Doris Duke and American Architecture

Doris Duke (1912-1993) was a wealthy American heiress, philanthropist, horticulturalist and art collector. The only child of tobacco and energy magnate James Buchanan Duke, she was shrewd, independent, and mingled with the likes of Elizabeth Taylor and Jackie Onassis. Her father's passing when she was just 12 years old thus made her the "richest girl in the world."

She grew to be very private and enigmatic as she got older. After winning her inheritance and going through two public divorces, she all but disappeared from the public eye. Her suspicious death on her Beverly Hills estate rekindled the media frenzy. She died worth $2 billion, much of which she left to The Doris Duke Charitable Foundation. Her death was a big story. The famous heiress is portrayed by Susan Sarandon in the HBO film Bernard and Doris (2008).

When we were youngsters my friends and I couldn't have possibly gauged her fame. Here was a woman who made her 'debut' guest to the royal family at Buckingham Palace. But to us she was simply a nice lady, obviously very resourceful and even let us camp out on her estate. She owned homes in Beverly Hills and Honolulu, but her main residency was the Duke estate in my hometown - Hillsborough, New Jersey.

Most surprising to me was discovering she was also a noted collector of Islamic art. She traveled the world from India to Cairo to Damascus and returned stateside with an impressive collection. So keen was the heiress, her estate in Honolulu named "Shangri La," is considered "a center for Islamic arts and culture."

This struck me as interesting, since during this period the Gothic style had long prevailed in the United States. Few American architects paid any attention to Islamic design. Ms. Duke was undoubtedly a pioneer:

“For most Islamic art historians, Shangri La was a kind of rumor, a shadowy place everyone had heard about but few people had actually seen,” says Thomas Lentz, director of the Harvard University Art Museums, who visited the new museum last year. “Walking into that building for the first time was an amazing experience. It’s a kind of marvelous jumble of mediums, periods and quality you wouldn’t find anywhere else. To see an imitation of a 17th-century Safavid palace facing a huge swimming pool on a spectacular site on the coast of Hawaii—after a while, the mind starts to whirl.”

Sources:

http://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/retreat.html

http://www.dukemagazine.duke.edu/iss...orisduke1.html

http://www.shangrilahawaii.org/Tour-The-Property/