RECENT AND FUTURE ARCHITECTURE
Edward Durell Stone
Edward Durell Stone: RECENT AND FUTURE ARCHITECTURE. New York: Horizon Press, 1967. First edition. Oblong folio. Embossed red cloth titled in gilt. Photo illustrated dust jacket. 136 pp. 131 gravure plates. Price clipped dust jacket with archival tape repair to verso of front panel, otherwise 4-inch closed tear to cover and spine. Jacket lightly edgeworn, with no loss. First few leaves lightly fingered with a couple of random fingerprint smudges and neither artwork nor text affected. A very good or better copy in a nearly very good dust jacket. An uncommon title, especially in this exceptional condition.
14.75 x 14 hardcover book with 136 pages and ilustrated with 131 gravure plates of Stones' principal works including government, public use and cultural centers, education, campus planning and research institutes, theatres, housing, hotels, factories, urban planning, and commercial buildings.
The Horizon Press carried the Gold Standard for Architectural Book Publishing in the United States after World War II, and this edition displays the full range of the Hotrizon press's formidable skills: superb design and layout, careful typesetting, crisp reproductions and wonderful full cloth binding with embossing and blind stamping. Highly recommended.
38 projects are spotlighted in this edition, including the Beckman Auditorium, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, California (1960); First Unitarian Society Church, Schenectady, New York (1958); Busch Memorial Stadium, St. Louis, Missouri (1962, demolished 2005); Gallery of Modern Art, including the Huntington Hartford Collection (now known as Museum of Arts & Design), New York City (1958, substantially altered 2006); Garden State Arts Center (now known as PNC Bank Arts Center), Holmdel, New Jersey (1965); General Motors Building, New York City (1964); Harvey Mudd College, Claremont, California (1959); International Trade Mart (now known as World Trade Center of New Orleans), New Orleans, Louisiana (1959); John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, Washington, D.C. (1962); National Geographic Society Museum, Washington, D.C. (1961); North Carolina State Legislative Building, Raleigh, North Carolina (1960); Pakistan Institute of Nuclear Science and Technology, (1965); Museo de Arte, Ponce, Puerto Rico (1961); Prince George's Center (now known as University Town Center), Hyattsville, Maryland (1962); WAPDA House, Lahore, Pakistan (1962); State University of New York at Albany, Albany, New York (1962); Stuart Pharmaceutical Co., Pasadena, California (1956, partially demolished); Tulsa Convention Center, Tulsa, Oklahoma (1964, expanded and renamed to Cox Business Center); Von KleinSmid Center, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, California (1964); and many others.
As a boy, Edward Durrell Stone delivered newspapers for a paper owned by Senator William Fulbright’s family. That newspaper awarded Stone the first of many architectural prizes he would win throughout his life. The prize was $2.50 in a contest to design and build a birdhouse. At age 18, Stone moved to Boston where he worked in an electrical appliance store, as an office boy for an architect, and finally as a draftsman for Henry Shipley, while studying architecture at night. In a design competition, he won a year’s tuition at Harvard. He later transferred to MIT but he left shortly before graduating when he was awarded a Rotch Travelling Scholarship to Europe from 1927 to 1929. . On his return, he worked for several architects and opened his own office in 1936.
Stone's first major work, designed in the starkly functional International style in collaboration with Philip L. Goodwin, was the Museum of Modern Art, New York City (1937-39). As one the the earliest American exponents of the International Style, Stone had a major impact upon architectural education in the United States during the 1950s. He helped transform the International Style modernism of the 1950s into the postmodernism of the 1960s and 1970s by substituting formalism for functionalism.
Stone's formalism developed during in his Beaux-Arts education at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and his apprenticeship in the New York office of Schultze and Weaver. Stone attributed his shift from a somewhat severe modernism toward the more ornamental formalism of his later career to his second wife, Maria Torchio, whom he met in 1953.
In typical modernist fashion, Stone allows his buildings to stand as isolated objects in open space. He arranges his buildings as large multi-functional central spaces ringed by smaller enclosed rooms of more definite purpose. Unlike many modernists, he uses luxurious materials and a profusion of decorative details.
Stone's later architecture responded to the middle-class taste for a vulgar display of wealth. It also satisfied the equally characteristic American preference for efficiency and straightforwardness. Stone expressed wealth and thrift by covering his large box-like buildings with vivid ornamentation.
Buildings designed by Stone include the original Museum of Modern Art, the U.S. Embassy in New Delhi, the U.S. Pavilion at the Brussels World’s Fair, Stanford Medical Center, El Panama Hotel, General Motors Building, the Huntington Hartford Museum (1962; now the New York Cultural Center), New York City. Among his later works are the Amarillo Fine Arts Museum (1969); the Univ. of Alabama law school (1970); the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts (1971), Washington D.C.; and the Community Hospital of Monterey Peninsula, Carmel, Calif.