is practice. He had come to the conclusion that he could ‘not tolerate being two different people’. Architecture was, of course, his passion.
‘To be a teacher or head of a school is totally different from being an architect which is a highly personal affair involving a considerable degree of emotion and which needs a great strength of personal conviction, assuredness and passion. To be a critic, a teacher or to determine the course of a school is the exact opposite, you must be totally objective and try to understand what the student is after and to put that in context that is helpful to him and that means clarifying what other people have done throughout history as well as today and not really let one’s own prejudices interfere at all. So one has to be two different people if one wants to practice architecture and teach.'(12)
Continuing, Rudolph expressed his respect for Walter Gropius as his gifted teacher whom he considered had inherent qualities that made him a natural academic, but from this analysis he underscored, later repeated and always demonstrated in his work that he disagreed with Gropius over the mechanism of the design process. Rudolph believed that designing was a personal and prejudiced creative act that could not be achieved by the goal of objective team work at that time central to Gropius’ ethos.
Although Rudolph had decided that he would not make a life- time career in education, the period at Yale University had been very effective in consolidating his reputation. It had crystallized his design ideas and had helped him acquire an impressive portfolio of commissions. While carrying out his educational responsibilities he was still steadily building up his architectural practice. However, he obviously found this dual role exhausting, as each demanded a full-time commitment. He often worked in his office well into the night. Nevertheless the time he spent with the students was doubly beneficial to them because his authoritative teaching was based not only on the current application of his design 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 brough