Review: Edward Durell Stone: Modernism’s Populist Architect by Mary Anne Hunting

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Mary Anne Hunting Edward Durell Stone: Modernism’s Populist Architect New York: W. W. Norton, 2012, 176 pp., 200 b/w illus. $55 (cloth), ISBN 9780393733013 Although Edward Durell Stone’s work is highly visible, he remains relatively unknown to both general and architectural audiences. Mary Anne Hunting’s Edward Durell Stone: Modernism’s Populist Architect is an attempt fill that gap. To start, she reminds us that this lack of recognition was not always the case. During his career he was very well known as the designer of the original Museum of Modern Art building, the “lollipop” building on Columbus Circle, both in New York City, and the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C. Along with Eero Saarinen, Paul Rudolph, Philip Johnson, and Minoru Yamasaki, he was considered to be part of the much-maligned “ballet school” of architecture, whose members challenged modernist orthodoxy by championing expressive and ornamented forms.1 His late work, such as the American Embassy in India, incorporated highly patterned ornamental screens, a motif that was much copied. In Hunting’s chronological narrative we also learn that Stone’s career was fueled by personal connections and media exposure. He grew up well-to-do in Fayetteville, Arkansas. He was a lifelong friend of J. William Fulbright, who, as a US senator, helped Stone secure a number of key government commissions. By all accounts, he was an affable and gifted colleague, “able to ‘draw anything except a sober breath,’ ” that is, until he quit drinking in the late 1950s. As a twenty-year-old he moved to Boston, where his brother was a practicing architect. His drawing ability landed him a job at Coolidge, Shepley, Bulfinch and Abbott, where Henry Richardson Shepley took him under his wing. In Boston he attended—but did not graduate from—Harvard and MIT, where he received a Beaux-Arts education. In both places he was a nonmatriculated special student. (As he admitted himself, he was never much of an academic.) It was Shepley who aided his admission to Harvard, and …