Arkansas Listings in the National Register of Historic Places

Abstract

Edward Durrell Stone Buildings IN 1916, A FAYETTEVILLE LUMBER COMPANY challenged local boys to design birdhouses. The prestigious competition had the president of the University of Arkansas as one of its judges. Fourteen-year-old Edward Durrell Stone won first prize: $2.50. To create a bluebird house, he sheeted a wooden box in sassafras branches cut in half to look like logs. In his autobiography, he described the small cash prize and local recognition as his "undoing," immediately hooking him on a career in design. He followed in the footsteps of his older brother, Hicks, a practicing architect in Boston. Today, Edward Durrell Stone is widely regarded as one of the greatest American architects of the mid-twentieth century. He left Arkansas early in his career but returned intermittently and even had a satellite office in northwest Arkansas from 1955 to 1959 to help him execute commissions in the state. Stone attended the art school at the University of Arkansas from 1920 until 1923 before heading to Boston to join his brother and begin his formal training in architecture. He started at the Boston Architectural Club, then went to Harvard after winning a 1926 competition that awarded him a year's tuition. He later transferred to Massachusetts Institute of Technology because a professor there, Jacques Carlu, was experimenting with modern designs that interested Stone. In 1927, Stone won a prestigious Rotch award to travel to Europe for two years. In the course of his travels, he became more enamored of modern design after having seen and studied the works of modernist innovators Ee Corbusier and Eudwig Mies van der Rohe. Returning to the United States in 1929, Stone began his professional career. He did his earliest work as a paid architect in the employ of larger architectural firms. He worked on the Waldorf-Astoria hotel and Radio City Music Hall in New York but did not fully display his talents until receiving and designing his first private commission, the Mandel House in Westchester County, New York, in 1933. With the Mandel House, Stone made a name for himself for having designed and built one of the earliest International-style residences in the United States. While the work of Rudolf Schindler and Richard Neutra had appeared in the Los Angeles area as early as 1928, the Mandel House helped introduce the style to the East Coast, where it became increasingly popular in the 1930s. Stone's work in the International style was well received, and he built many houses in the northeast. However, as public opinion became more favorable toward the style in the late 1940s, Stone began to pull himself away from it. Edward Durrell Stone visited Frank Eloyd Wright's Taliesin in Wisconsin in the 1940s. His encounters with Wright's work began to alter his design philosophies. He began to feel that buildings executed in the International style left something to be desired. They were "too sparse, too arid, too cold." Wright had found something that the International-styIe designers had missed. Stone deeply appreciated Wright' s integration of nature into his designs and his use of indigenous materials. After two decades of helping to lead the International-style movement in the United States, Stone reinvented himself and developed an individual style based more upon the work of Frank Eloyd Wright. It was in this latter part of his career that Stone designed most of the buildings in Arkansas with which he is credited. Two of the five private residences Stone completed in Arkansas, the Willis Noll House in Fayetteville (1950) and the Jay Eewis Residence in McGehee (1955), have been placed on the National Register, as has his Pine Bluff Civic Center (1963-1968). These three buildings are fine expressions of Stone's ideology during this stage of his career. The Willis Noll House in Fayetteville illustrates well the changes that Wright's influence had wrought. In the late 1940s, Stone was working on several different projects in northwest Arkansas when he was approached by a local grocer, Willis Noll, to design a home on Mount Sequoyah. …