Learn about the Kickstarter Campaign for the book that takes a fresh look at Paul Rudolph’s partially-realized project for a dynamic, mixed-use neighborhood in Buffalo: SHORELINE
SHORELINE: RUDOLPH’S VISION OF DIGNIFIED HOUSING
Paul Rudolph was a master of architectural perspective drawing—and this is his rendering of a portion of his vison for the Shoreline Apartments development. © The Estate of Paul Rudolph, The Paul Rudolph Heritage Foundation
Located steps from Buffalo, NY’s City Hall, Shoreline Apartments was an extensive housing complex designed by Paul Rudolph and completed in 1974. Featuring shed roofs, ribbed concrete exteriors, projecting balconies, and enclosed garden courts, the project combined Rudolph’s spatial radicalism with his innovative designs for human-scaled, high-density housing and a mix of multiple functions.
Rudolph’s scheme featured an arrangement of monumental, terraced high-rises flanking a marina, a sprawling school and community center, and a series of low and mid-rise apartment buildings meant to evoke Italian mountain villages, with green spaces woven through the site.
Arthur Drexler, the powerful director of the Museum of Modern Art’s Architecture and Design Department, included Shoreline in the 1970 MoMA exhibition, Work in Progress. The work, he said, showed—
“With few exceptions, Paul Rudolph’s buildings can be recognized by their complexity, their sculptural details, their effects of scale and their texture.”
And that they manifest—
“. . . .a commitment to the idea that architecture, besides being technology, sociology and moral philosophy, must finally produce works of art if it is to be worth bothering about at all.”
A VISION PARTIALLY FULFILLED
ABOVE: Another of Paul Rudolph’s architectural renderings of Shoreline, this one showing some of the low-rise housing that was built. This drawing is anticipated to be on the cover of the new book. © The Estate of Paul Rudolph, The Paul Rudolph Heritage Foundation
LEFT: An aerial view of a portion of Shoreline. Photograph by Donald Luckenbill © The Estate of Paul Rudolph, The Paul Rudolph Heritage Foundation
In the end, only two phases of the Shoreline affordable housing development were built, and families moved in and made lives there—as can be seen in the below photos.
Views of Shoreline, occupied and and active with life. ABOVE: Photograph by Joseph W. Molitor courtesy of Columbia University, Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library, Joseph W. Molitor Photograph Collection. BELOW: Photograph by G. E. Kidder Smith, courtesy of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology
AND A VISION OVERSHADOWED—aND SPURNED
Some of the remains of the demolished Shoreline project. Photograph by William Vogel
After years of occupancy, they became among the most reviled buildings in Buffalo because—like many public housing designs of that era—their inventive, complex forms and admirable social aspirations were overshadowed by disrepair, crime, and vacancy. Even so, some saw positive values in Paul Rudolph’s designs, and attempts were made to save Shoreline.
Following failed attempts at landmarking the structures for preservation, the first round of demolitions began in summer 2015—and In 2017, the site’s current owner accelerated the demolition schedule. As of January 2018, the last holdout was vacated from his unit.
REMEMBERING A POSITIVE VISION
The 2019 exhibition, Shoreline: Remembering a Waterfront Vision, at El Museo
El Museo is a Buffalo-based nonprofit visual arts organization, dedicated to the exhibition of contemporary work by underserved artists, and cultural programming that engages diverse communities. In 2019 they presented an exhibition, Shoreline: Remembering a Waterfront Vision, showing drawings, photographs, documents, and artworks, spanning from the original vision of the Buffalo Waterfront Development in the 1960s to the eventual destruction of Shoreline in recent years. The exhibition materials, drawn from archival sources as well as artistic responses, traced the erosion of an architectural, urban, and social vision for Buffalo’s waterfront, one that was only ever partially realized.
Considering the Shoreline within this context, they looked at the architectural style of Brutalism, the complicated history of urban renewal, and the past attempts by government to play a leading role in developing cities and providing social housing on a mass scale. They asked: Amidst Buffalo’s so-called renaissance, when its historical assets are being reevaluated, preserved, and restored, why was there a race to forget the Shoreline?
Following the exhibition, Remembering Shoreline included a two-day public symposium that brought together architects, planners, researchers, and activists from Buffalo and beyond to take a closer look at the history of the Shoreline Apartments, and discuss Paul Rudolph, Brutalism, urban renewal, housing, and preservation.
SHORELINE— THE BOOK
As of mid-2020, almost all of Shoreline complex has been lost to the bulldozer. While we cannot bring back the buildings, it is important that we remember this history in a tangible way.
El Museo is currently working on collecting the materials and ideas from their exhibition and symposium into a book, to be published in Spring 2021: Shoreline: Remembering a Waterfront Vision.
It will include the exhibition materials such as drawings and photographs from Paul Rudolph’s archive, as well as works by Avye Alexandres, David Torke, Kurt Treeby, and Rima Yamazaki. Also featured will be essays by and conversations with symposium participants Kelvin Dickinson, Kate Wagner, Mark Byrnes, Susanne Schindler, Henry Taylor, Charles Davis, Jessie Fisher, Aaron Bartley, and editors Barbara Campagna and Bryan Lee.
THE KICKSTARTER CAMPAIGN
El Museo is publishing this book independently, and your contribution will go towards the cost of editing and printing this full-color, perfect-bound, 8x10 volume. The book that will vividly show the importance this example of a vision for the public good—a type of Initiative which leaders had engaged in, and which were embodied in the designs of great architects like Paul Rudolph.
We hope you will help make this project happen—and there’s a Kickstarter Campaign to fund the book. You can find out about it HERE, including the benefits of contributing—like getting copies of the book, photographic color prints of Shoreline, and large-format prints of Paul Rudolph’s compelling drawings of Shoreline.
