A screen shot from “A Daily Dose of Architecture Books”: it’s the heading of their page devoted to a review of the pair of catalogs from the Paul Rudolph centennial exhibitions. published by the Paul Rudolph Heritage Foundation.
A Daily Dose of Architecture Books (“aDAB” to its friends) is a near-daily issued set of reviews of books on architecture, design, and urbanism.
Architects and designers love books—just about every architect we’ve ever met is a bibliomaniac—and the creator of aDAB is offering a most useful service to the design community. One can subscribe to it for free, and—everyday—you’ll find in your mailbox a review of a book you’ll probably want to know about. Moreover, aDAB shows a selection of pages from the volume under review—often of spreads from the actual open book—so one gets a real sense of what the book looks and feels like.
In addition to giving a description and assessment of the books it is reviewing, aDAB shows some pages from the book—often shots of actual page spreads. Here are some aDAB showed from their review of the pair of catalogs celebrating Paul Rudolph’s centennial.
The discerning proprietor of aDAB is John Hill—every review is by him. He is a registered architect who now devotes his time to writing about architecture and giving architectural walking tours. His blog, A Daily Dose of Architecture Books, started in 1999 as A Weekly Dose of Architecture, and took on its current incarnation 20 years later. He is the author of five books, the first as well as the most recent ones both devoted to architecture in New York City: Guide to Contemporary New York City Architecture and NYC Walks: Guide to New Architecture. He is editor-in-chief of the online magazine at World-Architects.com. On many weekends he gives walking tours in NYC. You can see his extensive list of books, articles, essays and interviews here.
2018 was the centenary of Paul Rudolph—he was born in 1918—and the Paul Rudolph Heritage Foundation sponsored two exhibits devoted to his life and work: Paul Rudolph: The Personal Laboratory (which focused on the living and working spaces which Rudolph created for himself), and Paul Rudolph: The Hong Kong Journey (which focused on the work he did in Hong Kong, during the last phase of his career when he was receiving many commissions in Asia). A pair of catalogs were published in association with these exhibits—and we are delighted that aDAB chose to review them.
Here are some excerpts from the review:
The Personal Laboratory volume presents drawings, photographs, and descriptions on four places where Rudolph lived and/or worked. The first is the Residence at 31 High Street in New Haven, the Connecticut city that is famously home to Yale University and his masterpiece, the Art & Architecture Building (now Rudolph Hall). The other three are all in New York City: his first apartment at 23 Beekman Place, the four-story duplex apartment he added at the same address, and of course the nearby Modulightor Building. In these pages, documentation of 23 Beekman Place is best…
Accompanying those projects are some words from Ernst Wagner, his friend, business partner, and founder of the Foundation, as well as archival texts by Peter Blake, Michael Sorkin, Stanley Tigerman, and others.
Sorkin's long poem, delivered at Harvard GSD in 1993 when Rudolph was being honored, describes Hong Kong as "bristling pairs," referring to Bond Centre (now Lippo Centre) from the 1980s, which is documented at length in The Hong Kong Journey. With lots of drawings — many of them yellow-trace sketches — not available on the Foundation website, this volume should be valuable to fans of Rudolph's late work, which was more glass than concrete at Bond Centre but still exhibited his skillful manipulation of form.Accompanying the documentation of Bond and a few other Hong Kong projects that were not built is an essay by Nora Leung, who worked with Rudolph on those projects and curated the exhibition at the Center for Architecture. Having missed that exhibition last year, it's a treat to look at the drawings of Bond, which move from plans to large-scale details.
We thank aDAB, and Mr. Hill, for this review. We were already fans of A Daily Dose of Architecture Books—and this review is helping in our mission to have the architectural community to know more about the work of Paul Rudolph.
And finally….
Is there an architect in your life? Or maybe you love architecture, history, and Paul Rudolph’s work as much as we do. If either of these is the case, then this is the gift for your friends - AND we won’t tell anyone if you chose to get one for yourself at the same time! You can purchase a set of the exhibit catalogs on our website here.