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ISSN 1946-5904 Abstracts With HeritaGE SO Wild: Cultural Landscape IN MemOriam: Edward Durell STOne’S CarlsON InventOry in United States NatiOnal ParKS Terrace, 1957-2007 The national parks of the United States hold a variety With a disproportionate number of his projects of cultural landscapes within their folds, representing threatened by demolition or irrevocable alteration, human activities as diverse as mining, ranching, Edward Durell Stone’s work has resurfaced as a recreational, and ethnographic landscapes. After touchstone for assessing American modernism during decades of neglect for many of these sites, the National the twentieth century’s middle decades. The University Park Service (NPS) began to prioritize and systematize of Arkansas’s Carlson Terrace, a housing project the inventory and treatment of such properties. One constructed to accommodate the influx of married major piece of this process is the Cultural Landscape students who flocked to the campus early in the Inventory (CLI) program. This paper explores the two postwar era, figures significantly among these works sets of data generated by CLI in 2003 and 2009 and and the challenges they present to those who argue for uses a variety of descriptive statistics, supplemented their preservation. by field reconnaissance, to evaluate the inventory of Built in three phases between 1957 and 1964, the cultural landscapes within the fifty-eight national parks. complex embodied the aesthetic and economic values Although considerable progress has been made in of the decades when American architects transformed recent years, some shortcomings remain. In particular, modernism to remedy housing shortages and to meet the the CLI methodology in the national parks continues to demands of the changing institutions. Designed to provide prioritize those sites whose main human component is optimal dwelling function in minimal space, the housing the NPS’s own park-related developments. The program reflects both Stone’s awareness of European prototypes has not been as effective in preventing the neglect of and his own sensibilities, made evident in lesser-known vernacular landscapes within these properties and affordable housing proposals. Less than fifty years after has disproportionately removed ethnographic cultural its construction, Carlson Terrace, compromised by landscapes from its baseline survey. Ultimately, this deteriorating infrastructure and considered obsolete in pattern is likely to skew the record of cultural history a changing campus housing market, became a target preserved in the national parks. for demolition. In 2005, the University of Arkansas Board of Trustees sanctioned demolition of the entire complex; two year later, Carlson Terrace was razed. Through MANISH CHALANA study of the project’s significance within Stone’s oeuvre University of Washington and relative to the larger thrust of the modern movement Seattle, Washington in postwar America, and by examination of the forces that led to its destruction, this paper posits why Carlson Terrace should have been saved. ETHEL GOODSTEIN-MURPHREE University of Arkansas Fayetteville, Arkansas Preservation Education & Research Volume Three, 2010 83 In Memoriam: Edward Durell Stone’s Carlson Terrace, 1957-2007 ETHEL GOODSTEIN-MURPHREE n 1938, Life magazine celebrated architect Edward appreciated his “serene and classic” vocabulary of the Durell Stone (1902-1978) as “the brightest young colonnade, the dome, the screen, and the reflecting I man” in the profession. By that time, Stone, born pool (Architectural Record 1962).3 in Fayetteville, Arkansas, had worked his way up the Recently, Stone’s work has attracted a very different ranks of New York’s architectural elite, participating kind of attention. Once topics of critical discourse on the through association with Wallace K. Harrison in the progress of the International Style and its subsequent design of Rockefeller Center (New York, New York, demise, all too often now his buildings come to 1932); attracting the attention of Henry and Clare light at the center of contentious disputes about the Booth Luce, who commissioned him to design their preservation of modern architecture. Even in his home South Carolina retreat, Mempkin Plantation (Monck’s town, Stone’s work proved vulnerable. In 2005, the Corner, South Carolina, 1937); and in association with University of Arkansas Board of Trustees sanctioned Phillip Goodwin, designing the Museum of Modern the demolition of Carlson Terrace (1957-1964), housing Art (New York, New York, 1938-1939). Through these Stone designed to accommodate the influx of married projects and a portfolio of houses “guided in one students who flocked to the Fayetteville campus during way or another by the concepts of the International the postwar era (Fig. 1). Stone’s generous arrangement Style” (Ricciotti 1988, 53), Stone filtered the formal of courtyards and low-rise housing units, featuring crisp conventions of modernism that he admired to suit modern lines and showy concrete screens of overlaid the expectations of his clients and the conditions of circles and squares, projected an image that conveyed the American suburb during the interwar years. As both the postwar university’s progressive aspirations Ricciotti (1988) establishes, Stone’s engagement with and its married students’ desires for up-to-date living European modernism was wedded to his appreciation arrangements (Fig. 2). The appearance of a rendering of of its formal theories of pure architectural volumes the project in Architectural Record (1958) underscored and liberation from applied ornament.1 Still, never fully interest in the new campus housing type; less than compelled by modernism’s “machine symbolism” fifty years later, it was destroyed. Through study of the (Ricciotti 1988, 55) and indifferent to its utopian project’s significance within Stone’s oeuvre and the premises, Stone’s interest in the International Style larger and diversified thrust of the modern movement waned. Formality, grandeur, and delicate decorative in postwar America, and by examination of the forces details characterized his buildings of the postwar era, that led to its destruction, this paper posits why Carlson setting them apart from the architect’s earlier works. As Terrace should have been saved. he authored coveted and highly visible projects, like the The loss of Carlson Terrace should be viewed in United States Embassy in New Delhi (1954-1958) and the context of other projects by Stone that recently the United States Pavilion at the Brussels World’s Fair have been demolished or barely saved. For example, (1957), Stone’s practice grew astronomically.2 Although a booming real estate market’s demands for large influential critics decried his betrayal of modernism, neo-traditional dwellings threatened Stone’s Conger Stone remained popular with a mainstream press that Goodyear House (Old Westbury, New York, 1938). This Preservation Education & Research Volume Three, 2010 17 Goodstein-Murphree E. Fig. 1. Perspective rendering, Carlson Terrace, married student housing, University of Arkansas at Fayetteville, 1957-1964 (Edward Durell Stone Papers [MC 346], series 6, subseries 1, box 120, folder 2, Special Collections, University of Arkansas Libraries, Fayetteville). International Style house was saved from destruction in 2001 (Ivy 2002) by the cooperative efforts of the World Monument Fund, the Society for the Preservation of Long Island Antiquities, and the Barnett Newman Foundation. His Busch Stadium (St. Louis, Missouri, 1961) was razed to make way for a neo-traditional ballpark in 2005; the Christian Science Pavilion he produced for the 1964 New York World’s Fair, meticulously rebuilt in San Diego, California, in 1966, was destroyed forty years later; and the Huntington Hartford Museum (popularly known as 2 Columbus Circle, New York, New York, 1957), arguably Stone’s most controversial building, has been reconceived and irrevocably changed by Brad Cloepfil’s 2008 alteration to house the Museum of Arts and Design.4 The disproportionate number of Stone’s projects that have been threatened or destroyed cannot be dismissed as a disappointing coincidence. It must be noted, moreover, that this trend of demolition involves works that date to the era when Stone “gave up a position as Fig. 2. Children playing in walkway between housing units, Carlson Terrace, married student housing, University of Arkansas one of America’s leading advocates of the International at Fayetteville, 1957-1964 (Edward Durell Stone Picture Collection, Style…and he began instead to evolve a personal University of Arkansas Campus Scenes, number 1584, Special Collections, University of Arkansas Libraries, Fayetteville). style that was lush and highly decorative” (New York 18 Preservation Education & Research Volume Three, 2010 Goodstein-Murphree E. Times 1978, C10). With little scholarly investigation to and universities witnessed astounding growth in the establish firmly the stature of Stone’s postwar work, fall semester of 1946; slightly