Paul Rudolph: the skilled architect who inspired Foster and Rogers

Paul Rudolph, America’s greatest brutalist, had a career spanning four overlapping acts. First, starting in the 1950s, he designed private homes, charming retreats in Florida, where the glassy modernist look was tempered by screens and shutters. Over the next decade, he designed monumental concrete fortresses, majestic and sometimes monstrous, for universities, businesses, and massive urban renewal programs. Then came introverted and complex houses in Manhattan, like the Hirsch house, which ended up being owned by the designer Halston, where people like Andy Warhol, Liza Minnelli and Bianca Jagger went to Studio 54 afterparties, later bought again by Tom Ford for US$ 18 million. (£13.55 million). In the 1980s, he returned to building on a large scale, with big-budget commissions for skyscrapers and shopping malls in Singapore, Hong Kong and Jakarta.

His creative journey was quite a zigzag, running the gamut of delicacy and strength, of inner intimacy and outer bravery, and of celebrity and condemnation. If you are not directly familiar with his work, you will have experienced his influence. If you see a building of a certain age with rough-hewn concrete ribs, or exaggerated horizontal and vertical compositions and heavy volumes, a little Rudolph is probably behind them. As chairman of the Yale Department of Architecture, he mentored a generation of renowned architects, including Norman Foster and Richard Rogers. The expressive projections and recessions of the latter’s Lloyd’s building owe much to his former teacher.

Last week, an exhibition of Rudolph’s work, Materialized Space, opened at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art. For those who don’t cross the Atlantic to see an architecture show, there is a book of the same name by Abraham Thomas, former director of the Sir John Soane Museum in London, who curated the Met exhibition.

If two works sum up Rudolph’s apparent polarities and contradictions, they are the Yale Art and Architecture Building, completed in 1963, and the apartment he created for himself in Beekman Place, on Manhattan’s east side, from the early 1960s. The first is a work of noble institutional brutalism, part castle, part refinery, with powerful pillars and cantilevers in smooth, textured concrete, and a dramatic multi-level interior. The second was a private world, glittering with mirrors and plastic bead curtains, energized by bursts of pop art — a kitchen lined with a Gulf Oil billboard canvas, a coffee table made from a nickel-plated subway grate. In the bedroom, behind the low fur-covered bed that rose from the fur-covered floor, facing a full-mirror wall, with a classic bare torso on one side, there was a deodorant advertisement featuring a beautiful model with a hugging carpet chest. by adoring women.

The Yale design embodied the style and attitude that Rudolph also applied to the reconstruction of large parts of the waterfront in Buffalo, New York, an unbuilt city-sized development for Stafford Harbor in Virginia, and the cooperative housing project Tracey Towers in the Bronx. . Also to the Temple Street parking lot in New Haven, which, despite being a third of the size originally intended, still occupies two city blocks with a heroic work of pachydermal concrete that, as he said, “celebrates the automobile like the Roman stadium.” . celebrated the carriage.” Because, along with other attitudes that have drastically gone out of fashion, Rudolph, owner of a Jaguar, loved both cars and their potential to transform cities.

At his most arrogant, he proposed in the late 1960s the Lower Manhattan Expressway, a multistory megastructure of highways, railroads and buildings that bisects the island from east to west. But by then he was falling from grace. He was too aligned with corporate and state power, a Man’s man, for the growing counterculture. His grandiose urban projects were rightly attacked for the careless obliteration of prosperous urban neighborhoods. His Yale building was criticized as dysfunctional, and when it caught fire in 1969, there were never substantiated rumors that it was a case of arson by unruly students.

Then he retreated to the interiors that defined his next decade. These, says critic and historian Aaron Betsky, whose 1997 classic Queer Space explored the relationship between architecture and sexuality, it had a lot to do with the fact that Rudolph was gay. He created environments for himself and his friends that, beneath “severe modernist geometries on the exterior, achieved a voluptuous interior spaces, which represented the complexities of their private lives”. His own home embodied his personality as a “very rough, crew-cut, very uptight person” – the son, as he was, of a Southern Methodist preacher – “who liked a different way of living in private.”

For Betsky, who in 1979 chose to study architecture at Yale because she loved the “incredible complexity, diversity and inventiveness” of Rudolph’s then-unfashionable building, there is a “combination of sensuality and muscularity” that permeates all of the building’s twists and turns. your career. Even his most monumental architecture “deviated from the norms of bureaucratic modernism in a way that one might speculate came from the queer culture of which he was a part.”

We could also say that he had an instinct for the exquisite that manifested itself both in his three-dimensional designs and in his meticulous but vibrant drawings, even in his most massive designs, in which showers of crosshatching shine with reflected light. In all his work there is a fascination with layers and transparency, with the dissolution of the apparent volume of a building into shadows and reflections, with the interactions between external and internal life. Rudolph, like other architects of his generation, proclaimed social, technological and artistic goals, but it was the latter that really motivated him, sometimes at a cost to the former.

Its achievements have turned out to be fragile, and even those that seem built for eternity have turned out to be vulnerable to demolition. Some of Beekman Place’s interiors are gone, and just two weeks ago Hurricane Helene swept away its beautiful 1952 Sanderling beach club in Sarasota. So it’s good that the Met is celebrating its architecture. He could create “such a work of art,” as Halston said of the Hirsch house, that “you end up giving in.”