EDWARD DURELL STONE (1902-1978). Born in Fayetteville, Arkansas, Stone studied art at the University of Arkansas, entered the School of Architecture at Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts, and transferred to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, to study modern design with Jacques Carlu. He toured Europe on a Rotch Traveling Fellowship and on returning to the United States assisted in the design of Radio City Music Hall in New York City. Based in that city he worked in International Style, designing the much-admired Mandel House in Mount Kisco, New York, and, with Philip Goodwin, the original Museum of Modern Art building in New York City. He then departed from the pure principles of the modern style to create a more personal idiom that embraced ornamentation. Examples from this phase of his career include a series of buildings protected by ornamental sunshielding or grilles, among them the United States Embassy in New Delhi, India. Other outstanding works include El Panama Hotel, Panama City, Panama-, Robert Popper House, White Plains, New York,United States Pavilion, 1962 World's Fair, Brussels, Belgium.

"I HAVE THIS BELIEF that great architecture will give everyone, the man in the street, the uneducated man, the uninformed man, an exhilaration. He'll be thrilled by it. The idea that architecture is something that can only be appreciated by a minuscule minority of precious initiates is all wrong. I think anybody would agree that Chartres is a beautiful thing. I think everybody really is thrilled with the interior of Grand Central Station. I think great architecture, people should sense and feel." --1963

From: John Peter, THE ORAL HISTORY OF MODERN ARCHITECTURE, Abrams, New York, 1994