STONE, Edward Durell

(b. 9 March 1902 in Fayetteville, Arkansas; d. 6 August 1978 in New York City), innovative modern architect whose distinctive style, seen in buildings from New York's Museum of Modern Art to Washington, D.C.'s John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, has been the subject of both praise and condemnation.

Stone was the son of Benjamin Hicks Stone and Ruth Johnson. After studying art at the University of Arkansas for three years, Stone joined his older brother, a practicing architect, in Boston. There he took courses at night through the Boston Architectural Club while pursuing an apprenticeship with the firm of Coolidge, Shepley, Bulfinch, and Abbott. In 1926 Stone won a competition entitling him to study architecture, first at Harvard and then at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). He proceeded to win a second MIT competition, the reward for which was two years' study and travel in Europe.

Upon his return to the United States in 1929, Stone obtained immediate employment helping to design the interior of the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in New York City and then the fabled interior of Radio City Music Hall. Several years of journeyman work followed, enabling him to open his own firm in 1936 with a major commission: the Museum of Modern Art (1937), which was praised as an embodiment in glass and concrete of the art it was intended to house. The building displayed the motifs for which he would become known: circular windows, overhanging flat roofs, and decorative concrete facades.

Stone built hangars and other utilitarian structures for the U.S. Army Air Corps during World War II, an experience that influenced his postwar designs. After the war he built a number of resort hotels incorporating the cantilever methods he had learned in the military. In 1954 he designed the American Embassy in New Delhi, India, featuring a pierced concrete grillwork and an overhanging roof that protected the interior from direct sun and heat. The building, set on a platform over a sheltered parking area, seemed to float above its site.

As Stone's reputation grew during the 1960s, he repeated these motifs in numerous commissions. In a controversial action, he renovated his Manhattan townhouse in 1964, covering the entire facade with a four-story pierced screen. For the headquarters of the National Geographic Society, erected in Washington, D.C., in 1964, Stone employed a two-story base with overhang and a second overhang on the main roof. For the Center for Continuing Education at the University of Chicago (now a graduate-student residence hall), he imposed bold geometric patterns on the concrete of the exterior walls and the overhanging roof and extended the preternaturally thin columns (which had become another recurring motif) to the full height of the structure. Perhaps Stone's finest work in this vein was a pair of libraries, one for the University of South Carolina and the other for the city of Davenport, Iowa, in which the roof overhang served a functional purpose similar to that performed in New Delhi: protecting the interior (and its books) from the effects of direct sun. The South Carolina library won the American Institute of Architects' First Honor Award in 1963.

Stone's designs brought him equal amounts of praise and criticism. The extreme thinness of his columns, made possible by Stone's mastery of cantilever design, was attacked as masking the true form of his buildings; the columns, however, contributed to the illusion of a "floating" building, which was particularly valuable in either a lush or unattractive landscape, as Stone demonstrated with the Huntington Hartford Museum (now the property of the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs). The pierced-concrete facade appears to hover on structural piers that are split into large circular voids at the second-story level, decisively separating the beauty of the building from the bustling traffic and intrusive signs at street level. Some critics recommended the building for landmark status; Ada Louise Huxtable, however, called it "a Venetian palazzo on popsicle sticks."

Inevitably, Stone was approached to do ever larger projects. Between 1964 and 1972 he designed two campus master plans, one for the University of Alaska in Anchorage and the other for the State University of New York at Albany; a headquarters building for General Motors in mid-town Manhattan; a headquarters building for the Standard Oil Company (now the Aon Center) in Chicago; the PepsiCo World Headquarters in Purchase, New York; and the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C., whose three performance halls and associated public areas total some 1.5 million square feet.

At large scales the delicacy of Stone's vision could be overwhelmed by the sheer magnitude of concrete and marble; the lobbies of the JFK Center are one hundred feet high, and the four-hundred-acre campus in Albany remains unfilled decades after its inception. But on the more human scale of the PepsiCo headquarters, in particular, Stone fused metal, glass, and natural materials to achieve an architecture that works both visually and functionally. And even when he failed in the view of critics, he did so in some cases because his materials were not adequate to the realization of his vision. A visitor to Chicago sees the Aon Center reaching for the sky while the nearby Sears Tower clutches the ground, and the fact that the Corten steel of the latter has better withstood the brutal Chicago winters does not invalidate Stone's choice of marble.

Stone married Orlean Vandiver on 5 December 1931; they had two children. They were divorced in 1951, and on 24 June 1953 Stone married Maria Elena Torchio. The architect often said that it was she who infected his designs of the late 1950s and 1960s with their famous "romanticism." Nevertheless, that marriage did not last, and Stone married for the third time, to Violet Campbell Moffat, in 1972. Stone died after a brief illness in New York City on 6 August 1978.

Stone gained fame as an architect working in the international modern style, but transformed in the late 1950s and became the world's foremost proponent of romanticism in large structures. Although his greatest work undoubtedly is found in his more modest structures, his large buildings have proved to be extremely efficient in operation, praised for their sensuous good looks yet condemned as examples of "architectural populism."

Stone's autobiography is titled The Evolution of an Architect (1962). Additional information on his architectural vision can be found in his Recent and Future Architecture (1967). An obituary is in the New York Times (8 Aug. 1978).

Hartley S. Spatt