What is your biggest design mistake?

Mistakes propel one into the next project, Stern says.

Robert A. M. Stern: The only mistake I would say, to be more serious, is sometimes – and I can’t tell you chapter and verse – I didn’t take a big enough leap. 

And that’s why you go and do the next building, by the way.  People ask me, but they ask every other architect like me, “Why don’t you give it up?  Why are architects always . . . they never retire.” 

Because you’re always thinking, “Well there’s another idea I have, another way of doing it.”