The US Embassy building in New Delhi, the Kennedy Center for Performing Arts in Washington DC and the Seaside City Hall would seem to have little in common. But each were designed by modernist architect Edward Durrell Stone.
In the mid-1960s, Stone was commissioned to design the Community Hospital of the Monterey Peninsula and then Seaside’s seat of government. Both structures have similar features associated with Stone’s style of that era, influenced by Frank Lloyd Wright, including thin, vertical supports and large overhanging roofs.
“Dad had a close relationship, personally and professionally, with Wright,” says his son Hicks Stone, who heads Stone Architecture in New York.
This Friday, a plaque-installing ceremony commemorating Stone’s design will be held. Hicks will speak, and will likely touch on his father’s aversion to the strict commercial style that dominated in the ‘60s.
“His work of that era began to break the stranglehold of post-war modernism in architecture,” Hicks says. “He reintroduced decorative features in a functional way.”
One of Stone’s most popular works is the embassy in New Delhi, a project was featured in a 1958 cover story Time magazine did on Stone.
THE COMMEMORATION CEREMONY STARTS AT 4PM FRIDAY, OCT. 19, AT THE SEASIDE CITY HALL, 440 HARCOURT AVE., SEASIDE. 899-6801.
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