplish wall. That kind of pissed me off, because I was like, ‘Why can’t we just paint the whole room?’"

While this was years before she spent the summer as au pair to Richard Meier’s children, she understood why, sort of: "I knew that he was crazy. I knew that he was this architect and things had to be his way, but as a kid I had no idea what was really going on. I just knew that he had a certain aesthetic"—she draws out the word—"but I didn't know what the word meant."

Now a film producer in Hollywood with aspirations to direct (the architect in her, she says), Julia has no misgivings about sharing the story. "If he can’t handle this, he shouldn’t have given birth to me, because he knows I’m just as provocative as he is."

And she’s still fighting her modernist demons. She and her husband, Andy Behrman, the author of Electroboy: A Memoir of Mania, recently moved into a 1959 house in the Hollywood Hills. But she resisted it at first. "It wasn’t cozy!" she says. "But my growing up wasn’t cozy either. Obviously a huge part of me is drawn to that."

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Oren Safdie grew up in Habitat, the revolutionary apartment building his father, architect Moshe Safdie, designed on the banks of the St. Lawrence River in Montreal for Expo 67. Its chockablock system of stacked prefabricated modules was Oren’s first playground and, later on, his newspaper delivery route. "I knew every nook and cranny of that building," he says. After his father moved out, 13-year-old Oren became tour guide to visiting dignitaries.

Habitat, Oren realizes, continues to influence his choice of homes: The New York City shoebox he lived in for 10 years had a terrace overlooking the Hudson, like Habitat’s terraces overlooking the St. Lawrence. At the moment, he and his wife, M. J. Kang, a playwright and actor, have found themselves temporary residents of the guesthouse of a 10-acre Malibu avocado plantation. "It always goes back to the water and the garden," he says.

Architecture, in both direct and circuitous ways, remains a part of his life. Oren finished a master’s degree in architecture at Columbia, but halfway through he had an epiphany: One summer in his father’s apartment overlooking the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem, while working on a paper about the father and son architects Eliel and Eero Saarinen ("it’s probably telling"), he flipped to the back of his notebook and started writing. The rough novel that resulted became the basis for his burgeoning career as a playwright. Even so, he hasn’t stayed entirely away from architecture. His recent play, Private Jokes, Public Places, produced this winter in New York, is set at an architecture student’s final review.

Erica Stoller’s father, architectural photographer Ezra Stoller, did as much to disseminate modern architecture as any architect. For many people, his iconic black-and-white photographs of the TWA Terminal, the Seagram Building, and the Guggenheim Museum, among others, are stronger icons than the buildings themselves. But he also disseminated modern architecture to his family, designing the open-plan house in an unorthodox subdivision in Westchester, New York, where Erica grew up. At home, his process worked in reverse: If at work he captured architecture in two dimensions, at home he tried to make every view resemble a photograph. "Everything was just beautifully spotlighted, but the light would always shine in your eyes," she says.

While Erica has never gone in for spotlights, she still insists that the place where the walls hit the floor be visible—a key detail in bringing clarity to photographic space. And even though her husband, William Ketchum, is a leading authority on American folk art and antiques, she maintains a certain minimalism. "I get pretty nervous when the windowsills have stuff on them," she says.

At work, clean lines come more easily—she’s surrounded by modern architecture, or at least its visual representation. For the past 20 years, Erica has run Esto, the photo agency her father founded, and turned it into the leading name in architectural photography. But her attitude about architecture’s relationship with its image is strikingly different from her father’s—more honest in its dishonesty. "He insisted photography is the only honest presentation, and that talking about architecture is just a lot of hooey," she says. "I, on the other hand, don’t think photography is honest at all. Everything about it is manipulative."