PAUL RUDOLPH
“Paul worked because he needed to. He needed to create.”

"According to the owners, there are more than 1,000 light bulbs in the apartment.
Rudolph used those bulbs to create borders —
almost like dotted lines of light — around the living areas."

Paul has been treated so badly,” says a woman whose Manhattan apartment was designed by Paul Rudolph, the Kentucky-born architect. She is referring to the indifference, and worse, that has greeted much of Rudolph’s architecture in the last three decades. Even before he died, of mesothelioma, in 1997, Rudolph was forced to travel to Asia to find clients. Since his death, several of his works in the United States have been demolished, and others are being threatened with the same fate. But inside this apartment, Rudolph is receiving the kind of treatment most architects can only dream of. The owners have kept the main rooms — completed almost four decades ago — exactly as they have been.

For Rudolph, who was known for molding concrete into shapes so intricate that they sometimes resembled M. C. Escher drawings, this apartment on a single floor of a prewar building must have felt confining. Rudolph’s free-standing buildings can have as many steps as doors or windows; his Art and Architecture Building at Yale University, though only seven stories high, is said to have 37 levels. But in the apartment, Rudolph found ways to work in three dimensions, installing built-in furniture that sweeps around the rooms, creating peninsulas and islands that seem truly topographic. In the husband’s office, a wavy, multilevel platform turns a rectangular space into a kind of cove while functioning as a wraparound library ladder.

Unlike many of his contemporaries — Modernist architects who preferred their walls white and unadorned — Rudolph threw himself into creating novel surface treatments, many involving tricks of scale and the subversion of expectations. In the living room, Rudolph had mirrors cut into half-inch-wide vertical strips, then applied them like tiles to the curving walls. And instead of hiding the owners’ collection of silver miniatures in a cupboard, he arranged the pieces in front of the mirrors and lit them with hundreds of concealed incandescent bulbs. (And he did so without access to the L.E.D. strips that make such jobs a cinch today.) The result is a tableau in which the tiny collectibles dazzle like diamonds in a Tiffany & Company window.




read full article
from NY TIMES here...
"shining moment"



Paul Rudolph.




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Paul Rudolph
1918-1997

The Architectural Office
"The Sarasota School"

"Rudolph became a leader of the "Sarasota School," a style of architecture founded by Ralph Twitchell and associated with Sarasota architects, including, Ralph Zimmerman, William Zimmerman, Philip Hiss, Jack West, Gene Leedy, Mark Hampton, Phil Hall, Roland Sellew, Tim Seibert, Victor Lundy, Bill Rupp, John and Ken Warriner, Tolyn Twitchell, Bert Brosmith, Frank Folsom Smith, Boyd Blackner, Louis Schneider, James Holiday, Joseph Farrell, and Carl Abbott. With a focus on making architecture be in harmony with its surroundings, Sarasota-influenced architecture features a clean, open contemporary floor plan, filled with light and terrazzo floors, wide overhangs, and flat roofs."


"Sarasota School of Architecture is characterized by its attention to climate and terrain. Large sunshades, innovative ventilation systems, oversized sliding glass doors, floating staircases, and walls of jalousie windows dominate many of these buildings, mostly built between 1941 and 1966.













"According to his 1997 obituary in The New York Times, “With the exception of Louis I. Kahn, no American architect of his generation enjoyed higher esteem in the 1960’s. But after 1970, his reputation plummeted. Many of his buildings are being torn down, or are in danger of being torn down. “Mr. Rudolph leaves behind a perplexing legacy that will take many years to untangle,” his obituary said. At the time of his death he was working on plans for a new town of 250,000 people in Indonesia, and a private residence, chapel and office complex in Singapore."






all text taken from here.
images via flicker accounts.

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Paul Rudolph
1918-1997

The Architectural Office
"The Sarasota School"



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