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 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 Harvar