Champion of the International Style designed buildings in Columbia
May 15, 2015
By Temple Ligon
In the early 1920s, Edward Durrell Stone left classes at the University of Arkansas for Boston and for architecture. He worked in an architect’s office while he attended classes and design studios at MIT, Harvard and the Boston Architecture Center, never graduating and never earning a degree. He did, though, win the prestigious Rotech Traveling Fellowship, good for two years in Europe, returning in October 1929, just in time to catch the stock market crash and the beginning of the Great Depression.
Stone went to work, even while most architecture students couldn’t find jobs. Having worked on the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel on Park Avenue, designing the main lobby and the grand ballroom, Stone also took charge of the design of Radio City Music Hall, part of Rockefeller Center. The Rockefellers were suitably impressed, enough to promote Stone as the design architect of the first Museum of Modern Art on East 53rd Street.
But before he got in good with the Rockefellers, he got in good with the editors of McCall’s Magazine and also their peers at Colliers, where he published house designs. In the March 1936 issue of McCall’s Stone’s house design in the International Style attracted the attention of Charles Augustus Wallace of Columbia, South Carolina. Wallace showed the house illustration in McCall’s to architect William Stork, who in turn showed it to Bill Lyles, his employee and future head of Columbia-based Lyles Bissett Carlisle & Wolff, or LBC&W.
At the time Stork was in business with a Mr. Weissinger, and the two of them advertised their firm as both designers and builders. Wallace asked them to draw up the house and to build it at 415 Harden Street, between intersections with Wheat and Wilmot.
Glenn McGee, head of interiors at LBC&W, bought the Wallace House in 1968 and immediately went to work restoring the place and correcting any errors in the transcription from McCall’s. McGee’s efforts gained National Register status in 1979.
Stone also designed in South Carolina the compound now called Mepkin Abbey, then Mepkin Plantation in 1936. Originally the Moncks Corner retreat home of Time-Life head Henry Luce and his wife Claire Booth, the property was given to the Catholic Church in 1949. Since the 1960s the occupants have been Trappist monks.
Stone actually came to Columbia in the late 1950s and the early 1960s to design USC’s Undergraduate Library, now the expanded Cooper Library, and the men’s dormitories affectionately called the honeycombs, demolished in the past decade. Before taking on USC’s Undergraduate Library, he had just finished his U. S. Embassy in New Delhi, India, and the library looked like a copy of the embassy.
Marketing the area, not just South Carolina, in Raleigh, North Carolina, Stone designed the N. C. Legislative Building and the N. C. Museum of Art.
Stone’s most prestigious commissions included the U. S. exhibit at the 1958 World’s Fair in Brussels, Belgium; National Geographic Society, 1961; Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, D. C., 1971; General Motors Building at the corner of 5th Avenue and 59th Street, finished in 1968; Aon Center, originally Amoco Building, 83 floors, 1974; and the Amoco’s twin, Toronto’s First Canadian Place, 1975.
Architecturally weak, the strength of the Kennedy Center is its scale and its multi-purpose functions:
Concert Hall              2,454 seats
Opera House             2,294
Eisenhower Theater   1,161
Terrace Theater         475
Theater Lab                398
Family Theater            320
Jazz Club                    160
And there is garage parking for a couple thousand cars below.
On Friday, June 12, there will be a lecture on the work of Edward Durrell Stone, including his South Carolina work; and by then we should have a more extensive and accurate grip on the history of his Wallace-McGee House at 415 Harden Street. The Stone lecture will be given at 1:30 p. m. at Still Hopes and at 6:00 p. m. in the library at 2225 Terrace Way.
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