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...
University of California Press