Gideon Fink Shapiro reads the first comprehensive scholarly study of Paul Rudolph's career.

Courtesy of Yale University Press

Paul Rudolph liked to work and live in midair. His drafting desk at his New York office from 1965 to 1969 was perched on a cantilevered mezzanine platform overlooking the reception lobby 20 feet below. At his Beekman Place penthouse in Manhattan, his grand piano and drafting desk were placed on a balcony high above the living room, while his shower/ bath had a clear Plexiglass floor that formed the ceiling of the kitchen and guest apartment below. It was not just that Rudolph liked vertiginous catwalks, precipices, and rail-less stairs, but rather that he saw architecture as a physical and emotional stimulant. The designed environment, he believed, should quicken the pulse and awaken the imagination, reaffirming the humanity of the user by eliciting a sense of wonder and demanding active participation. That is one of the many ideas explored in Timothy M. Rohan’s The Architecture of Paul Rudolph, the first comprehensive and scholarly study of the architect’s five-decade career, and a lucid one at that.

Although Rudolph (1918–1997) has reemerged in our time as an important reference, his work and life have until now remained partially shrouded by the residue of old controversies that made it difficult to separate rumor from fact. Rohan, an associate professor of art history at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, researched Rudolph’s papers at the Library of Congress and interviewed many of Rudolph’s former associates to construct this systematic and readable monograph, which follows his 2001 Harvard Ph.D. dissertation. He traces Rudolph’s rise from an art-loving student who wanted to study architecture and design movie sets in the 1930s, to a designer of lightweight modern Florida beach homes in the 40s, to a “maverick” who challenged the international style in the 50s, to an inadvertent “Establishment Man” of the 60s, to a lonely master retreating to a world of private interiors and Southeast Asian projects in the 70s–90s. Yet Rudolph’s aesthetic brand of “humanism,” derived from the theories of Geoffrey Scott via Vincent Scully, seems never to have wavered.....Continue Reading

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