a. Le Corbusier in L’Esprit Nouveau said, ‘An aesthetic and a work of art are above all systems. An attitude is not a system. Genius is personal, decided by fate – but it expresses itself by means of system, there is no work of art without system.’ (10)
Rudolph considered it was the visual system, the aesthetic, which unified and expressed a work of architecture and enabled the building to be greater than the sum of its parts. The selection and design of this repetitive system can blend in with the surroundings, if it is also in scale and character with the language of the neighboring buildings.
The unity of a design can be enhanced by working with one basic material. For Rudolph this often meant the use of in-situ concrete with various textured finishes. Elsewhere he used tiles, block or brickwork. He drew the analogy of Henry Moore sculptures being carved from a single stone material and so achieving a unity of design, and he noted that most works of architectural distinction, modern or historic, used a palette of only one material (and glass). He deduced, therefore, that it was important to use as few materials as possible in order to achieve a high- quality design. It seemed that a reasonable rule of aesthetics was that the standard of architecture decreases in direct proportion to the number of materials used.
In developing and refining his design priorities to accommodate his large commissions, Rudolph was not pandering to any new fashionable trend or fickle change in style; he was still convinced by his early convictions, but it was the acceptance of these later adjustments in his design philosophy that classified him as a Late-Modernist.
Nor was he persuaded to adopt any postmodernist theories, which he found superficial. He could not accept the modern-day trend of applying an element here or a column cap there and distorting symbolic forms of Classical architecture. To him those authentic proportions and original construction techniques had been developed in full for another era and were not transferable. Each generation developed its own architecture with its own contemporary technology. As a committed Modernist he of course believed the integrity of the building and its structure was generated from its internal function and space. He could not countenance the relevance of applying a superficial style to the exterior of a building, which was not derived from the internal and external spaces or functions: ‘To ignore what is intrinsic to the buildings by putting extraneous elements over the exterior is so anti-architecture that I can see no justification for it at all. It leads to world-fairism. Cities like Tokyo are turning into Disneyland.’ (11)
He obviously considered style to be superficial; fashionable to some degree, and often the clothing which reflected the personality and convictions of the designer. To illustrate this point graphically, Rudolph once entertained a graduate class by designing an identical building and enclosing it in the mantle of different styles, as it would have developed in the hands of several famous architects. Using his endless roll of yellow detail paper like some Greek scroll, he first drew a rectangular fat-roofed house with elegant Miesian details, then a sculptured courtyard with Le Corbusier cones and spheres, followed by a Wright residence growing naturally out of a hillside, and then an articulated Kahn castle, and concluded with an organized spatial house which he designed on many levels, which he claimed was superior to the others and his preference. The students knowingly noted that Rudolph had confidently placed himself alongside the elite of modern architecture, but by using this example he had skillfully illustrated the important point that style was only skin deep and a building can be designed in many different ways depending on the priorities and prejudices of the designer.
At about this time, in 1965, Rudolph told the Yale administration that he would like to leave the university as he would prefer to devote himself entirely to designing buildings and developing h