ruly great teacher, a theorist, an entrepreneur. He was so articulate always focused, very approachable. He was not a good architect but as an educator he was unsurpassed.” (1)
What is a good educator anyway? Rudolph taught in an entirely different way from Gropius. Rudolph was a comparatively quiet teacher but his architecture and drawings made such powerful statements that his students, hungry to learn, were captivated. They were well educated by the visual eloquence of these designs, and could therefore understand the supporting philosophy.
Rudolph arrived at Harvard in the fall of 1941 but after only six months was drafted into the Navy to take part in the Second World War, during which time he saw much of the world and acquired his all-American crew cut. He returned after the end of the war and was seceded again for his talent and application into the master’s class at Harvard. The university was at that time a hotbed of intellectual activity generated by several European refugees who had been at the Bauhaus and felt it necessary to flee potential German oppression. Harvard was therefore the exciting place to be. It had a clear program, Architectural Modernism was the theme led by Walter Gropius as its head. Marcel Breuer, Martin Wagner and IM Pei were all helping to forge a new design culture attempting to ‘solve today’s problems with today’s solutions’. These devotees brought to America a new zeal and rejuvenated the original Bauhaus principles. This philosophy was translated into a desire to create a fusion between industry and architecture by using modern materials and structures, The new Modernism still sought the ultimate design objective of combining high-quality craftsmanship with the engineering techniques of mass production.
This was the new order. It was the atmosphere in which the young and talented Paul Rudolph received his architectural education, along with such contemporaries as Ed Barnes, Bob Geddes, Ulrich Franzen, Harry Seidler, Harry Cobb and John Johansen. It is interesting that many of these professional architects appeared subsequently to give valuable lectures or criticisms as visiting tutors to the students on Rudolph’s own graduate program at Yale in the early 1960s when they, in their turn, had achieved personal notoriety.
The historian Philip Johnson was also an influential thinker who participated in the activities at Harvard architecture school as a contemporary of Paul Rudolph. Already a director of architecture at the Museum of Modern Art in New York., Johnson had organized an important exhibition identifying the International Style in the Modern Movement as early as 1932. He was taking a masters degree as a mature student and had built for himself in Cambridge, Massachusetts, a simple house with a fat roof and columns around a courtyard close to the graduate school which became the center of social and intellectual activities.
As Rudolph was accepted as one of Harvard’s insiders, he became one of an elite group who developed this new Modernist thinking centered around Gropius’ teaching of the democratic design process. After graduating in 1947, Rudolph went to Europe in 1949 where he was asked to edit an important edition of L’Architecture d’aujourdhui, in February 1950, called ‘Walter Gropius et son ecole’. Describing the rise of Modernism in America as an expression of the spirit of a new civilization, it contained many modern projects including Gropius’ house, Breuer’s Graduate Center at Harvard and houses built by Gropius’ practice, The Architects Collaborative, which still operates today under the title TAC. It included work by Pei, Cobb, Dreyfus and Barnes as well as the Cocoon House in Sarasota which Rudolph had built in 1948 with Ralph Twitchell. Chester Hagel also described in this edition his own interpretation of Gropius’ all-embracing principles on which Rudolph was nurtured, ‘. . . that mechanization and individual freedoms are not incompatible, the possibilities and values of communal action, and the integration of the work and thinking of technicians and creative work 