The recent surge of new money into the pockets of North America's rich is leaving the wealthiest residential quarters everywhere dotted with immense mansions of widely varying architectural worth.
It was ever thus, of course: Many of the huge houses that proliferated during the first Gilded Age were great galumphing heaps of historical ornaments that added nothing to the treasury of great architecture.
The era of prosperity after the Second World War was more fortunate. In that moment, many wealthy Canadians and Americans put up remarkable large houses in the anti-historical modernist style, some of which have survived.
In our own Gilded Age, however, the architectural tastes of the ultra-wealthy have largely reverted to what they were a century ago: eclectic and historical, and fond of architectural effects borrowed from the ages before mass democracy and the modern style took root.
American architect Robert A.M. Stern drew on traditional Italian motifs – such as creamy stuccoed walls and red-tile roofing – for a home built in 1992 in a luxury neighbourhood in Houston, heart of the Texas oil patch. Pictured is a view from the garden. (ROBERT RECK)
Related Articles
The rural French chateau is hot right now; so is the becolumned Georgian country house. And though many of them have all the expressive grace of Victorian insane asylums, vast neo-classical villas are also abounding.
Naturally enough, there are numerous contemporary architects willing to craft historicizing piles for wealthy clients. But on the evidence of what they do — take a swing through Toronto's ultra-luxurious Bridle Path neighbourhood to get a sense of what I'm talking about — few of these neo-eclectic designers seem able to whip up genuinely convincing residential architecture from the frills, froth and furbelows of the aristocratic past.
But one eclectic architect who is arguably able to do exactly that — at least occasionally — is Robert A. M. Stern, head of the architecture school at Yale University and a highly successful designer in his own right.
Mr. Stern came of creative age in the 1970s, during the mercifully short-lived phenomenon known as postmodernism, as a vociferous critic of Euro-American modernism and key advocate of design aesthetics grounded in what he and his fellow rebels called "history." (Which chiefly meant, not real history as it unfolds through time, but merely all the traditions of building design that modernism had been keen to overthrow.)
Around 1980, Mr. Stern jettisoned the more egregious elements of the postmodern agenda — its irony, above all — and settled into the moderate historicism lavishly illustrated in the recent book Robert A. M. Stern: Houses and Gardens (Monacelli Press, $89.95).
The 26 large houses featured in this book range in date from 1989 to 2005. They span the design spectrum from Georgian and French Directoire and country French (with a bit of Polynesian added) to mixes that have been merrily pastiched from several styles.
A good introduction to the kind of thing Mr. Stern likes to do is the residence built in 1992 in River Oaks, a deluxe neighbourhood in Houston. The basic inspiration is Italian: The appearance is dominated by creamy stuccoed walls and red-tile roofing.
But Houston is in oil-patch country, not gentle rural Tuscany. So Mr. Stern gives a nod to the roughneck context by avoiding any refinement, and adding plenty of punch — pumping up windows and window frames, and pulling together the front facade into a low-slung, toughly compact composition.
That sturdy compositional treatment is typical of all the buildings illustrated in the book. Whether a project is begun as Italian-style or Georgian or 19th-century New England cedar-shake style, it usually ends up with a similar ground-hugging profile, with all the strong lines running parallel to the earth.
Paging through this book, an aficionado of modernism will likely find himself oddly at home among Mr. Stern's forms (if not his ornaments and superficial strokes), merely because so much here interestingly recalls the strongly horizontal impulse of the modernist residential box that the architect officially dislikes.
So what does Mr. Stern's style really amount to? I think that, like most monster-house styling these days, it's an art of inexact reminiscence — an approach that ponderously recalls the flourishes and popular carry-on of architectural ornaments from bygone eras, while neglecting the proportions and scales and other spatial characteristics of historical architecture.
In the end, the forms of Mr. Stern's largest mansions are not very interesting because they incline toward a general sameness — the box, in other words — no matter what historical embellishment is patched on to them.
But contemporary eclecticism usually doesn't work, which is surely one reason so many architects emerging now have rejected it.
Mr. Stern's work is perhaps the most noteworthy representative of a bad architectural epoch, which (except among the very rich) we can hope is now passing away.
