The style debate continues, but the magnitude of Stone’s work is impossible to miss. Early on, he helped design the interior of Radio City Music Hall. With Philip Goodwin, he designed the iconic Museum of Modern Art in New York (1935-39). Stone’s office, which eventually had 200 architects, designed private houses, hotels, theaters, churches, hospitals, university complexes, and corporate headquarters. Two of Stone’s most enduring projects are the United States Embassy in New Delhi, India (1953-59), and the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C. (1958-71).

Given its depth of research and fairness, this will be the definitive book on Stone for years to come.

Equally famous in its day was the United States Pavilion at the Exposition universelle et internationale de Bruxelles, 1958. Hunting admirably places this project in the context of the Cold War. The US and USSR pavilions were adjacent and widely seen as competing. The American government took a daring leap into modern design, and it paid off — world opinion favored Stone’s design. Stone called his open, flamboyant style the “new romanticism.”

The government projects show up the close connection of architecture and politics. Stone was a personal friend of Arkansas Senator William Fulbright, who acted as his champion in the selection of an architect for a “national cultural center” in 1958. Renamed the Kennedy Center, it is contemporary with Lincoln Center in New York, 1962-66. Hunting claims that Stone helped to move State Department officials to adopt the modern style at home and abroad. He was adept at publicity, aided by his second wife Maria Elena Torch. And he was recognized around 1950 as an “inspiring teacher” at Yale and other architecture schools.

The later work looks interesting — skyscraper offices, city planning projects, condominiums, universities in Albany and Islamabad, museums in Puerto Rico, Nebraska and California — but Hunting runs through it rapidly. A short chapter at the end offers an appraisal of Stone’s output, and attempts to readjust his critical fall from grace: “[i]n the realm of consumerism, in which Stone was indeed player, architecture is just as vulnerable as any other commodity to rapid obsolescence.” Given its depth of research and fairness, this will be the definitive book on Stone for years to come.