20th century AD

Magazine Antiques, July, 2001 by Mary Anne Hunting

(11.) "Mandel House: A Home Resulting from Close Cooperation ...," p. 8.

(12.) Ibid.; "For Modern Living," p. 29; and Sheldon Cheney and Martha Candler Cheney, Art and the Machine: An Account of Industrial Design in 20th-Century America (1936; Acanthus Press, New York, 1992), p. 164. See also David A. Hanks and Jennifer Toher, Donald Deskey: Decorative Designs and Interiors (E. P. Dutton, New York, 1987), pp. 85, 91.

(13.) Cheney and Cheney, Art and the Machine, p. 164.

(14.) Stone, Evolution of an Architect, p. 89. Stone subsequently designed two other houses in the same area: the Ulrich Kowalski House (1934-1936) and the Mrs. Charles I. Liebman House (1937; never built). Other extant modem houses include Henry R. Luce's Mepkin Plantation (1936-1937) in Moncks Corner, South Carolina; and the A. Conger Goodyear House (1938-1939) in Old Westbury, New York.

(15.) Ibid., p. 31. On p. 89 Stone claims he later found the international style, "too sparse, too arid, too cold." Paul Goldberger wrote in Stone's obituary that he "gave up a position as one of America's leading advocates...just as that austere modern style was gaining wide public acceptance, and he began instead to evolve a personal style that was lush and highly decorative, the very opposite of the International Style" (New York Times, August 6, 1978).

(16.) These three principles are described in Henry-Russell Hitchcock and Philip Johnson, The International Style: Architecture Since 1922 (W. W. Norton and Company, New York, 1932).

(17.) Stone, Evolution of an Architect, pp. 32, 42.

(18.) "More than Modern," Time, vol. 71 (March 31, 1958), p. 62.

(19.) Robert A. M. Stern, "International Style: Immediate Effects," Progressive Architecture, (February 1982), p. 105. For earlier international style houses see Robert A. M. Stern, George Howe: Toward a Modern American Architecture (Yale University Press, New Haven, 1975), p. 166 n. 18.

(20.) Stem, "International Style," p. 107.

(21.) Dominic Ricciotti, "Edward Durell Stone and the International Style in America: Houses of the 1930s," American Art Journal, vol. 20, no. 3 (1988), p. 53.

(22.) Ibid., pp. 60-61 and Figs. 7 and 8.

(23.) Ibid., p. 57. For an aerial view of the Bauhaus, see Kenneth Frampton, Modern Architecture: A Critical History (1980; Thames and Hudson, London, 1992), p. 127.

(24.) Sec Erich Mendelsohn, Erich Mendelsohn: Complete Works of the Architect: Sketches, Designs, Buildings, trans. Antje Fritsch (Princeton Architectural Press, New York, 1992), p 151. I would like to thank Hicks Stone, Edward Durell Stone's son, for drawing my attention to the relationship between Stone and Mendelsohn's work. The Deskey Archives (Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum, Library, New York City, Smithsonian Institution Libraries) hold twenty early architectural sketches (see Pl. VII) of the Mandel house, and, while the authorship of these sketches is unknown, some focus on this curved wall element.

(25.) Illustrated and discussed in Ricciotti, "Edward Durell Stone," pp. 63-65 and Fig. 12.