Art: More Than Modern

(See Cover)

In a sea of mud at the northern edge of Brussels, workmen in wooden shoes this week are ripping wooden forms from concrete columns, troweling plaster into place, and punctuating the din of hammering and riveting with curses in half a dozen languages. Forty-four nations are striving to ready their pavilions for the Brussels World’s Fair, which opens April 17. Behind the fair’s grand display of bunting, chrome, cantilevers and parasol domes lies a deeply serious purpose. By next autumn, some 35 million visitors (all Brussels hotels are booked solid for three months after the fair opens) will file through the gates, judge and compare the nations by what they see before them.

Poised in the midst of the last-minute clutter and confusion stands the U.S. Pavilion, a soaring, airy, translucent drum, delicately resting on thin steel columns now getting their final golden lacquer (see color pages). Before it, workmen are completing the paving, preparing a 230-ft.-long reflecting pool to receive its fountains. Electricians are adjusting the lights that will shine on the 130 Belgian apple trees due to burst into bloom at about the day the fair opens. Nearly as vast as the width of Rome’s ancient Colosseum, which inspired it, combining dignity, symmetry and an inviting holiday glitter, the pavilion is the finest showcase the U.S. has built abroad at a major world’s fair. Spectacular in its daring engineering and inspired in its architecture, it is already recognized as the No. 1 U.S. exhibit at Brussels, and a leading contender for world architectural honors.

Up with Exuberance. One fine morning earlier this month a black Cadillac sloshed through the mud, slid to a stop before the U.S. Pavilion. Out got a heavy-built (205 Ibs.), 6-ft.-tall U.S. architect, his grey Homburg awry. Oblivious to the gathering circle of workmen, he stood transfixed before the building that seemed to float in the bright sunshine, softly murmured, “Wow!” Then, as his genial, basset-hound features broke into a delighted grin, he exclaimed: “God, isn’t that the most beautiful damned thing you’ve ever seen in your whole life?”

He was U.S. Architect Edward Durell Stone, 56, and for the first time he was seeing, nearly completed, the building he had created. One of the profession’s freest spirits and by general consensus the most versatile designer and draftsman of his generation, Ed Stone was a pioneer modernist. He early set his mark on such buildings as Manhattan’s Museum of Modern Art, became one of the deftest interpreters of the International Style initiated by France’s Le Corbusier and Germany’s Bauhaus school. In recent years he revolted against the monotony of cityscapes composed of acres of glass façades. chrome and exposed steel. Instead. Architect Stone turned to his own great love of classic monuments and deep love of beauty. “In my own case,” he says, “I feel the need for richness, exuberance, and pure, unadulterated freshness.”

Willows in the Amphitheatre. It was the note of exuberance and freshness in Stone’s latest work that convinced the American Institute of Architects committee, charged with finding an architect for the U.S. State Department, that Stone was the man to design the Brussels pavilion. When he first visited the site two years ago, it was little more than a grassy, willow-studded park, staked out in a triangular plot, between the areas reserved for Vatican City and the U.S.S.R. Characteristically, he began sketching his design on the spot, seized on the site’s natural amphitheater contours as the setting for a lofty, circular building. Leaving eleven giant willows in place, he resolved to build the pavilion over them, and include a wide interior balcony to give added area for exhibitions. He also decided to snuggle a circular, 1,150-seat auditorium half underground in the shoulder rise of the hill. “To frame and enclose such a huge space is an opportunity that doesn’t come often to an architect,” says Ed Stone. “Neither does the problem of spanning 350 feet. Why, you could put the University of Arkansas’ football field in here and still have room.” In the cloth velarium used by Roman emperors to cover the Colosseum, Stone found his solution to roofing the largest free-span circular building ever erected. He devised a bicycle-wheel system of cables, each under no tons’ tension, to hold up the pavilion’s 68,400 sq. ft. plastic outer roof.

To add glitter to the interior. Stone hung a mesh of thousands of sparkling, gold-anodized aluminum disks from the lower spokes of the roof. The hub, a tension ring 63 ft. across and weighing 25 tons, is dramatically suspended in midair and open to the sky above the central pool. To give the structure the maximum look of lightness, a trellis of light steel straps was used to hold the 42-ft.-high plastic walls rigid against the wind. Says Stone: “I’m not given to flexing my structural muscles publicly. But you can’t say this building doesn’t shout with steel. Why, you can almost hear those cables, and you can see every damned member.”

Under the Wire. Good luck marked the U.S. Pavilion from the start. The World’s Fair U.S. Commissioner-General Howard S. Cullman credits Stone’s early planning, even before a final budget figure was available, with giving the U.S. the fast start that “was the difference between make or break.” Belgium’s top contractor, Emile Blaton. made the project his particular baby. As a result, the U.S. Pavilion, one of the last to get started in Brussels, is among the first to be completed. Even more remarkable is the fact that Architect Stone stayed within 1% of the State Department’s original $5.000,000 building budget.

The exhibits for display within the gigantic Stone showcase have already raised the cry of scandal from art critics who object to showing American primitives and North American Indian art plus younger U.S. painters to art-sophisticated Europeans. But U.S. fair officials are hoping that a mixture of candor, humor, friendliness and a generous display of such technological gadgetry as closed-circuit TV, a quizmaster IBM machine, and fashion shows, will win friends for the U.S. To do this the U.S. will have to work out some way to stay within the already strained overall budgetless than a fourth of the estimated $50-$60 million the Soviets are spending to impress the world at the fair. Where architecture is concerned. Stone’s pavilion has given the U.S. a commanding lead over the Soviet’s frosted-glass monolithic rectangle, which Belgians are already referring to as “The Refrigerator.”

Birdhouse for Bluebirds. The man who created this U.S. showcase was born and reared in the Arkansas university town of Fayetteville (pop. 18,069). First member of the Stone family to go to Arkansas was Ed Stone’s grandfather, taciturn Stephen K. Stone, who managed to amass such a fortune in real estate and merchandise that he was known as “the Richest Man in Washington County.” His sons, including Ed’s father, Benjamin Hicks Stone, were raised in Southern comfort, so well off none of them troubled to work very hard.

It was Ed’s mother, an English teacher at the University of Arkansas, who was the dominant artistic force in his family. She encouraged Ed in his talent for drawing, gave him an upstairs bedroom for his carpenter shop. There, as a boy of 14, Stone designed the structure that won his first architectural contest-a birdhouse for a contest sponsored by the local lumberyard. Budding Architect Stone’s entry and first-prize ($2.50) winner: “A modest shelter for bluebirds, covered with sassafras branches.”

Birdhouse Builder Stone was no go-getting boy. A slow, sweet talker, he loved to hang around all day at the soda fountain. After his mother’s death, in 1920 he ambled onto the University of Arkansas, where he was immensely popular and immensely relaxed. “I guess all the boys were lazy,” recalls a college chum, “but Ed was more than ordinary lazy.” Arkansas’ U.S. Senator James William Fulbright, then a lowerclassman and later president of the university, gives Ed full marks as a storyteller and cartoonist. Beyond that, Stone seemed content to remain a lady’s man (despite his baggy-kneed appearance) and to join the boys in downing mountain dew. Finally the spinster head of the art department took alarm, wrote to Ed’s brother Hicks, an architect in Boston and 14 years Ed’s senior: “This boy has divine talent. If you don’t take him away from here and put him in school, it’s a crime, and you’re a wicked man!”

In Boston, Ed Stone opened his Arkansas eyes wide. “Buildings like the Boston Public Library and Trinity Church, well, they made quite a dent in a kid from the Ozarks,” he says. There were bigger dents on a trip to Manhattan and Washington, D.C. on the way home. Hicks led

Ed blindfolded to the middle of Brooklyn Bridge, then gave him his first view of the New York skyline. Recalls Ed, “It was fabulous!” Later, he stood spellbound in the patio of Washington’s Pan American Building, with its tropical courts, colored tiles and exotic macaws. “I decided that if architecture can be like this, then this is what I would really like to do,” he says. “By the time I got back to Fayetteville, that hotbed of tranquillity, the die was cast.”

Retaining the Sag. Leaving Arkansas for Boston without a degree, Stone threw himself into architecture with a drive and enthusiasm that would have rocked his old Fayetteville neighbors right off their chairs. He took a $10-a-week job as office boy in the office of dour Scots Architect Alexander Law, signed up for night courses at Boston’s Architectural Club, was soon staying up all night to work through his problems, began winning first prizes.

Within a year Stone was working in Boston’s top office, under Architect Henry Shepley, who recalls that “Stone from his earliest days had an extraordinary talent for turning a very commonplace design into a thing of beauty.” One of Stone’s first chores was to renovate Harvard’s historic Massachusetts Hall, retaining the sag in the roof at Shepley’s request, “so we wouldn’t spoil the architecture.” A year later, Stone was in Harvard’s architectural school, the winner of a scholarship for gifted students.

Soul & Spirits. “It meant more than the professor to have Stone around,” says Manhattan Architect Walter Kilham jr. “He contributed to everyone. He was the soul of the school.” He also accounted for much of its spirits, gave such blockbusting parties on Prohibition bathtub gin that his fellow students began to say, “Ed Stone can draw anything except a sober breath.” When Stone had completed two years of design courses in a single year, and found that he would have to concentrate next on engineering, he threw his slide rule on the drafting-room floor (the architect who picked it up still treasures it) and announced that he was going off to M.I.T. to study with Prix de Rome Winner Jacques Carlu.

Stone has never regretted the hours he spent copying details from D’Espouy’s Fragments de I’Architecture Antique. “Those great monuments of the past were an inspiration, not to copy, but to enrich your vocabulary. The Pompeian house and the romance of the classical-why, I harken to them even now.”

At the end of his first year at M.I.T., Stone walked off with Massachusetts’ top architectural award, the Rotch Travelling Scholarship, and was off to Europe for two years of touring and sketching the architectural masterpieces. When he stepped off the Berengaria back in New York in November 1929, he was 1) flat broke, and 2) convinced that the modern style he had seen abroad would sweep the U.S.: “It was an exciting time. People were jumping out of windows in New York, and the new Waldorf-Astoria was going up.”

Stone landed on his feet, with a $100-a-week job designing interiors for the new Waldorf, including the romantic trellised ceiling of the Starlight Roof. Within two years he had moved over to the new Rockefeller Center, where in the presence of “the prophets,” Architects Raymond Hood and Harvey Corbett of the Rockefeller Center team that included fast-rising young architect Wallace Harrison, Stone was put in charge of the working designs for Radio City Music Hall, then as now the world’s largest movie palace (6,200 seats).

Head of the Class. From that time on, Ed Stone was recognized as the young designer who had come closest to mastering the modern vocabulary. Stone needed all his talent just to survive the long winter of architecture during the Depression. One after another. Stone’s contemporaries closed shop. Those who survived often rushed from office to office to hover over a friend’s drafting boards, giving prospective clients the impression of an office packed with busy draftsmen.

Stone himself turned out advertising layouts and designed lighting fixtures. In the Richard H. Mandel house at Mt. Kisco, N.Y., he produced in 1935 the first modern house in the International Style (as contrasted with Frank Lloyd Wright’s indigenous style) to be designed by a U.S.-born architect. In the bachelor’s retreat he built for A. Conger Goodyear at Old Westbury, on Long Island, he deftly applied modern principles to an intimate, luxurious small house. His collection of medals and awards grew through the years. Two Architectural League Gold Medal winners are now rated as architectural landmarks:

¶ Manhattan’s Museum of Modern Art, designed in 1937-38 (completed in 1939) with the late Philip L. Goodwin, one of the earliest U.S. buildings constructed in the International Style. Conceived as a luminous rectangle, incorporating vast, flexible loft space for exhibitions, and an inviting, open ground floor, it is fronted by a wall of insulated glass to give the interior an alabaster glow. Stone calls it “a simple, vivid, workable building.”

¶ El Panama Hotel, which Stone designed in 1946 (it was completed in 1951)after a three-year hitch as a captain and major in the U.S. Army Air Forces in charge of designing air-base facilities. Faced with the commission for a hotel in the tropics. Stone chose the hilltop site two miles northeast of Panama City, decided to let the rooms air-condition themselves by making each one an open breezeway with its own cantilevered balcony. When Stone told Frank Lloyd Wright he was building a hotel without corridors, without windows and without doors, the shrewd old man opined: “Ed, sounds like you’ve got something there.” Wright was right. El Panama (now the El Panama Hilton) has set a style for resort hotels from Hawaii to Istanbul.

The Tie That Breaks. Despite his considerable professional success, these were difficult years for Ed Stone. His marriage to Orlean Vandiver of Montgomery, Ala., whom he had met in Venice during his student days, was drifting onto the rocks. Increasingly, Stone’s life centered over his drafting board. With his fellow architects he would rehash architectural problems over martini-laced lunches that often rolled until dinner, sometimes ended only when mid-Manhattan restaurants closed.

Everyone who knew Ed Stone in that era agrees that he would have drawn far more in commissions if he had drawn more sober breath.

“Money really had no meaning for Ed,” says Orlean. “Talent was his greatest motivating force. He said himself that he was first married to architecture, and that was very true.”In 1949 she moved out.

taking with her their two sons, Edward Jr., now studying landscape architecture at Harvard’s School of Architecture, and Robert Vandiver. now a student at Yale.

“The Tidy Siren.” Main driving force behind Edward D. Stone’s new era of success, he firmly avows, is his second marriage to a fiery, possessive and vivacious Latin beauty Stone calls “the tidy siren.” It was on a plane to Paris that Stone first met Maria Elena Torch, of Cleveland, a flashing brunette of mixed Italian and Spanish parentage who had come to New York, was then working as foreign editor on the short-lived quarterly, Fashion & Travel.

As Maria, now 31, remembers the meeting, “I noticed him because there was some woman seeing him off. and a man seeing me off, and we were both kissing goodbye. When the plane took off, I took a long look at this man in a baggy tweed suit, unshaven, a mess. He looked like some professor. But when we started to talk, I realized he was the most intelligent man I had ever met. By the time we were over London and the dawn was coming up, he proposed to me. It was romantic and wonderful.” Squiring Maria around Paris morning, noon and evening, Stone kept on proposing. On the tenth day she accepted, only to put in eleven months until Stone’s divorce from Orlean came through. Since then Maria has traveled with Stone around the world, twice to South America, 33 times across the U.S. and 19 times across the Atlantic, laying out his clothes, pinning the right tie to the right suit, re placing his lost belts. “He’s a genius.” she says. “He’d goto his office in his bedroom slippers if someone didn’t watch out for him. But he’ll be the greatest architect in the world. If he lives to be the age of Frank Lloyd Wright, he’ll be in a class with Sir Christopher Wren.”

If he reaches that class, Ed Stone will have an explanation. “I was like Rip Van Winkle, asleep in the hills, until I came down and Maria brought me back to life,” he exclaims. “I think the work I have done in the last five years-which I consider to be the most significant architecture I have done-can be directly attributed to my happy marriage. I was on a creative plateau for several years preceding my marriage.” One mark of Stone’s affection: in 1954 he threw away the martini pitcher that had dogged him since college days, has sat firmly on the wagon ever since.

Effective Elixir. Maria’s elixir had an instantaneous effect. They were married on June 24, 1954 in Beirut, while Stone was putting the finishing touches on his design for the $5,000,000 Hotel Phoenicia. Three days later, Stone lounged in his bathrobe on a balcony of the St. George Hotel, took a long look at the blue Mediterranean and the snow-capped mountains of Lebanon, and began his first sketch for the U.S. New Delhi embassy, a commission he had received from the U.S. State Department three months before. The sketch (see cut), done quickly on the corner of a coffee-stained Manila envelope which Maria snatched from the wastebasket afterward, may well prove to be a historic architectural document, for by almost universal acclaim, Stone’s New Delhi embassy is one of the key architectural achievements of the decade. What Stone has managed to do in a single building is to reintroduce into modern architecture the quality of monumentality and stateliness that functional, stripped-down modern has long lacked. Stone’s inspiration was the great temple forms of Greece and Rome, set on a podium, which in the New Delhi case also serves to shelter cars from the blistering India sun.

At the same time, Stone found in the arabesque grilles, used from the windows of Spain’s Alhambra to the walls of Hindu temples, a device both ornamental and effective in filtering the sun’s rays, which in New Delhi send temperatures up to 120°. By wrapping the grille around the building, Stone achieved not only a massive, highly textured façade, but also successfully reintroduced on a grand scale the element of decoration that has been one of modern architecture’s taboos.

“Taj Maria.” The reaction to Stone’s design for New Delhi was a rousing cheer that rolled the full range of the architectural profession, from Mies van der Rohe purists to Frank Lloyd Wright (“The only embassy that does credit to the United States”). Said one U.S. architect, just back from India: “The effect is of the Parthenon, with the pierced marble screen of Delhi’s Red Fort and the white of the Taj Mahal. In the sun it’s going to tell a terrific story.” Cracked Frank Lloyd Wright: “Why not call it Taj Maria?”

Ed Stone has made such massive use of the arabesque grille façade that it has become his trademark. Says he: “I guess, subconsciously, I have been working up to this for a long time. You can see it in the walls as far back as the Goodyear house. El Panama Hotel is full of grilles and screens. I have come to the belief that the device of the grille is warranted in most parts of the U.S. I think it serves not only to satisfy a wistful yearning on the part of everyone for pattern, warmth and interest, but also serves the desperately utilitarian purpose of keeping the sun off glass and giving privacy.”

Stone’s first opportunity to try out his theory in the U.S. came when he got the commission to draw the plans for the $19 million Palo Alto-Stanford Hospital and Stanford Medical Center. From his experience in designing the just completed $20 million Social Security Hospital for Employees (one of the world’s largest) in Lima, Peru and his University of Arkansas Medical Center (which won an American Institute of Architects Honor Award in 1952), Stone knew a hospital is “the toughest problem in architecture. It’s as if every room were either a kitchen, a bath, or a boiler room. It is not something you can design by remote control.” Stone moved his main office to Palo Alto, taking Maria along. Two weeks later, as Stone puts it, their firstborn, Benjamin Hicks III, joined them.

Pills & Palace. Once on the site, Stone decided to take his architectural rhythm from Stanford University’s low, Romanesque quadrangle. He laid out the medical complex in a low, three-story group within a 56-acre site, introduced inner landscaped courts, included sumptuous water gardens and fountains (see cut). To face the buildings, Stone designed a rough-surfaced grille of 3-ft. 8-in. units, carried it behind a 3Oo-ft.-long colonnade. Stone hopes the result, scheduled for completion in September 1959, will rival the beauty of Europe’s great squares, and at the same time relate the buildings to the landscaped California campus.

In short order, Stone found himself flooded with clients eager to try his new romantic modern architecture. In the Stuart Co. building in Pasadena, Calif. (TIME, Jan. 20), Stone tried his grille as a solution to Southern California’s climate, turned out a pill factory with such Tiffany & Co. glitter that one leading California architect said: “This building records all the gains of modern architecture and yet remains a romantic building.” In a dormitory for the University of South Carolina, Stone, along with Architect Thomas Harmon, used the grille as a façade sheathing a monolithic block with housing for 250 students. Economically a success (bids on the building came in so far below estimate that the university doubled its order), the four-sided grille had an overpowering monotony, a fact Stone now acknowledges. He plans to re-study the top of the building, particularly he screen above the roof. No such reservations cloud Stone’s opinion of the house resigned on ancient classical lines around central court, or atrium, which he completed this month (with Interior Designer ?. H. Robsjohn-Gibbings) for Bruno and “Josephine Graf in Dallas, Texas.

“Look, I’m Raving.” Stone has also applied his trademark to his own house. Designed in a single afternoon and built as planned, it is currently the most discussed louse in Manhattan. Spotted outside the house one day, Frank Lloyd Wright was asked. “Is this a pupil of yours?” and replied, “Not a pupil but a pal.” Then Wright marched up and rang Stone’s front doorbell. “I was scared to death,” Stone confesses, “but Mr. Wright was wonder-:ul.” Eying the house with a connoisseur’s discrimination, Wright said: “You know, Ed, we’ll have to trade details.” Then, in an astonished voice, he added: “Listen to me, I’m raving. And they say that old crank never has a kind word to say about anything. But I’m raving.”

Two blocks away from his new house, Ed Stone has set up his office, one of several he has maintained over the years in the East 60s. “There may not be a motto outside the door,” says Stone, “but we turn out architects as well as architecture.” Other architects agree, point out that Stone has long captured young architects’ imaginations, from his years of lecturing (at Yale, Princeton, New York University, Cornell and the University of Arkansas) has been able to pick top young graduates attracted by his informality and insistence that “architecture is an art.”

Outside Stone’s office, opinion is sharply divided on his direct challenge to the glass façade. The principal question: Will the grille become a cliche and a cover for bad architecture? Says Manhattan Architect Philip Johnson: “The New Delhi embassy? How could I help but love it? It’s a jewel! But architecture is more than putting up drapes in front of a house to hide it.” Architect Eero Saarinen (TIME Cover, July 2, 1956) feels that the New Delhi embassy “marks a new turning point toward stateliness and dignity,” but also thinks that “the best thing that could happen to Ed Stone is for his friends to take him down on the floor and wrestle his grilles away from him.”

Bell for Beauty. Stone fires right back at his critics’ glass facades: “Let’s face it. Large glass areas create serious problems. Interiors are hard to heat in winter and to cool in summer. The problem of glare is continuous. A glass house is lovely if you own the view. But hell, otherwise you’re all displayed to your neighbors in your pajamas. The grille is a basic architectural principle, as sound an idea as two steel columns with glass between them.”

Can the grille play a role in veiling unsightly pockmarks of urban blight which for economic reasons must stand? Stone is excited by the fact that two major U.S. cities are considering it. But his main hope is that he has touched off a new movement. “What we need is to put pure beauty into our buildings,” he says fervently. “Let’s strike the bell for beauty.”