Robert A.M. Stern, 86, a leading architect over the past six decades who left his imprint on Philadelphia by designing the Comcast Center and the Museum of the American Revolution among other notable buildings, died Thursday, Nov. 27, at home in Manhattan after a brief pulmonary illness, his family said.

Mr. Stern also wrote respected architectural histories, taught at Columbia and Yale Universities, and was dean of Yale’s School of Architecture from 1998 to 2016.

“Bob had a great sensitivity to urbanism in design. You can see that in Philadelphia, where his work certainly sits well where it is placed,” said developer John Gattuso, who worked closely with Mr. Stern on the Comcast Center, completed in 2008, the redevelopment of the Navy Yard and other projects.

“He was less concerned with theatrical architecture, the gymnastics, and understood how buildings contribute to a sense of place that resonates with people,” he said. For that reason,” Gattuso said, “he tended to be underappreciated.”

The 975-foot-tall shimmering Comcast Center, the company’s original skyscraper on JFK Boulevard, straddles the tracks and concourse of Suburban Station, a commuter gateway to the city. An airy 120-foot glass atrium connects the building to the station, providing for a dramatic arrival from below, and overlooks a public plaza.

“The Comcast Center may be his finest work,” said architecture critic Inga Saffron, who writes for The Inquirer. “The scale is right. It’s not fat. It’s tapered.”

Classical indentations in the 58-story building draw the eye upward, she said. “It’s a good dignified skyscraper … Buildings like this are embedded in the city.”

Mr. Stern’s firm was also known for luxury apartment towers. In Manhattan they include 15 Central Park West, a limestone-clad condominium at the southwest corner of Central Park that was internationally hailed.

The firm’s work also includes university buildings, including the Darden School of Business at the University of Virginia; Weill Hall at the University of Michigan; and Miller Hall at the College of William & Mary in Williamsburg, Va., among many others.

In Philadelphia, Mr. Stern’s firm prepared the master plan for the Navy Yard, and designed buildings on Crescent Drive in that development and the 10 Rittenhouse condominium, as well as the American Water tower on the Camden Waterfront.

Mr. Stern was a proponent of post-modernism, a style of architecture that incorporated classical elements. He moved further in that direction as his career went on.

Philadelphia’s Museum of the American Revolution was built in a Georgian style. But to Saffron, it was perhaps too much, and more out of place to the city.

“He embraces classicism more and more,” Saffron said. In the case of the museum, “It’s a schlocky classicism,” in contrast to the relatively modest scale of the historic buildings in Old City

“It’s like Independence Hall on steroids,” Saffron said.

The final Robert A.M. Stern Architects design in Philadelphia is nearing completion, a massive life sciences research building at Drexel University, on Cuthbert Street, by Gattuso Development Partners.

In an interview with the New York Times when he was 84, Mr. Stern said he still wasn’t using a computer and drew “everything by hand.”

Born in Brooklyn on May 23, 1939, Mr. Stern earned a bachelor’s degree from Columbia and a master’s in architecture from Yale. In 1966, he married photographer Lynn Gimbel Solinger, a granddaughter of Bernard Gimbel, the department store magnate. They had a son, Nicholas, and later divorced.

Mr. Stern is survived by his son, three grandchildren and other relatives.

The Washington Post contributed to this article.