Making and Remaking the Architect: Edward Durell Stone and Stanford

How does an architect establish a career? How is an architect remembered? What makes a building significant and how should it be preserved, if at all? Fundamental questions about the practice and production of architecture will be examined in this seminar that focuses on the work of Edward Durell Stone (1902-78) and specifically on his work at Stanford and in Palo Alto. By 1955, Stone was so well established that he founded an office in Palo Alto to design the Stanford Medical Center (currently slated for destruction) and several other significant local public buildings, such as the Palo Alto Civic Center. Through site visits to his buildings, research in the Stanford archives, and interviews with architects who worked in his office (among other strategies), students will question how architecture produced in the immediate post-WWII period is thought about historically and how and when it should be preserved.