Edward Durell Stone - Later Years

Later Years

In the mid-1950s Stone moved away from strict modernist tenets and began to fuse the formalism of his early Beaux-Arts training with a romantic historicism. This historicizing aspect of Stone’s work was in part influenced by his second wife, Maria Elena Torchio, whom Stone met, fell in love with, and proposed marriage to on a transatlantic flight. They were married shortly after in 1954. The Stones’ frequent travels to Italy during this period and Maria Elena Stone’s Italian origins reawakened his interest in classical and Italianate precedent which he had so dutifully recorded in his Rotch Fellowship sketchbooks. As Stone later wrote, “I believe the inspiration for a building should be in the accumulation of history,”. Decrying the “passing enthusiasms” of modernism, Stone asserted that “Architecture…should be timeless and convey by its very fiber the assurance of permanence…”

Stone's career enjoyed a dramatic turn when he was awarded the commissions for the United States Embassy in New Delhi, India and the United States Pavilion for the 1958 International Exposition in Brussels, Belgium. A cover story on Stone in the March 31, 1958 issue of Time magazine led to a series of important national and international commissions, and Stone's firm grew in size from 20 architects to over 200. No longer an intimate design atelier, Stone’s office became a stratified corporate entity and his work became uneven and formulaic.

Stone was generally shunned by the critical architectural community for his repudiation of pure modernist aesthetic, but his office was prominent and successful. Business Week called Stone the "Man with a Billion on the Drawing Board" and United Press International described him as "the most quoted architect since the death of Frank Lloyd Wright".

Stone continued to garner major architectural commissions into the early 1970s. The State University of New York at Albany, the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, DC, the Standard Oil building in Chicago, Illinois and the Pakistan Institute of Nuclear Science and Technology, were notable examples of late phase work.

Stone married his personal assistant, Violet Moffat in 1971 and retired from active practice in 1974. He died in New York City on August 6, 1978. His firm, Edward Durell Stone & Associates, continued to exist in various forms until 1993.