of artists in a new type of technical artist – the designer.’ (2)
Only eight years after graduating from Harvard in 1949 but with the practical experience of completing several elegant houses in Florida, the Arts Center at Wellesley and Riverview High School, Sarasota, Yale University was imaginative and sufficiently impressed by Paul Rudolph to appoint him Head of Architecture in 1957. He was then 39 years old. Philip Johnson was on the selection panel. The next busy decade, when Paul Rudolph combined both practice and teaching, proved to be the apex of his career.
PHILOSOPHY, IDEAS AND STYLE
Paul Rudolph was not a complex intellectual. He preferred to let his drawings and buildings speak for themselves. To him the visual satisfaction of a design was far more important than a self-justifying intellectual debate. During a period when architectural theorists were developing their own complicated language, Rudolph described his design priorities in a refreshingly simple manner. He was easy to understand and was always trying to improve the quality and indeed beauty of architecture. He wrote very little considering he was an architectural teacher but instead his production of drawings and building was prodigious. Leaving other’s to analyze his buildings, he seemed totally consumed by a burning desire to produce major works of architecture.
In one of Rudolph’s few articles, ‘Enigmas of Architecture’, written in 1977, he said ‘Architecture is used space formed for psychological and symbolical reasons. Architectural space overrides all its integrating elements and concepts by consciously forming enclosed voids to accommodate human beings in the totality of their psychic and physical life and in their various pursuits and intentions.’ (3)
His design ideas had matured by then. They had developed from his original formal and structural concepts elegantly expressed in his Florida houses, which were based on the Miesian principles of simplicity that ‘less is more’. He had been nurtured on minimalist Bauhaus design at Harvard University, where Walter Gropius had taught him the ideas of the International Style. These early residences followed a strict adherence to function, clarity of form and the articulation of individual components of the buildings.
For all the functional honesty and structural integrity expressed by his Florida houses, Rudolph was still not satisfied with their quality. On reflection he considered that they lacked sufficient psychological control of light and space. He started, therefore, to question the fundamentals of the International Style and re-examined these rigid principles: ‘And the experience of space was found wanting.’ (4) He probably felt that these ideas were too constricting for his design talent and too inhibiting for his graphic presentation techniques. He considered that there were lessons to be learnt from historical buildings, which often controlled light and space with solids and voids in a more interesting manner and were able to create a more dynamic atmosphere than most modern buildings. From studying historical examples and the work of modem masters he concluded that for him a central guiding principle should be the creation of human-scale space. It was indeed the spatial aspect of the work of Frank Lloyd Wright and the sculptural quality of Le Corbusier’s projects that he found meaningful and particularly appealing.
Rudolph explained that his goal in architecture was by now: ‘to wed the programmatic and spatial concepts of the International Style to Wright’s more suitable handling of interior volumes of space.’ (5)
This preoccupation with forming space, both internally and externally, was henceforth to be a lasting theme in Rudolph’s work. He had the opportunity to develop these ideas in his major public building, which he carried out to great effect. His Milam Residence in Jacksonville, Florida was a new departure, in that it was the first residence in which he introduced a central space as its heart and an independent sunscreen detached from the structure. To explain the importance spa