51福利

I am a son of Edward Durell Stone. Father was a prominent American architect in the twentieth century. He is most well-known for his work in the 1950s and 1960s, projects like the U.S. Embassy in New Delhi, India or the U.S. Pavilion at the 1958 world’s fair in Brussels, Belgium. But he was also one of the earliest American architects to embrace European modernism in the 1930s.

 

After working as the architect-in-charge of Radio City Music Hall and the Roxy Theater in New York City, both part of the Rockefeller Center complex, he was eager to experiment with modernist design that he had seen on his grand tour of Europe in the late 1920s. His 1933 home for department store heir, Richard Mandel, was one of the earliest modern homes in the eastern United States. The acclaim from the Mandel commission and Father’s close friendship with architect Wallace Harrison led to his most significant early commission, the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, which he designed in 1937. Seemingly his career was on a meteoric trajectory, but there were complications. Father was an alcoholic, a dilemma that his first wife, Orlean Vandiver, and his two children from that marriage, Edward and Robert, had to continually confront. But Father’s charming manner, sheer talent and easy sense of humor gave people a reason to overlook his problems with alcohol.

Over the years, there were five children from three different marriages. That last phrase conveys in dispassionate terms events that were scarring for all of us. I am the eldest child from Father’s second marriage to Maria Elena Torch, a woman widely viewed as the person who was most responsible for resurrecting Father’s career and providing the foundation for his remarkable success in the late 1950s and 1960s.

 

 Until he met my mother on a transatlantic flight in 1953, Father continued to struggle with alcohol. His drinking exploits were legendary. Noting simultaneously his luminous drafting skills and his utter lack of sobriety, one person noted that, “Edward Stone could draw everything but a sober breath.” During their courtship, my mother presented him with an ultimatum. She said that he had “to choose between the bottle and me” and remain sober for six months. He did — for the rest of his life. They married in 1954. I was born in 1955.

In 1956, Father purchased and redesigned a grimy derelict townhouse at 130 East 64th Street in New York City between Park and Lexington Avenues. Close to the Third Avenue elevated railway, the neighborhood did not yet have the genteel and precious character that it has today. Transformed by Father’s vision from a dreary brownstone with a dark interior, the house to this day remains a startling and controversial presence on East 64th Street. This was the home that I grew up in.

 

One of the benefits of growing up in a home with a strong and distinctive architectural character is that it almost inevitably imparts an innate sense of design and spatial awareness to the people who live there. My father never really sat me on his knee and spoke about architecture when I was a child, but living in this environment infused me with an instinctive understanding of architecture. Moreover, our travels to places he favored for their classical and neo-classical architecture, like Paris, Venice, Rome, London and the ancient Greek temples of Sicily, instilled a deeper understanding of architectural vocabulary in me.