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Morning Reflection
November 19, 2025
“Assembled” Lives
Interviewer: Your firm employs 300 people. Is it true that you still don’t use computers?
Stern: I write everything out longhand, I like paper and pen. In architecture, you can’t work at a computer in the initial stages. Most of the architects I admire use their hands and their eyes together, on paper, on cardboard, cut things, tear things, shape things. We use the same kind of clay that Michelangelo used, but also Frank Lloyd Wright used, to model buildings. Buildings that are made only in a digital way tend to be super thin. They’re not built. They’re assembled.
“Robert A.M. Stern is still dreaming of a fresh New York,”
New York Times, November 10, 2025
Reflection by Peter Vanderveen
I remember the first recording I ever bought. It was a double album, two vinyl records, of the music of Chicago Transit Authority. I knew nothing about this group. The record jacket was what attracted me. Inside there was a large poster of the members of the band and a complete sheet of lyrics. I was hooked.
For many years I loved wandering into record stores to flip through the stock – singles, LPs, boxed sets – moving from the classical section to jazz and on, finally, to pop recordings. And every time I made a purchase I lived through the long anticipation that arose from not knowing what the music of any given record sounded like until I could get home, unwrap the album, and put the record on the turntable. The drop of the needle started a process of discovery in real time. On a few occasions, I traveled long distances to major cities just to visit renowned stores with greater inventories, with the promise that I could procure something rare. And over the years I built quite a collection. It was self-curated – my music – which I played every day.
I hardly ever listen to musical recordings now. My records are long gone. And even though I have access on my iPhone to almost any music by any artists of any genre at any time for almost no cost at all, my interest has waned. It has become as thin as the process of swiping titles on a screen. Ownership is irrelevant, as are collections, which used to have their own aesthetic value, displayed like books on shelves. I do appreciate the ease with which I can play anything I’d like. But now the playing is less intentional: it is most often half-heard, relegated, like wallpaper, as an ornament in the background.
I miss the old habits. I miss the substance of them.
Robert A.M. Stern’s recent observation struck a chord with me. Buildings that offer quality space in which we can live need to be built, not merely assembled. They, too, are substantial, and designing them should take this into account, not just by three dimensional digital representation but by the physical tasks of molding and modelling, when the work of one’s mind is melded with the work of one’s hands. It’s more labor-intensive, but it’s also more true and felt. Dazzling imagery may be seductive, but so many of the most enthralling seductions evaporate the instant they meet reality. They are “super thin.”
One of the challenges for the church is that Christian faith can’t be immediate and spectacular. And whenever someone tries to represent it as such, it appears ridiculous (e.g. televangelists and highway billboards that warn of hell or advertise Jesus as an answer). Faith is not just an issue of what can be thought, in flights of imagination, as if one can be inspired by what can appear on a screen. It is played out, sometimes awkwardly, sometimes enthrallingly, in flesh and blood – in thousands of anticipations over time. It gives form to our being immensely complex creatures.
Christianity is the discipline of living “everything out longhand.” And worship is a process of building. Like the exercise of cutting things and tearing things and shaping things, it can certainly seem monotonous and boring – especially when a quick glance at your phone will offer a thousand silly video clips, all at a touch. But this later impulse is just endless, empty diversion. And what worship offers us all, ultimately, is a profoundly human space where we can realize the fullness of time and the beauty of home – something built, not merely assembled.
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