Presentation model of Paul Rudolph’s 1967 project for the Graphic Arts Center, New York City. © the estate of Paul Rudolph, The Paul Rudolph Heritage Foundation
Paul Rudolph’s 1967 project, the Graphic Arts Center, was a proposal for a megastructure, commissioned by the Amalgamated Lithographers Guild of America whose purpose was to house thousands of residents—and also connect them to business, civic, educational, and recreational facilities within the complex. This was all contained in a network of towers and lower-rise connected structures.
This Hudson-adjacent design for Manhattan’s Pier 25 was to be formed of individual prefabricated units, each manufactured off-site and then inserted into structural cores that formed the backbones of the complex. Floors and ceilings could be removed and reoriented to accommodate the variety of needs required by the residents and workers, and walls could be inserted or taken down to form double or triple apartments. Rudolph wanted to maximize the customizability of the spaces (yet make them with the industrial efficiency of the manufactured mobile home)—and he thought of such units as “the 20th century brick.”
Like some of Rudolph’s most ambitious projects, the Graphic Arts Center is unbuilt. The estimated costs (roughly $280,000,000 in 1967—or approximately $2,170,000 in 2020 dollars) seemed too daunting to its investors, and a prefabricated project of such magnitude had never been actualized in such a turbulent city like New York. Also, a powerful factor, in its un-consummation, was that unions allied with the Lithographers Guild were not pleased with its proposed construction systems, which would have largely dispensed with their labor (instead, manufacturing the components in out-of-state factories.) Rudolph nonetheless remained hopeful, as seen in a 1968 interview with The Daily Telegraph in which he said “As sure as I’m sitting here, it will be built somewhere.”
The ideals and ideas of the Graphic Arts Center did not die. Kisho Kurokawa’s 1970 Nakagin Capsule Tower in Tokyo—a paragon of the Japanese Metabolist movement—utilizes similar concepts of prefab construction, portability, and compartmentalization of functions and units. The major difference between the two, beyond the smaller scale of the Nakagin Capsule Tower, is that the Tokyo tower was actually constructed (and there is minimal diversity among the residential units.) Even so, the building is essentially a microcosm of the Graphic Arts Center, but focusing solely on the residential potential of the plug-and-live approach of architecture that Rudolph had been exploring years before. [Unfortunately, this landmark of Modernism has fallen into decay, and its future is uncertain—with the possibility of demolition having been raised.]
Kisho Kurokawa’s Nakagin Capsule Tower, Tokyo, Japan. Prefabricated units, similar-in-concept to those that Rudolph hoped to use in the Graphic Arts Center, are on display in all their stackable, angular, lego-like glory. Image: JordyMeow
An extremely rare monograph or Kurokawa’s 60’s work—“Capsule, Metabolism, Spaceframe, Metamorphose”—is in Rudolph’s library (residing in the Modulightor building in New York.) Included in the book is a 7” phonograph record, entitled “Music for Living Space” which was played in a Kurokawa-designed pavilion at Expo ‘70 in Osaka, Japan. It can be listened to here.
A monograph on Kikutake’s works in architecture: “Kiyonori Kikutake – Between Land and Sea”, has been published by Lars Muller. The above spread is from the chapter, “Ocean Urbanism”, which includes his project for Marine City.
Paul Rudolph’s perspective rendering of The Colonnade—his 1980 design for a residential condominium, which was built in Singapore. In the spirit of the themes he explored in his design for the Graphic Arts Center, Rudolph’s intention here was that the apartment units would be separately fabricated, then brought to the site, and “plugged in” to the vertical structure. [But, for technical reasons, the building had to be constructed with more conventional methods.] © the estate of Paul Rudolph, The Paul Rudolph Heritage Foundation
Rudolph had been aware of the basic tenets of the Metabolist movement from its inception, whose members grounded their designs in megastructural networks complemented by natural patterns of biological growth. Along with fellow architects Alison and Peter Smithson and Louis Kahn (and other distinguished practitioners from around-the-world), he was present at the 1960 World Design Conference in Tokyo, where the ideas of the Metabolists were first announced. Rudolph even proposed to Arthur Drexler, then curator of the Museum of Modern Art’s Art and Architecture department, that Kiyonori Kikutake’s Metabolist Marine City be included in the 1960 exhibition Visionary Architecture. That exhibition introduced the ideas of the Metabolists to the United States. Like the Graphic Arts Center, Kikutake’s Marine City is constructed of tower cores and plug-in residences set atop artificial landmasses—and the visual parallels shared by the works of the two architects are almost uncanny.
When viewed in this Metabolist context, Paul Rudolph’s Graphic Arts Center forms an extension of architectural thought that Rudolph had championed years before, and continued to internalize and project throughout the rest of his career.