Two exhibitions showcase Myron Goldfinger’s geometric genius through drawings and models

Two exhibitions showcase Myron Goldfinger’s geometric genius through drawings and models

Architect’s Newspaper
Belmont Freeman - December 19, 2024

Installation view of Circle, Square, Triangle: The Houses I Never Lived In. The Residential Work of Myron Goldfinger 1963-2008. (Kelvin Dickinson/Courtesy the Paul Rudolph Institute For Modern Architecture)

Late 20th-century modern architecture is having its moment in New York this season, beginning with the Paul Rudolph exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, a show that I (and others) found rather thin and predictable. More stimulating and unexpected are a pair of exhibitions at the Brutalist master’s namesake venue, the Paul Rudolph Institute for Modern Architecture (PRIMA), and the Mitchell Algus Gallery: Both showcase the work of the recently deceased Myron Goldfinger, a prolific and singularly talented designer whose portfolio merits and rewards fresh examination.

Circle, Square, Triangle: Houses I Never Lived In. The Residential Work of Myron Goldfinger 1963-2008 at PRIMA’s home in the Rudolph-designed Modulightor building features Goldfinger’s residential projects, which constitute most of his built work. Downtown, the Mitchell Algus Gallery hosts Circle, Square, Triangle: A World I Wanted to Live in. The Public and Unbuilt Work of Myron Goldfinger 1963-2008, which demonstrates Goldfinger’s work on more varied building types and at larger scale.

The shared titling of these exhibitions references Goldfinger’s self-professed infatuation with Platonic geometric form. Strong geometry was an inspiration for many practitioners in the 1960s and ‘70s—think of the New York Five—but Goldfinger’s bold compositions of cubes, cylinders, and triangular blocks take the predilection to near-fetishistic extremes. His best work accrues a monumentality that bears the influence of Louis Kahn, under whom he studied at the University of Pennsylvania (where he was a student also of Paul Rudolph, whom Goldfinger always admired). To my eyes, the clarity of Goldfinger’s designs is a welcome respite after enduring the irrational computer-generated form making that has taken over architectural production in recent years.

Goldfinger grew up in a working-class neighborhood of Atlantic City. After graduating from Penn in 1955, he worked at Skidmore, Owings & Merrill and in the office of Philip Johnson before establishing his own practice in 1966. That same year he married June Matkovic, an interior designer who worked alongside him for the duration of his career. Goldfinger made an early splash with the construction of his own home in the woods at Waccabuc, New York; the residence is a towering stack of cubes and triangular volumes clad in vertical cedar siding. The project was selected by the editors of Architectural Record for its 1971 edition of Record Houses.

At the same time, Goldfinger produced a much grander house for June’s parents, sited on the water in Sands Point, New York; the semicircular bays of which were meant to evoke the decks of boats owned by Mr. Matkovic’s shipping company. These early projects were followed by numerous commissions for houses in the New York area and, later, on the island of Anguilla, where Goldfinger became involved in the development of a resort community.

Goldfinger’s geometric compositions with their sharp play of light and shadow are naturally photogenic, and the exhibition at PRIMA includes many black and white images by Norman McGrath. McGrath, who surely knew every architect in town, selected Goldfinger to design his own home in Patterson, New York. The sculptural quality of Goldfinger’s houses is celebrated by several models built for the show by students at Pratt Institute, where Goldfinger taught for many years alongside Sybil Moholy-Nagy.

The photos and models are wonderful, but the stars of these two shows, as at the Rudolph exhibition at The Met, are the drawings. Goldfinger produced exuberant perspectives hand-rendered in pencil that convincingly and expressively place the houses in their sites and reveal the drama of their interiors. For me, seeing these drawings took me back to the mid-1970s when I was in school (at Penn, like Goldfinger) and we tried to emulate the drawing styles of the masters, including Romaldo Giurgola, Steve Izenour (at Venturi, Rauch and Scott-Brown) and, of course, Rudolph.

I applaud the decision by curators Kelvin Dickinson, president of PRIMA, and Eshaan Mehta to include several sheets of pencil-on-vellum working drawings that illustrate Goldfinger’s attention to detail and the handcrafting of architecture by drawing. June Goldfinger told me that while the finished presentation renderings were usually done by studio employees, Goldfinger was intimately involved in the drafting of the working drawings. I am grateful that I learned (at Davis, Brody & Associates) how buildings get built by tracing and adapting construction details and pity today’s interns who learn little more than to copy and paste in AutoCAD.

The mixed-media presentation of Goldfinger’s architecture looks right at home in the hyper-designed, residential-scaled setting on the top two floors of the Modulightor building. In the more conventional loft space of the Mitchell Algus Gallery, Goldfinger’s unbuilt work is, as one would expect, represented by drawings hung museum-style on well-lit walls. For me the stand-out piece is the expansive seagull’s-eye view of Goldfinger’s proposal for a huge residential development on Roosevelt Island, produced in 1975 for a competition that attracted entries by some 250 architects; Goldfinger’s was one of thirty-five published semifinalists. (This rendering and the best of others in the two shows are by Manuel Castedo, who worked for Goldfinger for several years before establishing his own successful practice.) Less dramatic but also ambitious is a series of plans and axonometrics for a system of prefabricated modular housing that recycled the cubic and triangular forms from his own house, illustrating Goldfinger’s interest in economical mass housing.

The twin Circle, Square, Triangle shows initiate a fruitful exploration of Myron Goldfinger’s legacy. It’s also a turning point for PRIMA, which until recently had been called the Paul Rudolph Heritage Foundation. With the cataloging, scanning, and display of the Goldfinger archive taking place in-house at PRIMA, with June’s participation, the effort validates its newly broadened mission to identify, study, and advocate for the preservation of the work of other modern architects of Rudolph’s and later generations, most of whom will likely not get exhibitions at The Met like Rudolph but who, like Goldfinger, have much to offer today’s scholars and practitioners.

Belmont Freeman is the founding principal of the New York City–based firm Belmont Freeman Architects.

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The Duplex Apartment in Paul Rudolph’s Modulightor Building may be Landmarked

The duplex apartment in Paul Rudolph’s Modulightor Building may be landmarked

6sqft
Aaron Ginsberg - December 12, 2024

Exterior photo courtesy of the Paul Rudolph Institute for Modern Architecture; interior photo courtesy of the Landmarks Preservation Commission

A year ago, the Landmarks Preservation Commission designated the Modulightor Building, a Midtown East building designed by renowned architect Paul Rudolph, as a New York City landmark. Now, the agency will consider landmarking the interior of the building as well. On Tuesday, the agency voted to calendar a duplex apartment on the third and fourth floors of 246 East 58th Street designed by Rudolph. According to the commission, the apartment is a “complex, multi-layered late modern residential interior unlike any in New York City.”

After purchasing the property in 1989, Rudolph and German physicist Ernst Wagner rebuilt the original 1860s row home to house the Modulightor lighting company.

As 6sqft previously reported, Rudolph was the contractor during the first phase of construction, and in 1990 he and Wagner moved their offices into the unfinished building. In May 1993, the city’s Department of Buildings issued a certificate of occupancy for the structure’s cellar, first floor, and mezzanine.

The city issued a temporary certificate of occupancy for the two apartments in June 1994, and they were first leased to tenants in 1996.

The duplex had been ineligible for LPC interior landmark status until this year; to receive interior landmark status, the agency requires at least 30 years from the original certificate of occupancy.

After Rudolph died in 1997, Mark Squeo, who worked with the architect during the 1990s, led the second phase of the project, adding a fifth and sixth story. Wagner later moved into the building, removing a wall and combining the north and south spaces into a single duplex apartment.

The light-filled duplex features an open-plan layout with an all-white double-height space and few walls. Significant architectural features include tile floors and stairs, exposed metalwork, fireplaces, lighting fixtures, and built-in furniture.

“Inside and out, the triumph of the design is that Rudolph pulled off the kaleidoscopic complexity with wallboard and off-the-rack metal studs and joists. For Rudolph, the richness of the materials didn’t matter. He aimed at the same spatial qualities regardless of materials: it was space itself, Rudolphian space, that counted,” architect Joseph Giovanni wrote in a 2004 New York Times article.

The building also became the headquarters for the newly established Paul Rudolph Foundation, now known as the Paul Rudolph Institute for Modern Architecture, which currently owns and occupies the building. Founded in 2015, the Institute has hosted tours since 2002, making it the only publicly accessible Rudolph building. More information on the tours can be found here.

In December 2023, the Modulightor Building was designated by the LPC as an individual landmark for its special character and its historical and aesthetic significance in NYC.

The building’s designation was the first in the LPC’s history to officially acknowledge an architect’s gay identity.

Born in 1918 in Kentucky, Rudolph studied at Auburn University and the Harvard Graduate School of Design, where he developed his signature modern sculptural aesthetic using industrial materials like concrete and steel, according to the LPC. In the mid-1960s at the peak of his career as chair of the Yale School of Architecture, Rudolph moved his practice to Manhattan.

During this time, Rudolph designed notable buildings such as the Jewett Art Center, the Tuskegee University Chapel, and the Yale School of Art & Architecture, now known as Rudolph Hall.

Two other Rudolph-designed buildings are also NYC landmarks: The Paul Rudolph Townhouse at 23 Beekman Place, where Rudolph lived for a large portion of his life, and the Halston House at 101 East 63rd Street on the Upper East Side.

A public hearing on the duplex apartment will be scheduled in the coming weeks.

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The Inside Of This UES Apartment Could Be NYC's Next Landmark

The Inside Of This UES Apartment Could Be NYC's Next Landmark

Patch
Miranda Levingston - December 12, 2024

Photo : Kelvin Dickinson

UPPER EAST SIDE, NY —The iconic Modulightor Building on East 58th Street was designated as a landmark in 2023 for its unique exterior designed by architect Paul Rudolph, and this week, the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission voted to consider landmarking one of the duplex apartments inside the building as well.

On Tuesday, the Commission voted to add a public hearing about the Modulightor's third-floor apartment to its calendar, which is the first step in the landmarking process.

Once a building's interior is landmarked, the Commission must approve any alteration, reconstruction, demolition, or new construction affecting the designated apartment to protect the historical significance of the architecture and design.

The duplex, which includes the third and fourth floors of the building, operates as a house museum for Rudolph, a famous 20th-century architect known for brutalist and modernist shapes.

The interior of the Modulightor duplex features an all-white, late-20th-century modern design, with cantilevered internal balconies, built-in furniture, and a double-height ceiling, Kelvin Dickinson, the president and executive director of the Paul Rudolph Institute for Modern Architecture, said.

"The interiors kind of flow around you, and you never actually pay attention to the fact that the space is only 18 feet wide, because the design has you looking up, which makes the space feel much bigger," Dickinson said.

"In [Rudolph's] mind, good design is not about putting marble on walls — it's about the actual use of the space and how the space is designed such that it is never boring. I think that's what makes the apartment so interesting and why we've opened it to the public, and we get sold out every time."

To qualify as an interior landmark, the space must be at least 30 years old and regularly open to the public, the Commission said.

The duplex operates as a museum for the architect with regular in-person tours and was first built in 1993, according to the Commission.

The building first opened to the public in 2002, after the architect's death, when Rudolph's partner opened the space to let people walk through, Dickinson said.

"His story is fascinating because his designs were not something people were used to. He was a very, very late modernist, a strict modernist, and if you like his work, then you like it. He didn't change his style for anybody."

The public hearing hasn't been scheduled yet, but could take place as soon as January, Dickinson said. When more details on the hearing become available, they will be announced here.

The Modulightor building is located at 246 East 58th St. right on the border of the Upper East Side and Midtown East.

Open House tours of the duplex are offered twice a month. Learn more here.

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A New Exhibition Surveys the Residential Work of New York Architect Myron Goldfinger

A New Exhibition Surveys the Residential Work of New York Architect Myron Goldfinger

Architectural Record
Sam Furnival - November 22, 2024

A young Myron Goldfinger (left) and his Norman and Molly McGrath Residence (1976) in Patterson, New York. Goldfinger photo © The Estate of Myron Goldfinger; McGrath Residence photo © Norman McGrath; both images courtesy the Paul Rudolph Institute For Modern Architecture

A month before architect Myron Goldfinger died last year, his wife, June Goldfinger, asked a question she had never posed during their six decades of personal and professional partnership. “Myron,” she said, “what is your architecture about? If you had one thing to say about your architecture, what would you say?” June was struck by the simplicity of Myron’s reply: “He just looked at me and he said ‘Circle, square, triangle.’”

Goldfinger’s gnomic utterance inspired the title for an exhibition on his legacy at the Paul Rudolph Institute for Modern Architecture (PRIMA) in New York. Curated by PRIMA’s president and CEO, Kelvin Dickinson Jr., Circle, Square, Triangle: Houses I Never Lived In: The Residential Work of Myron Goldfinger 1963-2008 is on view until March 22, 2025. The exhibition’s subtitle comes from the forward to his 1992 monograph, Myron Goldfinger: Architect, in which Goldfinger recalled the glamorous homes he admired while growing up working class in Atlantic City, writing “I am always building the houses I never lived in as a boy.”

Belying this simple, three-shape summation of his life’s work, Goldfinger left behind voluminous archives of his decades-long architectural practice, best known for geometric houses in dramatic beachfront or sylvan settings, many built in the upscale suburbs and vacation towns around New York City. The exhibition draws upon drawings, plans, models, photographs and publicity materials for residential projects built and unbuilt, carefully saved but never properly cataloged. Those archives have moved a mile up Manhattan’s east side, from the Goldfingers’ apartment in the I.M. Pei–designed Kips Bay Towers to PRIMA’s home in Paul Rudolph’s recently landmarked Modulightor Building on East 58th Street.

The most important donation to PRIMA, however, is June Goldfinger herself. Inspired by PRIMA’s mission to preserve Rudolph’s legacy, June joined the organization’s board and has helped Dickinson sort through the residuum of her late husband’s architectural practice, where she worked as the interior designer on many projects.

That personal touch has allowed the exhibition and archive project to come to life. Dickinson and a score of volunteers are working to digitize Goldfinger’s archives to preserve his legacy and make his work available to scholars, enthusiasts, and the next generation of architects. June thinks Myron would have been thrilled with the choice of PRIMA—Rudolph was his professor at the University of Pennsylvania in the 1950s and, according to June, was one of the only modern architects whose work the Goldfingers followed. Now, Goldfinger is inspiring Dickinson and PRIMA: “We realized that our mission was bigger than Paul Rudolph. There are other architects’ work that is similarly threatened by being forgotten. And so, our mission has grown.”

Rudolph’s influence is apparent in the angular, cantilevered triangles of the earliest project in the show, Myron’s house for himself and June in Waccabuc, Westchester County. Built shortly after starting his own practice and his family, June gave Myron carte blanche to design their home, reasoning that this was the first—and last time—her husband would be able to build to his vision free of anyone else’s demands.

The Waccabuc house made a splash and was published in the Mid-May 1971 edition of Record Houses as part of a feature on houses architects designed for themselves. It gained enough notoriety to inspire parody, with RECORD’s legendary cartoonist Alan Dunn imagining the impasse between a woman on a balcony overhanging the sheer cedar facade as a delivery man pleads with her to come down to sign for a package. As with many of Dunn’s cartoons, the joke’s truth is what gives it bite: omitted from the exhibition’s wall text but documented in PRIMA’s online listing of the project is the fact that upon moving in, June was surprised to find the kitchen on the second floor and even more surprised not to find any space set aside for their baby daughters. Fortunately for the Goldfinger family, Myron’s modular construction (built around the standard size of an 8-by-15-foot sliding glass door) and June’s talent for interiors found space for raising a family in the home where they stayed for over five decades.

Goldfinger added the circle to his toolbox when building the next project featured in the exhibition, the 1970 Matkovic house. Built for June’s parents in Sands Point on the North Shore of Long Island, the curving forms of the house evoke the boat hulls of his father-in-law’s shipping business. In one of the most personal and lively sketches in the exhibition, Goldfinger illustrates the curving forms of the house. Those looking for the exhibition’s titular triangles will find them not in the house but in its inhabitants, who are drawn in Goldberg’s characteristic renderings as triangle torso-ed. This less-than-idealized rendering of his clients seems not to have upset Goldfinger’s in-laws, nor the many other clients he and June cultivated as friends and repeat customers. Goldfinger benefitted from being able to express his personal vision of architecture in conversation with the individual needs of his clients—which also must have gone a long way towards not forgetting any more children’s bedrooms.

With his three shapes, Rudolph continued designing residences through the 2000s, ranging from New York City apartments to Antiguan resorts. Circle, Square, Triangle features a dozen of Goldfinger’s residential projects. We see the dramatic side of Goldfinger in his renovation of singer Roberta Flack’s apartment in Manhattan’s legendary Dakota building. Goldfinger’s illustration is pure showbiz, with mirrored walls surrounded by round Hollywood bulbs, while his blueprints assure the Datoka’s famously demanding co-op board that “HUNG CEILING SUPPORTS SHALL NOT DISTURB CEILING MOULDINGS” [sic]. The wall text informs us that some of the building’s historic moldings were in fact disturbed, much to the consternation of the architecture critic and (former) Dakota resident Paul Goldberger. The exhibition quotes Myron Goldfinger’s response to the original detailing as “it wasn’t good then and it isn’t good now.”

Every project in the exhibition is showcased through a variety of media spanning the design, construction, and domestic life of the building. Hand drawn interior renderings in three-point perspective oozing 70’s glamour are juxtaposed with detailed construction drawings and carefully staged interior photographs. For projects lacking architectural models, PRIMA honored Goldfinger’s legacy as a teacher and commissioned new models from architecture students at the Pratt Institute, where Goldfinger taught for a decade and worked with the eminent scholar Sibyl Moholy-Nagy.

The intent of the exhibition is to show the human hand in every stage of the design, construction, and even marketing of these projects. Goldfinger’s human touch and careful eye is something PRIMA’s Dickinson hopes young architects can be inspired by, even in an age of AutoCAD and Generative AI.

Asked to provide her own summation of her husband’s legacy, June emphasizes not the spaces he created but the people who inhabit them. “His architecture really celebrates the occupants. He celebrated people.” With this exhibition of his residential work and PRIMA’s ongoing efforts to archive and share it, Goldfinger's humanistic vision for architecture can be celebrated.

Circle, Square, Triangle: Houses I Never Lived In: The Residential Work of Myron Goldfinger 1963-2008 is on view at the Paul Rudolph Institute for Modern Architecture through March 22. A concurrent exhibition, Circle, Square, Triangle: A World I Wanted to Live In. The Public and Unbuilt Work of Myron Goldfinger 1963-2008 is on view at the Mitchell Algus Gallery in New York.

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'Materialized Space' traces the tangled legacy of architect Paul Rudolph

'Materialized Space' traces the tangled legacy of architect Paul Rudolph

Stir World
Sunena V Maju - October 23, 2024

Walker Guest House In Florida, US by Paul Rudolph Image: Ezra Stoller for House Beautiful

The exhibition at The Metropolitan Museum of Art revisits Rudolph’s contributions to architecture, from his early modernist roots to his bold experiments in brutalism.

There were more chances of American architect Paul Rudolph’s professional life becoming a movie first than it adorning the galleries of The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. Materialized Space: The Architecture of Paul Rudolph, curated by Abraham Thomas, The Met’s Daniel Brodsky Curator of Modern Architecture, Design, and Decorative Arts, is the first-ever major museum exhibition to examine the career of the renowned 20th-century architect. In architectural circles, this exhibition raises the question, "Was Paul Rudolph as influential as his contemporaries like Eero Saarinen and I.M. Pei?" For the general public, however, the pressing inquiry is, "Who was Paul Rudolph?" Though an architect, I like the latter more. This question is vital, as his life exemplifies the fleeting nature of architectural fame, encapsulated in a three-structured act of recognition, criticism and eventual retreat.

Materialized Space features a straightforward layout showcasing over 80 works in a variety of scales, from small objects that he collected throughout his life to a mix of material generated from his office, including drawings, models, furniture, material samples and photographs. These elements are categorised by building typologies—housing, civic projects, megastructures, interiors and his commissions in Asia—effectively illustrating Rudolph's architectural language and key projects. The beauty of his sketches is undeniable, reflecting the vision he consistently upheld. Unlike those of his contemporaries, the sketches on display are final drawings, meticulously perfected with scaled figures, vegetation and renderings.

In the exhibition’s press release, Thomas notes, “Rudolph’s intricate, visionary drawings and dramatic completed buildings represent a singular voice within the crowded, variable terrain of architectural late Modernism; one that will continue to prove both spellbinding and confounding for many years to come.” The first act of Rudolph’s career begins at Harvard Graduate School of Design under Bauhaus founder Walter Gropius. His studies were interrupted by the Second World War, during which he served in the United States Naval Reserve at the Brooklyn Navy Yard, designing merchant marine ships. After three years, he returned to Harvard and graduated with a master's degree in 1947. Shortly thereafter, he moved to Sarasota, Florida, a point in his life that would later come to be a key step in the creation of an influential architect.

Post the Second World War, Florida became a vibrant hub for modern development, driven by a housing boom and an influx of diverse immigrants. This dynamic environment fostered a flourishing of post-war modern architecture. Rudolph entered this scene, drawing on his experiences in American architecture and his Naval Reserve training. Alongside Ralph Twitchell, he designed vacation homes that innovatively used materials like plywood and plastics, blending these with principles of the International Style. Although their collaboration yielded many notable structures, the duo parted ways in 1952, allowing Rudolph to pursue his own architectural path.

The architect gained significant fame with the Walker Guest House (1952), which architecturally stands in close quarters to Mies van der Rohe’s Farnsworth House and Philip Johnson’s Glass House. Featuring symmetry, raised platforms, an open plan and geometric forms, the Walker Guest House marked a pivotal shift in Rudolph's career, pushing beyond modernism's constraints. By this time, he was not only practising architecture but also teaching at institutions like Cornell, Harvard, MIT and Yale and designing exhibitions, such as MoMA’s 1952 Good Design. However, Materialized Space doesn’t significantly discuss this multifaceted phase of his career and focuses primarily on his identity as an architect.

By the early 1950s, Rudolph began to question the ideologies of modern architecture and the International Style. The tension between his earlier influences such as art deco and Frank Lloyd Wright at Alabama Polytechnic and the functional modernism he encountered at Harvard played a crucial role in shaping his design language. The Paul Rudolph Institute for Modern Architecture mentions, “Rudolph re-examined his early work in Florida and was not satisfied with its quality, concluding that it lacked sufficient psychological control of light and space. He started to question the fundamentals of the International Style and the rigid principles of the Sarasota School.”

Transitioning to the East Coast, Rudolph established his practice in New York and was appointed Chair of the School of Architecture at Yale University in 1957. This marked the beginning of his second act, with the 1960s becoming a defining decade for him. His architectural style evolved into a more brutalist, monumental and expressive form, solidifying his status as a key figure in American brutalism and earning him the moniker "mastermind with building blocks."1 Materialized Space presents interesting magazine articles of the time where Rudolph and his architecture were praised and studied.

One of Rudolph's pivotal projects was the Yale Art and Architecture Building, often called the A&A Building and later renamed Rudolph Hall. Completed in 1963, it is regarded as one of the finest examples of Brutalist architecture in America, though many occupants expressed dissatisfaction with it. In his essay, Thomas mentions, “The paradoxical nature of his work was apparent even at the height of his career, when a 1967 New York Times Magazine cover story posited Rudolph as a natural successor to Le Corbusier, suggesting that his emphasis on intuition was the driving force behind an architectural unpredictability that could “turn out to be anything: a staggered complex of cubes or a soaring, sweeping affair, plain or fancy, lovely or lousy.”

In 1969, a fire severely damaged the A&A Building. After leaving Yale in 1965, Rudolph moved his practice to New York while continuing to create notable brutalist structures in Boston, including the Boston Government Service Center (1971) and First Church in Boston (1972). In 1967, he proposed the Lower Manhattan Expressway, a controversial project intended to connect New Jersey with Brooklyn, Queens, and Long Island via major bridges and tunnels. Although this concept remains utopian today, it garnered significant attention and critique in later years. Materialized Space features intriguing sketches of this ambitious proposal.

The fire at Yale and the 1972 publication of Learning from Las Vegas marked the beginning of a challenging phase for Paul Rudolph, the third act of his career. The 1970s were unkind to him, as critics who once celebrated his modernist-brutalist style began to scrutinise and doubt his work. Interest in post-war architecture was waning. In the book, The Architecture of Paul Rudolph, art historian Timothy M. Rohan wrote, “At a time when modernism was being widely questioned, Rudolph became more symbolic of its failures than any other architect of his generation.”

In the latter part of his career, Rudolph focused on projects in East Asia – contributed by the economic boom in Asia and the criticism for his work in the US, producing notable works such as Wisma Dharmala Sakti (1982), Burroughs Wellcome Addition (1982) and Bond (Lippo) Centre (1984). He also proposed several unbuilt projects, including the Sino Tower in Hong Kong (1989) and the International Building for Hong Fok Corporation in Singapore (1990). A magnificent model of the Sino Tower at the exhibition introduces a three-dimensional understanding of Rudolph’s architecture. He battled cancer in the last years of his life and passed away in 1997.

Lastly, was Rudolph as influential as his contemporaries? The answer is both yes and no. His tangled legacy links him to Brutalism, Sarasota and modernism, but his broader architectural journey is still less traceable. The exhibition offers a glimpse into the wider aspects of his life as an architect. At Materialized Spaces, take time to look beyond the sketches on the sheet, on the edges are coffee stains, pen scribbles, ink drops, imperfect tears and pin-up and tape marks.  

Materialized Space: The Architecture of Paul Rudolph is on view at The Metropolitan Musem of Art from September 30, 2024 - March 16, 2025.

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Paul Rudolph’s Sanderling Beach Club Cabanas in Florida Destroyed by Hurricane

Paul Rudolph’s Sanderling Beach Club Cabanas in Florida Destroyed by Hurricane

Arch Daily
Maria-Cristina Florian - October 01, 2024

Photo: Francis Dzikowski

On September 27, 2024, the Paul Rudolph Institute of Modern Architecture has announced that the Sanderling Beach Club, a complex of beachside buildings 1952 building designed by Paul Rudolph in 1952 in Sarasota, Florida, has been completely destroyed by Hurricane Helene. The severe tropical storm, a Category 4 Hurricane, has had a devastating impact on communities across Florida, Georgia, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Virginia.

Paul Rudolph was hired at the age of 34 by the Sanderling family to design the Sanderling Beach Club on Siesta Key. Known for their development of golf courses, the family entrusted Rudolph with creating a distinctive architectural experience against the backdrop of the Gulf Coast. Rudolph's design featured a series of cabanas with barrel vaults, their curved roofs intended to mimic the waves of the Gulf. The initial plan consisted of a concrete patio, an observatory, and five single-story structures composed of cabanas that faced the gulf. The low vaulted ceilings were made from thin layers of plywood sheathing.

The project received an international architecture prize from the Museum of Modern Art in Sao Paulo, Brazil. Over the years, Sanderling Beach Club underwent a series of additions, expanding between 1952 and 1960 with the inclusion of three more structures and a clubhouse. the club's architecture was eventually designated as a historic site but later fell into disrepair. In 1994, it was added to the National Register of Historic Places. According to architect Max Strang, who visited the site after the hurricane, the architecture was completely destroyed overnight.

According to the Paul Rudolph Institute of Modern Architecture, several other of Rudolph's notable structures in the area are also threatened by the severe weather conditions, among which the 1956 Deering Residence, 1949 Bennett Residence, and 1953 Umbrella Residence.

In other related news, the Boston Government Service Center, designed by Paul Rudolph and opened in 1971, has announced plans to be redeveloped into a mixed-use housing plan, to address the housing crisis while allowing for the preservation of the Brutalist structure. Another modern heritage site, the Wayfarers Chapel, designed by Lloyd Wright, the eldest son of architect Frank Lloyd Wright, has been responsibly dismantled following extensive damage from accelerated land movement.

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Paul Rudolph’s Sanderling Beach Club destroyed by Tropical Storm Helene

Paul Rudolph’s Sanderling Beach Club destroyed by Tropical Storm Helene

The Architect’s Newspaper
Daniel Jonas Roche - September 27, 2024

The complex was destroyed on September 26. Photo: Max Strang

In the past 72 hours, Tropical Storm Helene has killed at least 22 people. Houses, infrastructure, and roads in Florida have been decimated. Sanderling Beach Club, a 1952 building designed by Paul Rudolph in Sarasota, has also been completely destroyed.

News of Sanderling Beach Club’s destruction was shared by the Paul Rudolph Institute for Modern Architecture and Docomomo. It was wrecked by strong winds and rain the evening of September 26.

“We are absolutely gutted to see Paul Rudolph’s Sanderling Beach Cabanas in Sarasota, Florida have been completely destroyed by Hurricane Helene,” Docomomo said on Instagram. “This was the site of our first National Symposium in 2013. We knew this day would come but very sad as reality sets in.”

“Paul Rudolph considered his projects like children and once built ‘each has a power and a life of its own.’ The loss of the cabanas at the Sanderling Beach Club is devastating—another example of Rudolph’s genius now exists only in books and photographs,” Kelvin Dickinson, president of the Paul Rudolph Institute for Modern Architecture, told AN. “We hope there will be—and will fully support—an effort to rebuild the cabanas as Rudolph originally designed them. Until then, it feels like we’ve lost a member of the family.”

Paul Rudolph was 34 years old when he was hired to design Sanderling Beach Club by the Sanderling family, influential Floridian developers who built golf courses. The project on the Siesta Key became known for its cabanas with barrel vaults that go right up to the water. The roofs, Rudolph said, and their curvature were meant to resemble Gulf Coast waves.

A series of additions between 1952 and 1960 transformed the ensemble. Later, the Museum of Modern Art of Sao Paulo, Brazil gave Rudolph an award for Sanderling Beach Club. The project also appeared in The Architecture of Paul Rudolph by Sibyl Moholy-Nagy and Gerhard Schwab, published in 1970.

Sanderling Beach Club was designated on the National Register of Historic Places in 1994. According to architect Max Strang, who has since visited the wreckage, the architecture is completely destroyed, and there is nothing left to repair.

Strang relayed to the Paul Rudolph Institute for Modern Architecture that he will present a reconstruction plan for Sanderling Beach Club in the future. Meanwhile, a separate residence by Rudolph in Florida has also experienced flooding. But the full extent of damage is still unknown.

The disaster happened just days before a major retrospective on Rudolph opens at the Met in New York.

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Paul Rudolph’s Sanderling Beach Club Cabanas destroyed by Tropical Storm Helene

Paul Rudolph’s Sanderling Beach Club Cabanas destroyed by Tropical Storm Helene

The Architectural Record
Matt Hickman - September 27, 2024

The complex was destroyed on September 26.

The New York–based Paul Rudolph Institute for Modern Architecture has shared news that the Rudolph–designed cabanas at the Sanderling Beach Club in Sarasota, Florida, have been destroyed by Hurricane Helene. While details are still emerging, the Institute said that it was contacted this morning by local architect Max Strang, who shared photos of the ruined beachfront structures on his Instagram Stories. The cabanas, known for their low vaulted ceilings and sheathed plywood construction, were designed by Rudolph in 1952. In 1994, the club, located on Sarasota’s Siesta Key, was added to the National Register of Historic Places. (More information about the site can be found here.)

It is unclear* if any other Rudolph buildings located in and around Sarasota on Florida’s Gulf Coast—and there are many, including his addition at the city’s public high school and numerous private homes, including the Umbrella House, Revere Quality House, and the Healy Guest House, all of which RECORD visited in 2023—were impacted by Helene, which made landfall in Florida as a category 4 storm late yesterday.

Rudolph, who moved to Sarasota after studying with Walter Gropius at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, was perhaps the most prominent member of the Sarasota School of Architecture, a post-war regional architectural style also known as Sarasota Modern that flourished on Florida’s central west coast from the early 1940s through the mid-60s. Other architects associated with the movement include Ralph Twitchell, Victor Lundy, Tim Seibert, and Carl Abbott.

Coincidentally, a new exhibition titled Materialized Space: The Architecture of Paul Rudolph opens September 30 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

RECORD has reached out to Architecture Sarasota, a non-profit education and advocacy organization that celebrates and promotes the city’s rich design heritage through various programming initiatives including exhibitions, tours, and a signature awards program, to comment on the destruction of the Sanderling Beach Club cabanas and to confirm if any other significant Modernist buildings in the area suffered damage. We will continue to update this article as more information becomes available.

*Update: Morris “Marty” Hylton III, president of Architecture Sarasota, has confirmed with RECORD that at least two other Rudolph properties, the Revere Quality House and the Healy Guest House, also known as the Cocoon House, experienced flooding due to storm surge brought on by Hurricane Helene. He relays that the organization will assess the damages and consider next steps.

Update 2: Architecture Sarasota has issued an official statement confirming the loss of the Sanderling Beach cabanas and damage to “many of our Sarasota School and other local landmarks.”

“As assessments of the damage caused by Hurricane Helene continue, I am saddened that has meant so much to be for decades, and that I now call home, has been so significantly impacted,” writes Hylton, pledging to support local recovery efforts and keep the public informed with continual updates. “This moment only strengthens my resolve for Architecture Sarasota to serve as a resource and partner in addressing the challenges our community faces.”

Read the original article here.

The MET to Showcase Built and Unbuilt Visions of 20th century Architect Paul Rudolph

the MET to showcase built and unbuilt visions of 20th century architect paul rudolph

Designboom
Kat Barandy- September 01, 2024

Paul Rudolph (American, 1918-1997), Rolling Dining Chair, Designed 1968, Lucite, chromium plated tubular steel, 30 h × 28 1/4 w × 24 d in (76 × 72 × 61 cm), Paul Rudolph Institute for Modern Architecture. Photograph by Eileen Travell

The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City will host its first-ever major museum exhibition dedicated to the work of Paul Rudolph, one of the most influential architects of the 20th century. This exhibition will highlight Rudolph’s contributions to modern architecture and his enduring influence on the field. Spanning his early work in the 1950s to his later projects in the 1970s, the show will provide a comprehensive look at his architectural vision and legacy. Titled Materialized Space: The Architecture of Paul Rudolph, the exhibition will be on view from September 30th, 2024 until March 16th, 2025.

Paul Rudolph emerged as a leading figure in the second wave of modernist architects during the 1950s and 1960s. Known for his bold, expressive use of space and materials, Rudolph’s work often incorporated complex, interlocking volumes and textures that set him apart from his contemporaries. This exhibition aims to shed light on the diverse range of his architectural practice, featuring over eighty artifacts, including architectural drawings, models, furniture, material samples, and photographs.

Paul Rudolph’s Unbuilt Concepts

One of the key highlights of the Metropolitan Museum of Art‘s exhibition, Materialized Space: The Architecture of Paul Rudolph, will be the display of Rudolph’s designs for the Lower Manhattan Expressway / City Corridor project. The ambitious unbuilt urban plan, conceptualized between 1967 and 1972 to address traffic congestion in New York City, was designed as a massive elevated roadway. Rudolph’s radical approach integrated residential, commercial, and public spaces into the expressway’s design, reflecting his belief in architecture’s potential to shape and improve urban living conditions. The exhibition will showcase detailed drawings and models from this project, offering visitors insight into his innovative and futuristic urban planning ideas.

brutalism Embodied

 Another significant feature of the exhibition is Rudolph’s celebrated Art and Architecture Building at Yale University, completed in 1958. This structure is considered a masterpiece of Brutalist architecture, characterized by its rugged concrete facade and intricate interior spaces. The building’s design highlights Rudolph’s skillful use of concrete and his ability to create dynamic, interconnected spaces that engage the viewer. Drawings and photographs of this iconic building will be on display, illustrating Rudolph’s architectural philosophy and his contribution to the Brutalist movement.

Rudolph’s design for the Tuskegee Institute Chapel in Tuskegee, Alabama, now known as the Tuskegee University Chapel, will also be featured in the exhibition. Designed in 1960, this chapel demonstrates Rudolph’s ability to blend modernist principles with the cultural and historical context of its surroundings. The chapel’s soaring arches and light-filled interior reflect his innovative use of space and materials to create a place of serenity and reflection. Visitors to the exhibition will be able to view architectural drawings and photographs that capture the essence of this iconic structure.

early works

The exhibition will also include materials related to one of Rudolph’s earliest and most famous projects, the Walker Guest House on Sanibel Island, Florida, built in 1952. This small, single-story structure exemplifies Rudolph’s early experimentation with modular design and prefabrication. Its simplicity and functional elegance laid the groundwork for his later, more complex works. Models and photographs of the Walker Guest House will be on display, highlighting Rudolph’s innovative approach to residential design.

Materialized Space: The Architecture of Paul Rudolph offers a rare opportunity to explore the breadth of Rudolph’s architectural career. By showcasing a wide range of artifacts from his office, including personal items and work-related materials, the exhibition provides a holistic view of his creative process and the diverse influences that shaped his work. This comprehensive exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art will celebrate Rudolph’s contributions to modern architecture and offer new perspectives on his lasting impact on the built environment.

project info:

exhibition title: Materialized Space: The Architecture of Paul Rudolph

museum: Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York | @metmuseum

on view: September 30th, 2024 — March 16th, 2025

Read the original article here.

The Met to Present the First Major Exhibition Dedicated to Influential Modernist Architect Paul Rudolph

The Met to Present the First Major Exhibition Dedicated to Influential Modernist Architect Paul Rudolph

The City Life
Staff - August 27, 2024

Paul Rudolph (American, 1918-1997), Perspective section drawing of the Art and Architecture Building, Yale University, New Haven, 1958. Pen and ink, graphite, and plastic film with halftone pattern, on illustration board. 36 7/8 x 53 5/8 x 2 in. (93.6 x 136.2 x 5.1 cm) School of Architecture, Yale University, Manuscripts and Archives, Yale University Library.

Exhibition Dates: September 30, 2024–March 16, 2025
Location: The Met Fifth Avenue, The Helen and Milton A. Kimmelman Gallery, Lila Acheson Wallace Wing, Floor 1 

From Halston’s spectacular town house to Yale’s iconic Art and Architecture Building, unrealized utopian megastructures to immersive interiors, the exhibition will survey the fascinatingly diverse career of one of the most significant, yet underrecognized architects of the 20th century.

The show will be the first major exhibition of 20th-century architecture at The Met in over 50 years

The Metropolitan Museum of Art will present the first-ever major museum exhibition to examine the career of the influential 20th-century architect Paul Rudolph, a second-generation Modernist who came to prominence during the 1950s and 1960s alongside peers such as Eero Saarinen and I.M. Pei. Materialized Space: The Architecture of Paul Rudolph, on view from September 30, 2024, through March 16, 2025, will showcase the full breadth of Rudolph’s important contributions to architecture—from his early experimental houses in Florida to his civic commissions rendered in concrete, and from his utopian visions for urban megastructures and mixed-use sky¬scrapers to his extraordinary immersive New York interiors. The exhibition will give visitors the opportunity to experience the evolution and diversity of Rudolph’s legacy and better understand how his work continues to inspire ideas for urban renewal and redevelopment in cities across the world. The presentation will feature a diverse range of over 80 works in a variety of scales, from small objects that he collected throughout his life to a mix of material generated from his office, including drawings, models, furniture, material samples, and photographs. 

The exhibition is made possible by The Modern Circle.

Additional support is provided by The Daniel and Estrellita Brodsky Foundation, Ann M. Spruill and Daniel H. Cantwell, and the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts.

The exhibition was organized by The Metropolitan Museum of Art, in collaboration with the Library of Congress’s Paul Marvin Rudolph Archive.

“Paul Rudolph was a pioneer and an iconic figure among the architectural community, and this long-overdue presentation analyzes the immense impact that his trailblazing work continues to have on contemporary architects and the development of our urban spaces,” said Max Hollein, The Met’s Marina Kellen French Director and Chief Executive Officer. “Materialized Space not only underscores the radical thinking that Rudolph imparted to the Modernist era, but also invites viewers into the complex artistic process of architectural development, illuminating the ways in which the spaces we occupy come to life.”

“The refusal to be categorized makes Paul Rudolph a challenging architect to summarize, but this same quality also makes him a fascinating topic for research, driving new audiences to discover, or rediscover, his work every day,” said Abraham Thomas, The Met’s Daniel Brodsky Curator of Modern Architecture, Design, and Decorative Arts. “Rudolph’s intricate, visionary drawings and dramatic completed buildings represent a singular voice within the crowded, variable terrain of architectural late Modernism—one that will continue to prove both spellbinding and confounding for many years to come.”

Materialized Space will be divided into thematic sections that follow the many stages of Rudolph’s architectural practice, highlighting his work in housing, civic projects, megastructures, interiors, and his commissions in Asia. Through a careful selection of projects, the exhibition will show how Rudolph’s work engaged with key moments of cultural, economic, and political significance during the 20th century, including post-war construction and expansion, urban renewal and housing policies in the 1960s, and the economic boom in Asia in the 1980s. 

The exhibition will explore many of Rudolph’s well-known New York projects—most notably Robert Moses’s unrealized Lower Manhattan Expressway scheme, a controversial proposal to link New Jersey to Brooklyn, Queens, and Long Island via the Holland Tunnel and the Manhattan and Williamsburg Bridges. Designed to leave the city’s infrastructure intact, Rudolph’s proposed Y-shaped corridor introduced a new approach to city building in which transportation networks would bind communities rather than dividing them. Ultimately, this project was never realized due to strong opposition citing that the project would destroy a vibrant urban neighborhood and displace communities. 

Materialized Space will also examine why Brutalism—a 1950s post-war era architectural style that prioritized structural elements over decorative deisgn—and architectural projects in concrete during the 1960s and ’70s continue to be extremely divisive and controversial. These ideas reflect on a form of architecture that once represented 20th-century utopia and that is now synonymous with many of the social issues surrounding the projects of late Modernism. Rudolph’s regular use of concrete and Brutalist methodology was a factor in his own fall from public favor during the 1970s, perhaps offering insight into why so many of his projects have been demolished during the past decade and lost forever.

The exhibition will also highlight the primacy of drawing as a practice within architecture and, in the case of Rudolph, an opportunity to showcase the stunning renderings and perspective drawings that he became famous for. Although technology has given rise to new tools for creating architectural schematics and plans, these handmade drawings set the precedent for creative development and remain key teaching tools in architectural schools today. 

Just before his death in 1997, Rudolph bequeathed to the Library of Congress his architectural archive of more than 100,000 items, encompassing drawings, models, photographs, and printed ephemera. Materialized Space will feature extensive loans from the Library of Congress, including several objects that have never been on view before and in some cases have never been photographed. Additional loans, from the Paul Rudolph Institute for Modern Architecture, include important examples of furniture and other objects from the architect’s estate – in addition to other key institutional and private lenders.

Materialized Space: The Architecture of Paul Rudolph is organized by Abraham Thomas, the Daniel Brodsky Curator, Modern Architecture, Design, and Decorative Arts in The Met’s Department of Modern and Contemporary Art.

The exhibition is organized by The Metropolitan Museum of Art, in collaboration with the Library of Congress’s Paul Marvin Rudolph Archive.

The exhibition will be accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue.

The catalogue is made possible by the Samuel I. Newhouse Foundation, Inc.

The Met will host a variety of educational opportunities in conjunction with the exhibition, including in-gallery conversations, panels, demonstrations, and hands-on activities inspired by Rudolph’s legacy. Programming and activities are available for all ages. 

Materialized Space: The Architecture of Paul Rudolph will be featured on The Met’s website, as well as on social media.

Read the original article here.

‘Drawing’ some surprising architectural conclusions

‘Drawing’ some surprising architectural conclusions

Boston Globe
Mark Feeney - May 02, 2024

Paul Rudolph (1918–1997), Callahan House, Perspective, 1965–1986, Birmingham, Alabama, graphite and colored pencil on paper. MIT Museum 2018.011.063. Gift of Danielle and Martin E. Zimmerman '59. © The Estate of Paul Rudolph, The Paul Rudolph Institute for Modern Architecture

CAMBRIDGE — “Drawing After Modernism,” which runs at the MIT Museum through Oct. 27, is about a particular kind of drawing and a particular period of after. The museum’s Jonathan Duval curated the show.

The drawings are architectural sketches, and they range from drawings (in pencil, ink, graphite, or gouache) to an acrylic painting (Zaha Hadid), lithographs (Helmut Jahn and Frank Gehry), and even a model (John Hejduk). A model can be considered a sketch in three dimensions, no?

The eminence of those names gives a sense of how much this small but arresting show has to offer. There are some 50 items on display, not just artworks but also colored pencils, an airbrush, and exhibition cards for a 1977 exhibition at New York’s Leo Castelli gallery. The MIT show is pretty much an ideal size: small enough for a visitor to comfortably take everything in, big enough to be varied and wide-ranging.

The period in question is from the late ‘70s to late ‘80s, with a few outliers. Those outliers — Louis Kahn (1959), Paul Rudolph (1965), and Gehry (2004) — are further evidence of eminence. Other architects with works in the show include Peter Eisenman, with eight; Stanley Tigerman, with seven; Michael Graves and Jahn, with four each. Jahn took pride in having done more than 100,000 architectural sketches over the course of his career.

One of the Graves drawings is of the Humana Building, in Louisville, Ky. This was one of the signature designs in the emergence of Postmodernism. The reason “Drawing” focuses on the span it does is that it effectively marked the end of Modernism as culturally dominant — not just in architecture — and the arrival of Postmodernism. That’s where the “after” in “Drawing After Modernism” comes in.

The title is a bit of a cheat, albeit in a good way. Rudolph and Kahn aren’t just chronological outliers here, but also stylistic. One can quibble, or even quarrel, over where Late Modernism spills over into Postmodernism. But Rudolph and Kahn remain firmly on the pre-Postmodern side.

Not that there are any complaints about their presence in the show. Rudolph’s exactingly detailed perspective for his Callahan House, in Birmingham, Ala., and Kahn’s sketch for what would become his revered Salk Institute, in La Jolla, Calif., are among the most beautiful drawings in the show. Right up there are Arata Isozaki’s sketch for the Museum of Contemporary Art, in Los Angeles, and two Graves sketches for the San Juan Capistrano, Calif., public library. Both Graveses and the Isozaki were done in graphite and colored pencil and come from 1981.

This period has further significance in that it saw architectural drawings attain a new status. The MIT Museum began collecting them in the mid-’70s. That Castelli show marked the arrival of architectural drawings as a collectible by the art public. In 1978, Max Protetch founded his namesake New York gallery to exhibit architectural drawings. The inaugural Venice Biennale of Architecture took place in 1980.

Coincidence or no, affinities with the visual arts appear throughout the show. It’s more than just that Hadid acrylic. Rem Koolhaas’s gouache and ink on paper for the Villa dall’Ava, outside of Paris, has Edward Hopper lighting. Aldo Rossi’s none-too-serious proposal for a Venetian theater salutes Claes Oldenburg, with its giant Coca-Cola can, tin of Twinings tea, and pack of cigarettes (brand indiscernible). Saul Steinberg would have felt right at home sitting at Tigerman’s drawing table when the architect was coming up with designs for his playful “Architoons” series.

In a different category is James Wines’s never-executed “Highrise of Homes,” a 1981 ink and wash on paper for the firm SITE. It could be a prototype for the piled-up houses in Steven Spielberg’s 2018 film, “Ready Player One.”

The clearest indicator of the collectible status that architectural drawings attained is the Gehry lithograph. Visually, it’s an inky scribble of great verve. But the architect never intended its shake-and-bake lines to be translated into three dimensions. He drew them to be sold as a limited-edition print. So, yes, you can own a Frank Gehry, even if you can’t afford to live in one.

The lithograph’s scribble-ness gets at a third transformation in the profession, one posterior to the period covered in the show. By the turn of this century, computer-aided design had become common in architecture. This opened all kinds of new possibilities. Consider MIT’s Stata Center, a Gehry design, that’s a five-minute walk from the museum. It opened in 2004, the same year Gehry did the lithograph. What had for millennia seemed fanciful now became not just possible but executable. Even if not meant as a building design, per se, that scribble was more than just a doodle. Or could have been.

DRAWING AFTER MODERNISM

At MIT Museum, 314 Main St., Cambridge, through Oct. 27. 617-253-5927, mitmuseum.mit.edu

Read the original article here.

A New Exhibition at the MIT Museum Offers Nostalgia for Bygone Architectural Representation

A New Exhibition at the MIT Museum Offers Nostalgia for Bygone Architectural Representation

Architectural Record
Josephine Minutillo - April 30, 2024

Paul Rudolph (1918–1997), Callahan House, Perspective, 1965–1986, Birmingham, Alabama, graphite and colored pencil on paper. MIT Museum 2018.011.063. Gift of Danielle and Martin E. Zimmerman '59. © The Estate of Paul Rudolph, The Paul Rudolph Institute for Modern Architecture

Remember when architects made drawings? A new exhibition at the MIT Museum brings us back to a time when those works were considered a hot commodity. Tucked away in a small, upper-floor gallery, Drawing After Modernism is the first exhibition dedicated to architecture in the decades-old Cambridge, Massachusetts institution’s new space.

There are small, colorful drawings of the Teatro Veneziano—both from 1981 and unmistakably Aldo Rossi. There’s a larger line drawing by Paul Rudolph—a different set of initials next to his signature indicates he probably didn’t put all those lines down alone. A sketch for a store along Chicago’s Michigan Avenue by Robert A.M. Stern is more interesting for the dedication he wrote on it to Stanley Tigerman in 2000. Very eye-catching are the slick, airbrushed ink creations by Bernard Tschumi of his Parc de la Villette (1985). An obligatory Frank Gehry and a slew of Michael Graves are also on view.

“There was a latent anxiety about CAD in the 1980s,” says Jonathan Duval, assistant curator of architecture and design at the museum. “The architect as artist emerged as a way to emphasize, ‘I cannot be replaced.’” The works on display—whether in ink, graphite, colored pencil, or charcoal—are the kinds that commercial galleries, museums, and private collectors began buying in the 1980s at places such as Max Protetch in New York and Rhona Hoffman Gallery in Chicago. It became such a fad then that architects like Helmut Jahn began making lithographs in large series for sale—several of those are included in the show.

In total, the 41 objects, which also comprise an acrylic painting by Zaha Hadid, a collage by Rem Koolhaas, and a cardboard model by John Hejduk, all come from the collection of Martin E. (an MIT alum) and Danielle Zimmerman, which the couple gifted to the museum in 2017. Hailing from Chicago, the Zimmermans’s collection features many of the city’s luminaries including Jahn, Tigerman, Thomas Beeby, and Laurence Booth.

Visit the exhibition for a nostalgic trip back to another era, then wander around the rest of the museum for a decidedly different look at the present—where scientific breakthroughs, AI, and other ongoing innovations take center stage.

Drawing After Modernism is on view at the MIT Museum until October 27, 2024.

Read the original article here.

Still standing: Boston Government Service Center, 1971

Still standing: Boston Government Service Center, 1971

Architecture Today
Ian Volner - April 18, 2024

Photograph: The Paul Rudolph Institute for Modern Architecture.

The Reverend Doctor Keener Rudolph rode the Methodist preaching circuit in the southern United States for nearly 50 years, beginning just after the turn of the twentieth century and continuing through his marriage and the birth of his children, whom he thereafter brought with him from town to town. His youngest, Paul, would always remember his father’s commanding presence in the pulpit — and though he largely rejected religion in later life, it would seem that the son did absorb some of the old man’s convictions, however indirectly. “Often truths must be placed in paradoxes [that] the truths themselves may be revealed,” Reverend Rudolph wrote in one of his published sermons. It could almost stand as a motto for Paul Rudolph’s architectural career.

It has not necessarily made for universal popularity. The paradoxes of Paul Rudolph’s buildings are often tough to crack, and the truths that they reveal are not to everyone’s liking. His most important public commissions, mostly dating to the 1960s, could be typified as Brutalist – not everyone’s cup of tea to be sure, though even that movement enjoys a broader fanbase nowadays than Rudolph’s work, which often seems to preserve Brutalism’s self-seriousness while scrapping its lovable sci-fi eccentricity. But especially in his civic projects, Rudolph was after something different than his concrete contemporaries: not a vision of the urban future, but a visceral expression of the social present; not a machine for forging a new collective identity, but a very human crucible for individual, creative becoming. It’s strong stuff, and in the historic heart of old New England, he served it up with no chaser.

Begun in 1963, and completed eight years later, the Boston Government Service Center is actually two structures, the Charles F Hurley Building and its attached pendant, the Erich Lindemann Building. One could be forgiven for not noticing the distinction: as seen from what is nominally the primary entrance, on its eastern side, the complex presents an unbroken ring of concrete and glass, looming in stepped terraces around a vast interior plaza. Only in navigating the perimeter of the wedge-shaped site, along busy Staniford and Merrimac Streets, does the true nature of the scheme become clear, and with it the distinction between its various components – Hurley, at the southern tip of the C-shaped plan, meets the city with an almost classical façade of regular piers and glazed intercolumnations, while Lindemann to the north presents a dizzying pattern of external staircases, topped by a profusion of sculptural ventilation towers. Clad in Rudolph’s signature corduroy-ribbed concrete, the whole building feels hairy, ornery, a big wild beast squatting in the middle of polite, Hahvard-accented Beantown.

In fact, it was nearly wilder. In his original proposal, Rudolph called for a massive tower near one side of the plaza; the plaza itself was to have been a nautilus- like curl of steps ranged around the high-rise, tricked out with banners and shrubs and vari-textured pavings. As it is, the complex is somewhat less elaborate, though also more confusing than Rudolph intended – and is destined to become only more so: in 1998, the Edward R Brooke Courthouse was added in place of the tower, a rather sedate affair that closes off one side of the courtyard; just a year and a half ago, after the Rudolph portion was threatened with demolition, it was announced that a pending renovation would preserve the existing buildings while adding a series of new, rather more conservative towers on top of Hurley. It was never easy to understand quite what the architect was intending to communicate before, and it’s unlikely to get any easier.

Just the same, the fact that the building is being preserved at all has to be reckoned a huge win: all too often, Rudolph’s high-maintenance public buildings have been dismissed as unworkable, with many succumbing to the wrecking ball in recent years. And though the message it conveys may be garbled, the Government Service Center contains the Rudolphian spirit in one of its purest forms – and certainly at one of its grandest scales.

“Buildings are like people,” Rudolph himself once said. “They can be honest or not so honest.” In his early houses in Florida; at his celebrated Yale School of Architecture in New Haven; as, in a different way, in his late skyscraper projects in East Asia, long after his star in the United States had dimmed: at every stage of his career, Paul Rudolph practiced an unusual variety of honesty, speaking to more than mere architectural truth. A conventional Brutalist might have used raw concrete as a signpost for material candour – a celebration of the building’s actual substance – but those long expanses of bush-hammered roughness in Boston are too theatrical, too emotive for that. A structural purist might have forgone all those trimmings and furbelows – the ovular projections, the crisscrossing walkways – but Rudolph makes a meal out of every projecting volume, every sectional collision. In a building that appears to be frank, confrontational even, almost everything is a kind of gamesmanship. A paradox, in other words, of the very kind Reverend Rudolph long prescribed.

What is the truth embedded in this particular paradox? Certainly, against the background of the Vietnam War, political assassinations, the promise of the Great Society and of the civil rights movement, it’s hard not to see the building as reflecting the fraught American prospect after mid-century, a heroic yet terrifying cri de coeur. There’s something too of urban critique: in the modern technocratic city, Rudolph gives us a monument to funkiness – a stubborn, solipsistic kick right to the bureaucratic solar plexus. But most of all, it might be just that the paradox itself is the truth. Rudolph was a secretive man; even to his intimates, he spoke rarely of himself or of his past. For the government of one of America’s oldest cities, at the height of his renown, the designer made one of his largest public projects into one of his most confounding architectural statements. That may tell us all we need to know.

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Architectural Posters as Works of Art

Architectural Posters as Works of Art

World-Architects.com
John Hill - March 11, 2024

Designing Decades: Architectural Poster Art (1972-1982) is on display at the Modulightor Building, the New York City home of the Paul Rudolph Institute for Modern Architecture, until April 7, 2024. Drawn from the collection of architect Judith York Newman, owner of SPACED Gallery of Architecture, the exhibition features forty posters that served as announcements for architectural exhibitions, lectures, and other events. Here we present a selection of the posters on display.

Although Judith York Newman is not as familiar a name as Max Protetch and Leo Castelli, fellow gallerists who held architectural shows in New York City in the 1970s and 80s, SPACED Gallery of Architecture, established in 1976, is notable as the first gallery in the city devoted to architecture. Unlike Protetch and Castelli, who were dealers of art with occasional shows of architecture, Newman was educated as an architect (at Cornell University) and worked as an architect as well as an educator and editor, all within the realm of architecture. Therefore SPACED, as the name implies, focused exclusively on representations of architecture, presenting prints, drawings, photographs, and models on architects and buildings over more than 40 years (the latest show was held in fall 2019).

While Designing Decades: Architectural Poster Art (1972-1982) is not limited to posters for shows that were held at SPACED, theirs are some of the first posters visitors encounter when stopping off the elevator on the fifth floor of the Rudolph Institute's Modulightor Building. Notable among them is Architectural America (at top), an early show in 1976 that was advertised with text literally cut and pasted atop an image of Jasper Johns' Three Flags (1958). Just as the literature for Designing Decades describes its contents as encapsulating “a pivotal moment in time before the internet age,” the collage of text on art in this poster — clearly visible in the original on display behind glass — captures the techniques of those pre-Photoshop days.

Other posters from SPACED on display at include, among others, a few by illustrator David Macaulay, clearly a favorite of Newman's, and one from a 1977 exhibition of the drawings of Lebbeus Woods. Posters from other venues span from the Grand Palais and Centre Pompidou, both in Paris, and the RIBA Heinz Gallery in London, to the Institute of Architecture and Urban Studies (IAUS) and Brooklyn Museum, both in New York City. The last venue staged Women in American Architecture, the influential exhibition organized by The Architectural League of New York in 1977. It presence in Designing Decades comes in the form of the text-heavy “Historic Chart Relating Architectural Projects to General and Women's History in the United States,” revealing that, while many posters opted for striking graphics to hook people, some served as vehicles of disseminating information beyond the confines of their exhibitions.

Designing Decades is spread across the fifth and sixth floors of Modulightor, the building Paul Rudolph designed for the lighting company of the same name in the early 1990s. The fifth and sixth floors were added after Rudolph's death in 1997 but were based on extant designs by the famed architect. As such, a visit to the exhibition is recommended as much to see inside the Rudolph building as for seeing the posters on display. If anything, the posters hung across the two floors have a hard time competing with the architectural complexity of the spaces. Nevertheless, Newman and the Rudolph Institute did a good job of placing the posters in sometimes unexpected places — at stair landings, for instance — turning the posters also into invitations to explore Rudolph's interiors.

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Paul Rudolph’s Blue Cross - Blue Shield building declared local landmark by Boston Landmarks Commission

Paul Rudolph’s Blue Cross - Blue Shield building declared local landmark by Boston Landmarks Commission

The Archinect’s Newspaper
Daniel Roche - March 08, 2024

The Boston Landmarks Commission has unanimously voted to declare the Blue Cross – Blue Shield building by Paul Rudolph a local landmark. The announcement comes after years of preservation advocacy to save the Brutalist building, a campaign which started in 2006.

Blue Cross – Blue Shield is a 13-story, 120,000-square-foot concrete tower located at 133 Federal Street in downtown Boston, completed in 1960. It is one of three buildings by Paul Rudolph in the city of Boston, and was the architect’s first tall building.

The Brutalist tower is known for its Y-shaped, precast-concrete piers; columns made of large white quartz aggregate; and a novel HVAC system that’s hidden within non-load bearing columns. Rudolph wanted the building’s opacity and heaviness to challenge the rampant construction of glass curtain wall buildings happening in cities around the U.S.

Rudolph’s project at 133 Federal Street was one of the first new ground-up building in Boston’s central business district since the 1920s, marking a turning point in the city’s history after years of economic stagnation. It was also one of Boston’s first Brutalist buildings. In 1975, Sasaki renovated the tower’s ground level to accommodate a new bank. Its basement-level had numerous uses over the years, including an art gallery.

In 2006, then-Boston Mayor Thomas Menino (who was certainly no fan of Brutalist architecture) proposed demolishing Rudolph’s Blue Cross – Blue Shield building for a new, 75-story “iconic tower” by Renzo Piano. But once preservationists caught wind of the proposition, they took action and requested a 90-day stay of demolition to determine if Blue Cross – Blue Shield is historically significant enough to merit preservation.

The 2007–8 recession then stymied commercial demand for the Piano tower, so demolition plans for Blue Cross – Blue Shield were shelved. After, the Boston Landmarks Commission identified the Blue Cross – Blue Shield building in 2009 as eligible for inclusion on the National Register of Historic Places, which opened up the opportunity for a landmark status petition with the city of Boston.

Once the economy bounced back, the Boston Redevelopment Authority (BRA) revisited plans to develop the site. The BRA issued an RFP which drew five responses, one of them from Trans National Properties who proposed demolishing Blue Cross – Blue Shield for a twin-tower construction project, in-sync with another development site at 115 Winthrop Square. That project looked like it would come to fruition until it was stopped in 2017.

Flash forward to November 2023, the Boston Landmarks Commission published a study report on Blue Cross – Blue Shield’s proposed designation as a Landmark under Chapter 772 of the Acts of 1975.

The announcement to landmark this Rudolph building comes a few months after another decision by Boston city officials to recommend landmarking another Brutalist building, Boston City Hall by Gerhard Kallmann and Michael McKinnell.

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Vintage architectural posters from 1970s–80s to be exhibited by Paul Rudolph Institute and SPACED Gallery of Architecture

Vintage architectural posters from 1970s–80s to be exhibited by Paul Rudolph Institute and SPACED Gallery of Architecture

Archinect
Niall Patrick Walsh - March 01, 2024

The Paul Rudolph Institute for Modern Architecture is to present an exhibition centered on the design of architectural poster art. Titled Designing Decades: Architectural Poster Art (1972–1982) and organized in collaboration with SPACED Gallery of Architecture, the pieces on display are curated from the private collection of Judith York Newman, the American architect, educator, and owner of SPACED.  

The subject posters, sourced from around the world, originally served as announcements for architectural exhibitions, lectures, and commemorative events. Educational institutions associated with the posters include Cornell, Columbia, and Yale, while other organizations involved in the commission of the original posters include RIBA Heinz, Centre Pompidou, and the Smithsonian.

In their entirety, the posters highlight an “era of diverse stylistic expressions of architects and institutions, and collectively accentuate the experimental design choices of the 1970s–80s,” organizers say. The exhibition is also intended to serve as a testament to Newman’s own longstanding commitment to the intersection of art and architecture.

“Prior to the internet, they were an important and sometimes sole source for information about location, opening times, and special events,” Newman said about the exhibition. “This selection of 40 works not only serves as a retrospective survey of graphic design but also encapsulates a pivotal moment in time before the internet age.”

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10 must-see architecture and design events to check out this March

10 must-see architecture and design events to check out this March

Archinect
Alexander Walter - March 01, 2024

The month of March spoils the architecture and design community with another plethora of exciting events: No matter if you're drawn to festivals, new exhibitions, trade shows, symposia, or academic conferences — we've got you covered.

From the roster of ongoing and upcoming events listed on Bustler, here is our curated selection of recommendations worth checking out.

UPCOMING EVENTS

Open House Miami | March 1–2, Miami

Kicking off the new month in style is Miami Beach, which hosts the inaugural edition of Open House Miami. Free and open to the public, the two-day festival offers access to more than 50 individual experiences in 15 different neighborhoods.

Tropical Modernism: Architecture and Independence | March 2 – September 22, London

London’s Victoria and Albert Museum will open a new exhibition on the topic of Tropical Modernism in British West Africa in the late 1940s, detailing the style's colonial roots and its legacy in the post-colonial period.

Designing Decades: Architectural Poster Art (1972–1982) | March 7 – April 7, New York City

Another exhibition on a fascinating period of architectural history opens to the public in NYC: Organized by the Paul Rudolph Institute for Modern Architecture and SPACED Gallery of Architecture, Designing Decades presents vintage poster art, which once announced architectural exhibitions, lectures, and commemorative events.

SXSW 2024 | March 8–16, Austin

Is it a conference? Is it a festival? It's South by Southwest! Returning to Austin for the 37th year, the upcoming SXSW offers a packed schedule of events and keynotes for creatives and designers. 

In Focus: Research | March 16, London

The Design Museum in London will host the 2024 In Focus: Research symposium in mid-March. Organized by The World Around and Future Observatory, the event boasts an impressive lineup of speakers. Can't make it in person? Join via the live stream.

Architect@Work London 2024 | March 20–21, London

While in London, why not stick around for this year's edition of the two-day Architect@Work trade event at the Truman Brewery, presented under the theme "FOCUS: People + Planet: designing from the ground up."

ONGOING EVENTS

Frank Gehry: Ruminations | Until April 6, New York City

If you're in Manhattan this month, stop by the Gagosian on Madison Avenue to see Frank Gehry's current show Ruminations, featuring the architect's latest works in sculpture and on paper.

CFA Lab: Seeking Refuge and Making Home in NYC | Until March 23, New York City

Also in New York, the work of the Center for Architecture Lab's 2023 residents Kholisile Dhliwayo, A.L. Hu, and Karla Andrea Pérez is still on display until March 23rd, examining the idea of "Home."

Copenhagen Architecture Festival: FOODSCAPES – By Eating We Digest Territories | Until April 26, Copenhagen

And should you find yourself in Copenhagen this spring, make sure to stop by FOODSCAPES, a new exhibition presented by CAFx on the "overlooked architecture of our food systems."

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Landmarks Designates Two Modern Buildings as Final Designations for 2023

Landmarks Designates Two Modern Buildings as Final Designations for 2023

Cityland
Veronica Rose - January 03, 2024

On December 19, 2023, the Landmarks Preservation Commission voted to designate two buildings as individual landmarks. The Barkin, Levin & Company Office Pavilion in Queens and the Modulightor Building in Manhattan, were the final designations of 2023. 

The Barker, Levin & Company Office Pavilion is located at 12-12 33rd Avenue in Long Island City and was designed in 1957 by Ulrich Franzen. The building is a great example of mid-20th century commercial architecture; the minimalist pavilion sits on a small, landscaped parcel consisting of low brick walls, concrete walkways and grass laws. The pavilion features nine steel pillars supporting an umbrella-like ceiling that extend past the building’s glass walls to provide extra shade. The facility was originally constructed as a manufacturing facility for women’s coats which included all stages of production.

The Modulightor Building is located at 246 East 58th Street in Manhattan and was designed by Paul Rudolph in 1989. The building was constructed in two phases on a 20-foot wide lot, with the first phase completed in 1993 four years before Rudolph’s death, and the remainder completed in 2018 under architect Mark Squeo. The building’s front and rear elevations consist of overlapping vertical and horizontal rectangles. The building features a multi-level roof terrace and three cantilevered steel balconies facing a rear patio. The building is named after the architectural lighting company Rudolph founded in 1976. Rudolph was known for his modern sculptural aesthetic featuring industrial materials like steel and concrete. The building features ground floor commercial space, and an expanded duplex apartment, which is occupied by the Paul Rudolph Institute for Modern Architecture. 

Landmarks Chair Sarah Carroll stated, “New York City’s streetscape has always served as a canvas for some of the world’s most creative minds, and the buildings designated today highlight two exceptionally innovative designs by internationally prominent modern architects, one at the start of his career, and the other towards the end of it. I’m pleased that the Commission has chosen to recognize these modern architectural gems, and grateful that they’ll be preserved for future generations to come.” 

By: Veronica Rose (Veronica is the Editor of CityLand and a New York Law School graduate, Class of 2018.)

Read the original article here.

Preservation stories that had AN editors buzzing in 2023

Preservation stories that had AN editors buzzing in 2023

The Architect’s Newspaper
Kristine Klein - December 21, 2023

Demolitions. Designations. Decorations. Preservation stories always excite AN readers who often rally around projects by eminent architects slated for the wrecking ball or praise expertly restored ones. This year was no exception. We saw history years-in-the-making play out as several imperiled buildings faced an unfortunate fate, while elsewhere the future of others hang in limbo.

A number of office-to-residential projects mark a shift toward the reuse of buildings, a trend taking hold in cities across the country. From a project to restore the town of a Willie Nelson movie set to a proposed change to move a door 19 inches at a Paul Rudolph–designed townhouse, here are the preservation stories AN covered this year that kept editors and readers on edge.

New York City Planning Commission voted to allow renovation of 60 Wall Street’s postmodern lobby

The beloved 1989 postmodern lobby by Kevin Roche and John Dinkeloo at 60 Wall Street has been a topic of conservation among New York preservation circles for the last few years. In August the city’s planning commission decision to renovate the exquisite example of postmodern design was again met with chagrin by the architecture and preservation community. AN spoke with Docomomo U.S. executive director Liz Waytkus, architecture critic Alexander Lange, and architect Robert M. Stern following the news. Each recalled their disappointment to not maintain the public space, even going on to say more could be done to save it and more emphasis could be placed on the study of postmodern architecture.

SOM’s Baxter International suburban office park lives on

In January, Baxter announced plans to sell its SOM-designed office campus in Deerfield, Illinois , citing supply chain congestion, rising costs, and poor financial performance. The company planned to sell the 101-acre office park to Bridge Industrial with plans to demolish the complex and replace it with a 1.3-million-square-foot warehouse and shipping hub. After much public resistance, primarily from local residents, Bridge withdrew their plans to redevelop the office park in June.

SOM architect Richard Tomlinson believes the Baxter campus’s modular flexibility makes it an ideal candidate for adaptive reuse. And so the suburban behemoth of rectilinear structure connected by skywalks and underground tunnels lives on.

Chicago Tribune Tower converted to residential use

Elsewhere in Chicago another preservation win is the renovation of the storied Tribune Tower. One of several office-to-residential adaptive reuse projects taking hold in the city, the Tribune Tower, first conceived as part of a design competition in 1922, now has a residential purpose. Solomon Cordwell Buenz (SCB) led the redesign, which converted offices into 162 units and 55,000 square feet of amenity space.

The firm maintained as much of the original infrastructure as possible while making minimal interventions. From the outside of the tower not much has changed, with much of the renovation concentred to the interiors where vital infrastructure was updated to make way for new retail spaces and the host of new residential amenity spaces.

In Detroit, ODA converted a historic office tower to hotel and residential use

The office-to-residential pipeline is thriving. In addition to the Tribune Tower, a landmark building in Detroit also underwent a major conversion. Headed by New York–based ODA Architecture, Detroit’s Book Tower has been converted into a hotel, residences, restaurants, and retail.

Restoration was a tedious process that involved preserving the building’s masonry facade, while maintaining the historical integrity of the interiors. A major component, and crowning achievement, of the project was the restoration of the glass skylit atrium. Restoring the glass was akin to piecing together a puzzle. While some glazed elements were cleaned and preserved, others were remade to match speculated versions of what was once there.

Demolition of the Gyo Obata restaurant pavilion made way for the new Bezos Learning Center

The year started out with sadly anticipated demolition of architect Gyo Obata’s glass restaurant pavilion on the National Mall in Washington, D.C. A job designed to make way for the $130 million Bezos Learning Center is slated for construction on the site.

The pyramid-shaped pavilion was built to accommodate school groups and other museum visitors and had been closed since 2017. This year the Smithsonian, who is behind the planned Bezos Learning Center, announced Perkins&Will will design the new structure following five proposals announced in 2022. According to a press release the firm was chosen for its “ample experience designing cultural and education spaces, the composition and credentials of its management team, and the strength of the team’s aesthetic approach.”

An old western town built as a set for a Willie Nelson film was restored

In a change from the traditional preservation stories AN covers was news that the town of Luck, Texas, designed by Willie Nelson for the film he produced and starred in Red Headed Stranger, has been restored. The Old West town, complete with a dirt road street, wood buildings, and a saloon, was restored by architects from Cushing Terrell. The film set will now serve as a performing arts and hospitality venue for up to 4,000 guests.

While the buildings themselves were not historic, the architects adopted a light touch approach and treated them as if they were; this involved staying true to the architecture, and keeping the wood material and trusses present throughout.

LPC ruled the entry of a Paul Rudolph–designed home cannot be moved back by 19 inches

Other fun preservation news this year came out of a Landmark Preservation Commission hearing in New York City over a Paul Rudolph–designed townhouse on the Upper East Side, owned by Tom Ford. The modern townhouse at 101 East 63rd Street occupies the footprint of a former carriage house designed in 1881, later redesigned by Rudolph in 1966.

Trash, loitering, and vagrancy outside the residence led the current residents to commission Steven Blatz Architects to redesign the entryway. A proposal presented to the LPC sought to move the recessed doorway out by 19 inches—a change that would reduce the distance from the door to the property line from four feet to two-and-a-half feet. Other changes included making alterations to the soffit.

The proposals were turned down by the commission. Preservationists and the community spoke out in defense of the planes, light, and shadows that define the existing structure. One commissioner brought up that if the residence was occupied more frequently the aforementioned issues would be, well, less of an issue.

Sotheby’s purchased the fabled Breuer Building

Tenancy of the Breuer Building near Manhattan’s Museum Mile has changed hands a number of times in recent years. In June 2023 the global auction house Sotheby’s announced it would purchase the building. The building was first conceived as a storage facility for The Whitney Museum of American Art in 1966. It was later sold to The Met, and following that the Frick used it for a time.

When Sotheby’s occupies the building fully in 2025 it will make the former museum and art facility its main headquarters, relocating its gallery spaces, auction room, and offices from its current location at 1334 York Avenue.

Read the original article here.

Modernist structures by Paul Rudolph and Ulrich Franzen are New York City’s newest landmarks

Modernist structures by Paul Rudolph and Ulrich Franzen are New York City’s newest landmarks

The Architect’s Newspaper
Edward Gunts - December 21, 2023

After several Modernist buildings by Paul Rudolph have fallen to the wrecking ball or been substantially altered, 2023 is ending with one of the last buildings he designed gaining protection as a public landmark.

The New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission (LPC) on Tuesday voted unanimously to designate Rudolph’s Modulightor Building an individual city landmark. The commission also voted to designate a one-story structure by Ulrich Franzen: the Barkin, Levin & Company Office Pavilion in Long Island City. The designations protect both buildings from changes to their exteriors, including demolition. Any proposed changes will have to be reviewed and approved by LPC before the city issues a construction permit.

Located at 246 East 58th Street in Manhattan, the Modulightor Building is one of just a few structures Rudolph designed in Manhattan, where he moved at the height of his career in the mid-1960s. A six-story, multi-purpose structure that replaced a row house dating from the 1860s, it takes its name from an architectural lighting company that Rudolph founded in 1976 with Ernst Wagner, featuring customizable light fixtures and systems.

The Modulightor Building is the only publicly accessible structure in New York designed by Rudolph, who died in 1997. Constructed in two phases starting in 1989, it contains a ground floor commercial space that serves as a showroom for Modulightor. Its upper levels are occupied by the Paul Rudolph Institute for Modern Architecture. Other Rudolph-designed buildings in Manhattan are 23 Beekman Place, where Rudolph lived for many years, and the Halston house at 101 East 63rd Street, a private residence owned by designer Tom Ford—both already designated as landmarks.

The lower four floors of the Modulightor Building were designed by Rudolph and completed in 1993, four years before his death in 1997. The upper two floors and a roof deck were added by architect Mark Squeo between 2010 and 2016, using Rudolph’s preliminary drawings for a six-story structure on the site.

In recent years, several of the Rudolph’s buildings have been demolished or significantly altered. The list includes Burroughs Wellcome headquarters in North Carolina and his Shoreline Apartments in Buffalo, New York.

This week’s LPC designation and possible landmark designation in Boston of Rudolph’s 12-story Blue Cross/Blue Shield Building at 133 Federal Street come as more positive developments to those who admire his work. At the request of the building’s owner, commissioners agreed to extend the public comment period to December 27 before taking action.

“This is a great designation partly because there are fewer and fewer Rudolph buildings around and he’s an undeniably important mid-century-and-later architect in the U. S.,” said LPC commission vice chair Frederick Bland.

“During his lifetime, Rudolph wished our residence at 23 Beekman Place would become a study and resource center for the architectural community,” Wagner said in a statement. “When that didn’t happen, I promised him that I’d use the Modulightor building to fulfill his wish and then created the Paul Rudolph Institute for Modern Architecture. It is fitting that the Modulightor building – designed by and dedicated to Paul Rudolph – will be preserved as a living example of his genius. Thank you to the Landmarks Preservation Commission for ensuring future generations will get to experience and learn from his work.”

LPC’s hearing on December 19 also designated the Barkin Levin Company Office Pavilion in Long Island City, one of the first projects Ulrich Franzen completed after starting his own office. Constructed in 1957 and 1958 as part of a factory complex in Queens, it was described by the landmarks commission as “a distinguished example of mid-20th century commercial architecture, a graceful minimalist building set on a small, landscaped parcel of land and enclosed by low brick walls, concrete walkways, and grass lawns.”

“It’s no coincidence that you brought them both together because they’re of the same period and these two architects were in fact contemporaries and knew each other,” said LPC commissioner Jean Lutfy of the two buildings. “The other interesting thing is that both of these projects are aberrations from their Brutalist style, so they’re a little more refined and they’re definitely more an expression of what was going on at this particular time….I think we’re so fortunate to sort of capture them and preserve them and recognize them, and I’m so happy to be part of that process.”

Read the original article here.