The front of the Paul Rudolph-designed MODULIGHTOR BUILDING—a site much visited during the 2019 OPEN HOUSE NEW YORK weekend. Photograph © Joe Polowczuk, the Archives of the Paul Rudolph Heritage Foundation.
This last weekend--October 19th & 20th--the MODULIGHTOR BUILDING was a hot spot to visit during OPEN HOUSE NEW YORK.
OHNY is the annual NYC event when spaces throughout city—many of them not normally available for public visits—are opened to all. In 16 years (OHNY started in 2003) it has grown to a city-wide phenomenon, now with over 300 sites open across New York's 5 boroughs.
A sample page, from Open House New York’s website, showing a small portion of the over 300 sites that were visitable during OHNY’s 2019 weekend.—and this page includes the MODULIGHTOR BUILDING. OHNY sites span all of New York City’s five boroughs.
Paul Rudolph's MODULIGHTOR BUILDING has been a participant for most of that time, and this year we had over a thousand visitors—experiencing our Rudolph-designed building (inside and out), and learning about Paul Rudolph’s life and prolific career.
OHNY visitors entered through the building’s street-level MODULIGHTOR showroom—a space designed by Paul Rudolph. The architect was obsessed by light—natural and artificial—and co-founded the Modulightor Company to create fixtures which gave designers more flexible options. The triple-tier chandelier (at the upper-left in this view) is an example of an original Rudolph design.
Paul Rudolph’s career spanned a half-century, and was highly prolific—with over 300 projects to his credit. The top floor of the building featured an exhibit on Rudolph’s life and work. and included renderings, objects, plans, models, and original drawings by the architect.
Last year, for Rudolph's centenary, we created an exhibit here, which included models, original drawings, artifacts, and personal memorabilia from the collection of the Paul Rudolph Heritage Foundation. For this year’s hundreds of OHNY visitors, we re-mounted part of that show, and added newly acquired items (including some significant drawings by Rudolph) which were recently donated to us.
The Paul Rudolph Heritage Foundation’s Seth Weine (left) speaks with a visitor during OHNY weekend. They’re standing in the section of the exhibition devoted to Rudolph’s Beekman Place residence—and at a table filled with publications and artifacts from the library and archive of the Foundation.
One of the most popular parts of the show was that visitors could try-out chairs which Paul Rudolph had designed for his own use. Ever a creative force, when Rudolph needed furniture for his own home, he designed it himself--and OHNY visitors had fun trying Rudolph's unique designs. Rudolph's designs for a dining chair and a lounge chair can seem "challenging" to sit on--they look like floating planes of crystal---but visitors were surprised by how comfortable they were.
The Dining Chair, which Rudolph designed for his own NYC home on Beekman Place.
The Lounge Chair, also designed by Paul Rudolph for his home—a lower, wider version of the Dining Chair.
Dramatically positioned, on a platform over the staircase, is a model of Rudolph’s own home at 23 Beekman Place. Visitors seemed especially responsive to architectural models (especially examples like this, where a wall is “cut away” so that one can see the interiors)—and the Paul Rudolph Heritage Foundation had commissioned several for the exhibit.
Rudolph's 101st birthday is coming up (this week: October 23rd). So it was fitting that, as Rudolph's work enters another century of life, he was newly introduced to a over a thousand new pairs of eyes---via OHNY weekend!
On the second day of OHNY weekend, the latter half was rainy—but that did not stop a continuous stream of visitors from arriving. Some even stopped across the street to get a better view of the Paul Rudolph-designed facade of the MODULIGHTOR BUILDING.