n philosophy to the major projects he was then implementing, but also included his work with leading consultants eminent in their own field. It was an exciting and refreshingly new experience for most of the students to be taught by a young and yet already revered practitioner who led the architectural school by example and who demonstrated through his own imaginative projects many new images and visually new design ideas. He had invited around him a group of controversial tutors who often expressed different architectural opinions to his own. Robert Venturi, for one, was then quietly writing his own book, which was to have a considerable influence on American architectural thinking. Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture was produced by Venturi while he was engaged in teaching the architectural master’s class in 1963 as the studio tutor. Vincent Scully, Philip Johnson and Serge Chermayeff were all involved in the philosophical debate at the university during that changing period in architectural design. The architectural criticisms of the student projects were particularly interesting as they were often enlivened by healthy debate among the examining jurors, who were themselves keen to assert their respective positions. Serge Chermayeff would often intellectualize his point with passionate White Russian conviction on the changing social order. Paul Rudolph, by contrast, would usually concentrate calmly on using his eyes and imagination to visualize his theories on what those physical changes would look like. The impressive differences, of course, seldom harmonized because each was concentrating on their own personal convictions, which were on a different architectural plane.
There was no established theory expounded, other than a liberal education that encouraged a healthy examination of the relevant current issues. Perhaps it was because of this climate of inquiry that so many of the graduates who had been selected to join Rudolph’s master’s program from different cultures around the world, and who brought their own convictions and qualities to the course, have subsequently made significant contributions to modern architecture in their own ensuing careers.
PRACTICE, GROWTH AND COMMERCIALISM
Having consolidated his design ideals and established his international reputation as a Late-Modernist architect, Rudolph then spent the next decade in practice busily implementing numerous important projects. Major commissions came in thick and fast. There was little time or need to review his refined ideas or re-examine the appropriate selection of materials. An impressive list of schemes for large corporate clients and authorities gave him the opportunity to apply the design philosophies which he had developed over the years by designing and then constructing these significant buildings.
These important corporate projects included the Endo Laboratories, the research facilities for IBM, the huge Boston Government Service Center, the Orange County Court Center, the Southeastern Massachusetts Institute of Technology and especially the futuristic Burroughs Wellcome Headquarters as well as high-density apartments at Tracey Towers and the new departure to design the Daiei offices in Nagoya, Japan. All reflected Rudolph’s distinctive and sculptural use of in-situ and precast concrete and, where appropriate, his preference for elegantly proportioned public spaces and repetitive components representing the varying design systems developed aesthetically for each building.
He was also commissioned by the Ford Foundation to produce exploratory proposals to investigate the potential for building a megatropolis with structures over the Lower Manhattan Expressway, having previously prepared similar-sized sketch schemes for the Graphic Arts Center. These were both grandiose concepts for high-rise high density ‘cities in the sky’. Further there was also a steady flow of clients requiring large houses to be designed personally for them. The Green Residence, Bass house and earlier Milam Residence all showed Rudolph’s confident handling of flo