Laurie Bodor, an executive with Rubenstein Public Relations called and asked me if I’d like to talk to Robert A.M. Stern about a new building he’d designed. The purpose was obviously to garner some publicity about someone’s new real estate project.

Frankly we are besieged here at NYSD with new projects looking for promotion (a/k/a freebie advertising), so I was only half-listening when she made her pitch. I didn’t catch the name of the project or product that Ms. Bodor was elegantly hawking. I heard only “Robert A.M. Stern” — a name I am very familiar with and naturally impressed with.

I did not know Mr. Stern, had never really met Mr. Stern (beyond the polite-society-howja-do at sundry social events). And so it stuck in my craw: would you like to have lunch with Robert A.M. Stern?

I always run these PR offers/suggestions by JH who is the NYSD built-in applause-o-meter, because inevitably he’s going to enhance them with his photographic talents. He’s often a little more objective than I. It was he, for example, who when we were offered (also by Ms. Bodor) the day-trip on Adam Katz’s G IV to Nantucket, overruled my solid indifference, and of course NYSD readers know it was a great time. And an interesting one.

Although, in the case of Robert A.M. Stern, I actually wasn’t entirely indifferent. He’s a distinguished, award-winning American architect of our time. He’s the Dean of the Yale University School of Architecture; an author, a teacher, and he runs a 175-person firm of architects, landscape architects, interior designers and supporting staff involved in product design, town, urban and campus planning. Their design work includes schools, hotels, corporate centers, libraries courthouses, museums, performing arts centers, recreational centers, as well as resorts and even individual housing. (You can have a look by going to www.ramsa.com). Awesome, you could say.

Besides, growing up, I was one of those kids who loved to while the hours away on a rainy day home from school drawing houses and cars and even floor plans. In college I was further intrigued by Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged. The notion of being an architect passed through my brain many times, and its romantic aspect remains.

So we went. Yesterday. Over to the man’s office on 10th Avenue in the 30s, in one of those great old buildings that have been turned into offices (or lofts). Mr. Stern’s building was built for printing business. Now a good portion (if not all, I’m not sure) of one huge floor is space for his business.

Architecture, to my way of thinking is the fusing of the imagination — the stuff of (my) childhood fantasy — with the practical, the utilitarian and the politics of adult life. That’s what comes to me when I enter an architect’s headquarters. For there are always maquettes of their creative imagination that are about to become, or already have become reality. There are oceans of desks covered with books, papers and blueprints, and more maquettes, and models — often even rough, primitive clay models — all the more fuel to the imagination’s fire.

Entering Mr. Stern’s personal office (which is really just another communal space with three entrances connecting to all the other partitioned offices) you’re instantly drawn to a wall of windows and the magnificent Hudson River.

It was a clear day and we could see ten miles out to the Oranges and the Watchung mountains of New Jersey. Below before us were the railroad yards (where someone wanted to build a new Jets Stadium), the sprawling black glass chock-a-block Javits Center and beyond to the permanently berthed USS Intrepid to the north, the High Line and the Starrett-Lehigh Building (where the Martha Stewart offices are) to the south, and beyond, across the river, Newark and Hoboken.

You could stand there all day and just watch — the yachts, the planes, the helicopters, the sailboats, the barges, the cars on the West Side Highway, the cars emerging on the west bank from the Lincoln Tunnel.

The office itself is utilitarian — white walls and ceiling (partitions really), brown carpet, Mr. Stern’s desk, glass; a pedestal with an entire place-setting of china, crystal, and silver (designed by him) under a square plastic cover; a table laid out with a tray of sandwiches, a Greek salad, china, silver, napkins and water. Everyone took something and we sat down at a large elliptically-shaped glass conference table.

Mr. Stern has the manner of a good doctor, or professor. Friendly, but businesslike; ready for questions and quick with answers, and accommodating like an excellent teacher. I asked him if he liked to draw as a kid. Yes. I asked him if there were a moment when he knew he really wanted to be an architect. He told me how growing up in the city, he used to go to a dentist on West 54 Street right across the street from the back of MoMA. One day when he was 12 or 13, walking west across Park Avenue, suddenly he saw for the first time, The Lever Brothers Building (1951, Skidmore, Owings and Merrill). “It was just there!” he said recalling how astounded he was at the sight of it. Then there was the UN Secretariat Building (1952, Le Corbusier/Wallace K. Harrison). That was it; he’d seen his future.

Then he talked about this new project – the one we’d been called to talk about; the one which theretofore was of no interest to me. It turned out to be very interesting. It’s called 15 Central Park West. It’s a joint venture between two real estate investment companies and Zeckendorf Development LLC which is co-chaired by two brothers, Arthur Zeckendorf and William Lie Zeckendorf, who are the third generation of a great New York real estate development family.

It will be luxury condominium residences that cover the entire block from 61st and 62nd Street between Central Park West and Broadway. The old Mayflower Hotel, which just came down this year, occupied the CPW side for many decades.

The building at 15 Central Park West is designed to offer all the amenities of the historically great apartment buildings of Park and Fifth Avenues but also only moments away from Lincoln Center, Carnegie Hall, the Broadway theater district, museums, international designer boutiques, superb dining, and, of course, Central Park.

What separates this project from any other residential that has been erected in New York in the past sixty or seventy years, and the reason why Robert A.M. Stern was contracted to design it, is that it is the 21st-century heir to the architectural traditions of the great residential apartment buildings such as The River House, 740 Park, 770 Park, 834 Fifth, 820 Fifth Avenue that remain the premiere luxury apartment buildings in New York six and seven decades after their completion.

The facade for 15 CPW will be clad in rare Indiana limestone which comes from The Empire Quarry and was the source of the stone for the Empire State Building, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, 834 Fifth Avenue, and 740 Park Avenue.

How is that possible? Mr. Stern spent a great deal of time studying these buildings, especially two of his favorite apartment buildings, 740 Park and River House, and what gave them the allure that has lasted through two, almost three generations. He decided on a facade for his new project that will be entirely clad in rare Indiana limestone which comes from The Empire Quarry and was the source of the stone for the Empire State Building, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, 834 Fifth Avenue, and 740 Park Avenue. The quarry has been reopened recently for 15 Central Park West, and so it will be one of the few buildings in New York to be entirely faced in limestone.

Furthermore the residences of the new building are designed in the neo-classical style, detailed with traditional design elements found only in the finest New York luxury apartment buildings, with layouts inspired by the classic apartments of Rosario Candela — spacious entry galleries, high ceilings, and set-back terraces; libraries and formal dining rooms; wood-burning fireplaces; elegantly appointed kitchens with adjacent family rooms; modern household technologies; as well as traditional staff quarters and service entrances. Ninety percent of the units have direct park views, and all the oversized windows (often 12 feet by 12 feet) will showcase exquisite views of the Manhattan skyline.

He pulled out the ground floor plans for the building which comprises two wings — The House (as they are calling it) of twenty stories, facing CPW, and the Tower, which is 43 stories. The two are connected at the base. There will be a total of 202 personal residences (simplexes, terraced duplexes, and full-floor penthouses), and 29 private suites that may be purchased by the residents for their guests or staff members, or as personal home offices. Listening to Mr. Stern talk about his project, I realized that he is involved in the grand transformation of the West Side to a residential position which was originally planned at the beginning of the 20th century and later abandoned for the East Side after the erection of the Vanderbilts’ Grand Central Station and the covering over of the railroad tracks on Park Avenue. We left with visions of 21st-century New York where the very rich and established would inhabit this massive creation of Robert A.M. Stern.