Edward Durell Stone | Tag

Toronto Architecture City Guide: 25 Modern and Contemporary Landmarks in Canada's Largest City

September 25, 2023

Whether rain or shine, Toronto is a yearlong bustling city, the largest in Canada and the fourth largest in North America. It’s become a cosmopolitan center with its renowned business district and cultural venues/ events that come alive during the summer and early fall nights. Toronto suggests a beautifully diverse urban setting between shimmering high rises and smaller brick houses, intertwining residential and vibrant commercial areas, public parks, and even beaches. All become part of the city's striking skyline, crowned by the iconic CN tower.

Toronto’s ongoing sprawl and constant urban development are noticeable as new projects spread through the city, weaving themselves into the existing buildings, from 19th-century landmarks such as the Gooderham Building to modern and contemporary major works like the Aga Khan Museum. These new constructions include increasing adaptive reuse and retrofitted projects throughout the city as more efforts and incentives are provided to reduce carbon emissions.

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Weiss/Manfredi Reimagines Iconic U.S. Embassy Campus in New Delhi, India

January 11, 2021

Multidisciplinary design practice Weiss/Manfredi has broken ground on the reimagined U.S. Embassy campus in New Delhi, India. Designed for the U.S. Department of State with the Bureau of Overseas Buildings Operations, the project aims to support the U.S.-India Comprehensive Global Strategic Partnership with a new chancery building for the embassy. The project includes restoring Edward Durell Stone’s early modernist Chancery Building and remaking the 28-acre compound into a resilient campus.

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AD Classics: Radio City Music Hall / Edward Durell Stone & Donald Deskey

October 27, 2018

This article was originally published on July 29, 2016. To read the stories behind other celebrated architecture projects, visit our AD Classics section.

Upon opening its doors for the first time on a rainy winter’s night in 1932, the Radio City Music Hall in Manhattan was proclaimed so extraordinarily beautiful as to need no performers at all. The first built component of the massive Rockefeller Center, the Music Hall has been the world’s largest indoor theater for over eighty years. With its elegant Art Deco interiors and complex stage machinery, the theater defied tradition to set a new standard for modern entertainment venues that remains to this day.

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The Architecture of Washington DC's Watergate Complex: Inside America’s Most Infamous Address

March 01, 2018

Joseph Rodota's new book The Watergate: Inside America’s Most Infamous Address (William Morrow) presents the story of a building complex whose name is recognized around the world as the address at the center of the United States' greatest political scandal—but one that has so many more tales to tell. In this excerpt from the book, the author looks into the design and construction of a building The Washington Post once called a "glittering Potomac Titanic," a description granted because the Watergate was ahead of its time, filled with boldface names—and ultimately doomed.

On the evening of October 25, 1965, the grand opening of the Watergate was held for fifteen-hundred guests. Luigi Moretti, the architect, flew in from Rome. Other executives came from Mexico, where the Watergate developer, the Italian real estate giant known as Societa Generale Immobiliare, was planning a community outside Mexico City, and from Montreal, where the company was erecting the tallest concrete-and-steel skyscraper in Canada, designed by Moretti and another Italian, Pier Luigi Nervi.

AD Classics: Museo de Arte de Ponce / Edward Durell Stone

September 28, 2016

Among the dignitaries in attendance at the dedication ceremony of the Museo de Arte de Ponce (MAP) in Puerto Rico was Roberto Sánchez Vilella. In his capacity as Governor of the island, he gave a tongue-in-cheek speech[1] directed at his political opponent and founder of the museum, Luis A. Ferré:

I feel that I have contributed, in my small way, to the building of this museum. Had I not defeated Luis Ferré in the election, he would not have had sufficient leisure time to devote to this cultural project.

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Vice President Joe Biden to Break Ground on Steven Holl's Kennedy Center Expansion Today

December 04, 2014

Almost 50 years to the day after President Lyndon B Johnson broke ground on Edward Durell Stone's design for the John F Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington DC, today Vice President Joe Biden will do the same for Steven Holl Architects' design of the Kennedy Center Expansion, a largely below-ground addition that will add an extra 60,000 square feet to the Center.

AD Classics: The Museum of Modern Art

September 24, 2013

The entrance to the Museum of Modern Art is tucked beneath a demure facade of granite and glass in Midtown Manhattan. Its clean, regular planes mark Yoshio Taniguchi's 2004 addition to the MoMA's sequence of facades, which he preserved as a record of its form. Taniguchi's contribution sits beside the 1984 residential tower by Cesar Pelli and Associates, followed by Philip Goodwin and Edward Durell Stone’s original 1939 building, then Philip Johnson’s 1964 addition. Taniguchi was hired in 1997 to expand the Museum’s space and synthesize its disparate elements. His elegant, minimal solution presents a contemporary face for the MoMA while adhering to its Modernist roots.