The term “neoliberal architecture” has come to encompass a number of different developments over the last four decades, from the glittering, anonymous office towers of the financialized economy to the touristified “smooth” city of endless convenience and passive surveillance best viewed through a phone camera, or from the back of an Uber. But when I learned in November that the architect Robert A.M. Stern—one of postmodernism’s last living holdouts—had passed away at 86, I couldn’t help but redirect my gaze toward the original neoliberal architecture. It is impolite to speak ill of the dead, but the times in which the dead were living and working are fair game. The architecture of Stern’s generation, which reached its zenith in the 1980s and ’90s was, despite its fun colors and cartoonish irony, one whose clientele consisted largely of the elite and the institutions that fostered their rise to power. In this, Stern participated more happily than perhaps any of his peers.

Stern was conservative—one could even say a neoconservative. This was true both architecturally and politically, though he tended to launder his politics and keep them close to his chest. Born in 1939 to a middle-class family, and graduating with an MArch from Yale in 1965, he got his start designing Manhattan penthouses and summer houses for the well-heeled along the windswept coasts of New England. The coastal homes were often informed by the shingled vernacular of the late 19th and early 20th century so beloved of his peers like Robert Venturi and Charles Moore. (Stern would later spin off a house-building office from his firm RAMSA, devoted solely to the replication of actual historical houses.) This clientele, and the project of neo-historical architecture, would typify his work for the rest of his life. The apogee of this mode of working is one of his last but most famous buildings, 15 Central Park West, which towers over the eponymous park in imitation of the great prewar apartment buildings replete with stately masonry and patient doormen.

Stern’s early work in the 1970s fell neatly into the emergent style known as postmodernism, which rejected the stark, unornamented forms of modern architecture as well as the directive, so precious to the prior generation, to directly shape the way we live by shaping architecture. The form-follows-function ethos that had propelled architecture forward for almost 80 years had gradually become entangled in mixed modes of expression, and previously bare technical elements—such as staircases and mechanical systems—became covertly ornamental ones. The answer to this dilemma was to disregard functionalism altogether and return to the languages of the past, which the postmodernists revived through pastiche and often ironic forms. In Stern’s 1974 Lang Residence in Connecticut, for example, a stucco, macaroni-colored box on a rolling green hill is punctured by six windows like the front of a die, each of which is framed by molding plucked from a baseboard and glued on the facade. The house flaunts the languages of the time: pastiche, irony, and the play of history and new materials.

From the ’70s onward, the interrogative quality of postmodernism, including its celebration of the vernacular, from the Las Vegas strip to the suburban house, faded while its historical gestures gradually grew cartoonified. This development would only accelerate in the 1990s when nearly all postmodern architects, including Stern, became deeply entangled with the ersatz worlds of the Walt Disney Company. Stern’s architectural ethos is on full display in a 1986 special he did with PBS called Pride of Place (which was sponsored by Mobil). The show, which also involved a companion book, is a star-spangled overview of American architecture from the Shakers to the mall. It’s not necessarily a bad overview of the subject, but like all genuinely patriotic works, it’s not without revanchism. Stern accepted unquestioningly a version of history in which the United States is always a benevolent actor. He believed wholeheartedly in the American project and all of its attendant kitsch, which is evident in everything from his Norman Rockwell Museum (inspired by the Greek Revival but featuring a bizarre floating pediment on the front) to his preoccupation with theme parks. In his Pride of Place tie-in book, he writes,

As resorts seem to free their patrons from the constraining conventions of the workaday world, so does their design free their architects. Just as one can see normally button-down men and women reveal their every physical and psychological nuance during a summer afternoon at the beach, one can see national architectural preferences, free at last from so many economic and societal constraints, intensely expressed in resort architecture.

This last line really reveals his vision of American architecture: an apolitical playground in which the architect, working in a distinctly national tradition, could be “set free.” His work for Disney—at its most Mousified in the animation studio building capped with the hat from The Sorcerer’s Apprentice and at its most twee in the BoardWalk resort complex, a 1:1 replica of a shingled, late-19th-century hotel—best showcases this fantasy. Architecture as entertainment, architecture as sign, architecture as theme and playground for the leisure class (with the city itself soon to follow suit). These ideas, as innocuous as they may seem on their face, are in part responsible for the way we now view the built environment as a site of consumption.

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Stern’s generation yearned to remake America in the misremembered image of the soda fountain and the pre-integration small town. A new generation raised on the Mouse but bereft of both property and hope produces AI-slop shadows of the same fantasies.

However, the most quintessentially neoliberal thing about Stern was his willingness to work with the (literal) architects of neoliberalism. There was not a single college business school—so often historicized in neo-Georgian colonnaded brick—he refused to lend his name to. When the time came to hire an architect for the George W. Bush Presidential Center, there was only one man for the job. These and the Disney buildings are perhaps the most public-facing of Stern’s work. What is a resort but an imaginary and commodified commons? It is one of postmodern architecture’s great ironies that Stern and his contemporaries were so invested in the revival of small-town urbanism in the form of planned communities like Seaside, Florida, and its Disney-owned sister, Celebration, but, in an overcorrection to modernism, remained singularly uninterested in true public space and in true public commodities, especially mass housing.

Stern’s unrepentantly elitist projects ran the gamut from top universities to some of the most expensive residential properties in Manhattan. He believed in the architect as celebrity and brought those values to the previously rather straight-and-narrow architecture program at Yale, where he served as dean from 1998 to 2016. A very successful protégé of his recently regaled me with tales of Stern pioneering the after-lecture cocktail hour, and how he often sent students back to Yale from Manhattan in limousines.

But the man also represented a time, now in the rearview mirror, when the wealthy were tastemakers, when they helped curate rather than just rule the world. Today, the architect has never been less relevant in elite culture. Since we are unfortunately stuck with elite culture, this is for the worse. Increasingly replaced by the custom builder, the architect has lost her grip even on the production of architectural culture. Gone is the heyday of Rizzoli coffee table books and Architectural Digest. Celebrities now stream from their McMansion basements and hole up in cruise-ship-like fortresses crammed into the Hollywood Hills. In an age of academic austerity, his deanship at Yale also feels like a relic of the distant past. Stern, for all his conservatism, was often a fun architect, especially in his early work and his interiors. But it’s never been more clear that the fun is over. The world he helped make will never make another one of him.