Arts and Letters

Edward Durell Stone was a distinguished architect who loved architecture as well as the pleasures of life—wine, women, and song! He mixed his architectural work and his living habits so much so that in his later years these activities were all taking place in his town house. Often he would be up early in the morning developing ideas before his staff arrived, or sometimes he might work very late into the night after they left. In other words, he was a dedicated architect.

His professional training took place in the 1920s and early 1930s, the period when the basic training of architects was the Beaux-Arts system of the École des Beaux-Arts of Paris transferred to the U.S., with the École des Beaux-Arts of New York as its U.S. center. In the 1930s, American architectural students were also studying the works of Le Corbusier, Mies van der Rohe, Frank Lloyd Wright, and the Bauhaus. In other words, it was a period of transformation and all architectural students of this period had perhaps a very good training, having both the Beaux-Arts disciplines and the early exposure to the oncoming development of the modern architectural movement.

Ed Stone's total works of architecture are a reflection of this dual training. As a young man he was one of the early architects to adopt modern architecture as his sole design interest. He was very successful as a pioneer in introducing modern architecture to the United States. In the period of 1935 to 1950 he was the leading architect in the field of modern architecture in our country. Later in life, especially after he completed the United States Embassy in New Delhi, he seemed to have turned back to his Beaux-Arts training and to have become a romantic, slightly historical architect who attempted to "apply" beauty to his buildings. Beaux-Arts training of an architect also includes a training in the lifestyle of "La Vie de Bohème." Ed was a real Bohemian who enjoyed, perhaps at times to excess, the good things in life.

Rather than attempt to write a detailed outline of his work, I think it best to include in this commemorative tribute a well-written history of Ed Stone that appeared in The New York Times, August 18, 1978, written by Paul Goldberger, with some deletions by me.

"…Edward Durell Stone was born in Fayetteville, Arkansas, on March 9, 1902. He attended the University of Arkansas there and worked as an architectural apprentice at the office of Henry R. Shepley, a distinguished Beaux-Arts architect in Boston.

"From 1925 to 1927 Mr. Stone—who never received a college degree until his later years, when an honorary doctorate was conferred upon him by Arkansas—attended the architecture schools of Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In 1927 he was awarded the Rotch traveling scholarship, a coveted architectural prize that permitted him to spend two years of expense-paid travel abroad.

"He went to Europe, where he had his first glimpse of modern architecture, and shortly after his return in 1929 settled in New York and took a job with the consortium of architects designing Rockefeller Center. There he worked on what was to be considered his first major early achievement, the design of the interiors of Radio City Music Hall.

"Mr. Stone became deeply involved in the growing modern movement in New York, and in 1933 designed his first house, a starkly modern concrete and glass-blocked estate for Richard H. Mandel in Mount Kisco. The boxy white house with strip windows and a semicircular glass-block dining area attracted wide attention, and Mr. Stone was soon called to design a compound for Mr. and Mrs. Henry R. Luce at Mepkin Plantation in South Carolina.

"His next major commission was the Museum of Modern Art, and at the same time Mr. Stone designed a house in Old Westbury for A. Conger Goodyear, the Museum's president. The house's strong horizontal lines and large roof overhangs displayed a certain Frank Lloyd Wright influence that was to become even more marked in Mr. Stone's later buildings.

"In 1946 came the last significant project of Mr. Stone's early career, the El Panama Hotel in Panama City. A high white slab oriented to water breezes, the hotel's bedrooms opened to balconies, and its design became a prototype for hotels throughout the world.

"The hotel was followed by a number of houses that continued Mr. Stone's modernist leanings but indicated the increasing influence of Wright—his buildings became lower, more horizontal, and relied more on the use of wood.

"…His first major project of the 1950s (was) the United States Embassy at New Delhi. The building's rectangular shape and temple-like form, its gold-leaf columns, surrounding fountains and reflecting pool, not to mention its concrete grillework, epitomized Mr. Stone's new way of looking at architecture. He was to repeat the elements of New Delhi in a number of subsequent projects, including a round version for the United States Pavilion at the Brussels World's Fair of 1950.

"His work generally became more romantic and more highly embellished as time went on. In the 1960s Stone designs appeared at both the southwest and southeast corners of Central Park. The building on the southwest corner, originally the Huntington Hartford Gallery of Modern Art and later the New York Cultural Center, is an eccentric marble box on delicate legs with arches at top and bottom and characteristic Stone grillework tracery up and down the sides. The building on the southeast corner, General Motors, is a 50-story shaft with a sunken plaza, with bay windows and a marble facade instead of metal to emphasize Mr. Stone's distance from the Miesian steel and glass towers of Park Avenue.

"…His design for the Kennedy Center in Washington, completed in 1971, was perhaps the most controversial Stone project, however. The enormous marble building resembled the New Delhi Embassy, but was blown up to vast scale, with three auditoriums connected by a single formal hall decorated with red carpeting.

"Mr. Stone's large office at 745 Fifth Avenue remained active throughout the late 1960s and 1970s. Among his other major projects were the headquarters of the National Geographic Society in Washington; the North Carolina State Legislative Building at Raleigh; the 80-story Standard Oil (Indiana) Building in Chicago, which was a larger version of the General Motors tower, and the Garden State Arts Center in Holmdel."