Chapter V, The Apostates Summary and Analysis

Edward Durell Stone was one of the first International Style architects in America. On a plane trip to Paris, he met an "explosively Latin" Italian woman, Maria Elena Torchio, whose father was an Italian architect. She did not like his buildings but she married him a year later. She then changed his style, leading him to create the luxurious design of New Delhi's American Embassy. Stone had gone apostate. When the Embassy was unveiled, Stone was dropped immediately from fashionable architecture. He had become bourgeois par excellence. Stone didn't even try to resist, claiming that he represented two millennia of Western culture rather than two decades of modern architecture.

Stone was anathematized, not even asked to help build an addition to his own building; the job went to Philip Johnson. Wolfe remembers vividly when, in...