Mogul Modern

If ever a building marked a turning point for its designer, it was Edward Durell Stone's U.S. embassy in New Delhi. With its gold-leaf columns, lacy grills and inner water courtyard, it won him architectural accolades round the world. "I have been a marked man ever since," muses Architect Stone, 64, by no means unhappily. At home, the New Delhi embassy triggered commissions that include the just-started John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington and the soon-to-rise 50-story, marble-sheathed General Motors Tower in Manhattan.

What pleases Stone most is that the Delhi embassy's fame seems to have lingered longest in the Middle East and Pakistan, where it has since won him a dozen commissions. "They want something they can identify with, not just a crate," says Stone. "The problem is to be inspired by their style and do a completely modern building."

Minaret Exhaust. A prime example of what pleases is the $15 million Nuclear Research Center in West Pakistan, the first phase of which has just been completed in the sleepy village of Nilor, 17 miles north of the present capital, Rawalpindi, and close to Islamabad, the projected new capital for all Pakistan. Says an official of the Pakistan Institute of Science and Technology: "We asked him to create a design that would reflect our Islamic architecture with in the structural limitations posed by the reactor."

What Stone produced might well make an old Mogul emperor rub his eyes in astonishment. Against the background of the blue Murree hills, Stone set the swimming-pool reactor beneath a mosquelike dome embellished with gold mosaic designs, juxtaposed it with a minaret-like exhaust tower. Enclosing the reactor complex is a great quadrangle housing laboratories and offices. In its final phase, the great quadrangle surrounding the reactor will measure 800 ft. by 600 ft., become the nucleus for what Stone likes to think of as "the M.I.T. of Pakistan."

Grace & Delight. So pleased was the Pakistani government with the new reactor that last week it gave Stone the staggering commission to design its new capital at Islamabad. Working with a budget approaching $100 million, Stone will design five government structures, including the presidential residence, in the new capital's 50-block central core.

While Stone has only begun to put pencil to paper, he intends that the project will combine the grace and delights of Mogul architecture with all the benefits of modern technology. Says Stone: "It is the dream of every architect to do a project of this scope. It hasn't happened more than half a dozen times in history."

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