Makers of Modern Architecture, Volume III by Martin Filler

Makers of Modern Architecture, Volume III by Martin Filler

Author:Martin Filler
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: New York Review Books
Published: 2018-08-03T12:27:20+00:00


11

PAUL RUDOLPH

A FALL FROM critical grace is not uncommon in the arts, but somehow it seems more surprising in architecture than in literature, music, or painting. Buildings tend to remain in the public realm much longer and more conspicuously than books that go out of print, operas that languish unperformed, or paintings relegated to storage. By and large, architecture is simply too expensive to destroy for mere matters of taste. There is no such thing as “out of sight, out of mind” when it comes to an ugly building, whatever the standards for judging one might be. Indeed, the benign neglect of un-fashionable architecture in economically marginal areas has long been an inestimable boon to historic preservation.

Among the most acclaimed mid-twentieth-century American architects, none experienced a more precipitous reversal of fortune than Paul Rudolph. During the late 1940s and early 1950s, Rudolph attracted well-deserved attention for the more than two dozen houses he built on the west coast of Florida. These small, sprightly structures displayed what the architectural historian Robin Middleton aptly termed “a very bright-young-boyish charm.” Rudolph’s informal, lightweight houses demonstrated his dynamic manipulation of space, inventive use of new materials, and rejection of rote domestic conventions. It was thrilling to imagine what he might do on a larger scale with bigger budgets.

At the peak of his career, in the late 1950s and early 1960s, Rudolph was widely deemed destined for greatness. With the death in 1961 of Eero Saarinen, then the preeminent architect of his generation, Rudolph appeared ready to lead the American architectural avant-garde. (Louis Kahn, who was considerably older than both men, began to be perceived as this country’s most important contemporary architect only in the late 1960s.) As Rudolph’s renown grew, he became preoccupied with two concerns—self-expression and monumentality—that were fundamentally at odds with the empathetic touch and humane feel of his early works.

The extent to which modern architecture had become formulaic by midcentury led Rudolph to ponder how he could stand out from the crowd. His quest for a distinctive stylistic manner led him to adopt the tough vocabulary of New Brutalism, with its vigorously sculptural compositions that made the modular steel-and-glass grids of the Miesian school look somewhat anemic and routine. Rudolph’s distinctively American version of Brutalism diverged from that of his foreign peers in his attraction to scenographic design—architecture that begins with a preconceived idea of how a building should look from a specific vantage point, in contrast to the Modernist belief that the internal functions of a structure should determine its external form. However, despite the arresting profiles scenographic design could engender—perhaps most famously in modern architecture the sail-like rooflines of Jørn Utzon’s harborfront Sydney Opera House of 1957–1973—the practice struck some as a throwback to nineteenth-century Romanticism.

Another major difference in Rudolph’s approach was that instead of using poured concrete like his counterparts abroad, he chose a less demanding and more economical alternative—the rough-finished precast concrete blocks that became his hallmark. Poured-in-place concrete requires costly wooden forms to contain the material until it hardens, whereas precast blocks eliminate that expense and can be used like bricks.



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