John Edward McKenzie Lucie-Smith (born 27 February 1933) is a British writer, poet, art critic, curator, broadcaster and author of exhibition catalogues.
Paul Rudolph Was an Architectural Star. Now He’s a Cautionary Tale.
His Brutalist buildings, praised during the Kennedy era, are now being demolished. A new exhibition in Manhattan looks at the limits of genius.
A drawing by the architect Paul Rudolph, who died in 1997, of a plan to drive a megastructure through Lower Manhattan. It was never built.Credit...George Etheredge for The New York Times
American architecture’s bright, shining light of the Kennedy era, Paul Rudolph was scrounging for commissions less than a decade later. He may now be best remembered — to the extent his name rings bells — for the heroic, bush-hammered concrete Camelot he designed during the early 1960s to house the architecture school at Yale.
When it opened, it prompted rapturous reviews akin to what, many years later, greeted Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim Bilbao. But the building soon became a piñata for everything wrong with modern architecture.
And Rudolph, who died at 78 in 1997, dropped down the memory chute.
Image The Art and Architecture Building, now called Rudolph Hall, at Yale University.Credit...Ezra Stoller/Esto, Yossi Milo Gallery, via Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
The only one of Rudolph’s three Hong Kong projects to be built, Bond Centre emerged during an uneasy time in the city as the conditions of its transfer from British to Chinese rule were being negotiated. (Paul Rudolph Heritage Foundation, Center for Archtitecture/Ian Lambot)
Mottalini, Chris (2013). After You Left They Took It Apart: Demolished Paul Rudolph Homes (1st ed.). Chicago, Illinois: Columbia College Chicago Press. ISBN978-1-935195-45-0.
He was a man who would have made a success of life a century and a half ago when conversation was a passport to good company and inebriety no bar. "I ought to have lived in the eighteen hundreds," he said himself. "What I want is a patron.
Vincent Urban Dictionary: No Bars https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=No%20Bars No Bars means you don't have skill in hiding illegal things. You're a dumbass, and you get caught a lot.
Since its dedication on a crisp November morning in 1963, Paul Rudolph’s Art & Architecture building at Yale University (now called Rudolph Hall) has drawn praise and condemnation. For some it has served as the catalyst to pursue the study of architecture. For others it remains an obstacle in that pursuit. Within seven stories, the building’s dizzying thirty-six levels are a mystical revelation in the art of space making, prompting the late architect Joseph Esherick to remark that you couldn’t go to the restroom without having a spatial experience.
In 1988, on the 25th anniversary of the building’s completion, I interviewed Rudolph at his office in New York City about the importance of the A&A in his oeuvre for an article published in Architecture magazine. By then, the building was only marginally as he had intended it to be. In June 1969, a devastating fire (the cause of which was suspected but never conclusively proven to be arson) gutted the fourth and fifth floors and provided the occasion to make the building over. Double-story spaces were divided into single stories, space use and allocation were changed, open spaces were subdivided, fluorescent lighting replaced incandescent, and hung ceilings appeared. Eleven years after Rudolph’s death, Dean Robert A.M. Stern spearheaded the Charles Gwathmey-led restoration of the building, to nearly as Rudolph had envisioned it.
This fall marks the centenary of Paul Rudolph’s birth. (He died in 1997, at the age of 78.) He began working on the design of the A&A building in 1958, when he was 40—a relatively young age for an architect to design a work of this stature. In the interview I conducted with him, partly presented here, Rudolph discussed his most controversial creation for the first time since its completion, his views on architectural education, and the nature of architecture.
MJC:Michael J. Crosbie PR:Paul Rudolph
MJC:
When was the last time you visited the A&A building?
PR:
I think in October of last year–I lectured at Yale.
MJC:
I understand that at the Yale lecture you said that you didn’t want to talk about the building.
PR:
I almost never talk about it. It’s a very painful subject for me. I talk quite freely about many of my buildings when asked, but I never talk about this building. It’s partially because I don’t think I can look very objectively at it.
MJC:
What’s your attitude about the building now, 25 years later?
PR:
It’s a little mixed.
MJC:
How mixed?
PR:
Obviously buildings have a life of their own. This one has had a rather unusual life, I suppose. It takes its toll, in terms of one’s attitude about it.
MJC:
What were your thoughts about how the building would serve as a model, pedagogically?
PR:
I thought it was important that first-year architecture students be very aware of what their elders, the older students, were thinking and doing. To that end, the drafting rooms were a multileveled affair, so you couldn’t help but see and be quite aware of what other people were doing. You looked down.
MJC:
Beyond just the functional requirements of the spaces themselves, how does the building itself, as an object, work pedagogically?
PR:
I don’t think of it as an object. I think of it as participating in urbanism. It’s freestanding, but it was always intended to grow toward the north. Yale at the time didn’t own the two buildings to the north, and it was perfectly clear that the building wasn’t really large enough the day it opened. The building is intended to be read from the New Haven Green, and the building certainly is intended to turn the corner; and therefore the configuration, at least from the outside, is an effort to turn the corner. The fact that a wall aligns with Lou Kahn’s building [the 1953 Yale Art Gallery across York Street] is an intention to embrace his building, with an invisible plane connecting to other points of the building across the street. I don’t think you’d ever build a building in this configuration if it weren’t for the fact that it’s at a corner, and that Kahn’s building is immediately across the street. There was a filling station on the site, so everyone was at least happy to get rid of the filling station.
MJC:
Once the students are inside, though, how is the building something they could look at and learn from?
PR:
This is complicated, from my viewpoint. I was the chairman of the Yale department of architecture, a post which then and now I was never too sure was something I really wanted to do. I’m interested very much in the theory of architecture, but I regard that as different from the teaching of architecture. I had taught in various schools as a guest, so it was not that I was new to the academic world. I was a gadfly, it was all great fun, and I’m sure I learned much more than the students. But, for very complicated reasons, I found myself responsible for a school of architecture. To this day I think of myself as a very bad teacher, as opposed to a critic or a theoretician.
I say this because I think for certain students my attitude was okay, but for others it was not, in spite of the fact that I felt there should be something for everyone—the good students as well as the not-so-talented ones. I think I was much better for the good students or the talented students than with the less talented students. But the mark of a good teacher is that he really cares equally about everybody. And try as I might, the truth of the matter is that’s not within me.
At the same time, it seemed to me that [as a teacher] I should never ever talk about myself as an architect, and indeed I didn’t. I never talked about what I was doing. I tried to talk in terms of principle, and to this day I think that’s very important–the differentiation between an architect and a teacher or a theoretician or a critic is the difference between night and day. As a teacher or critic, it seems very important to me to be as objective as possible and to talk only in terms of principle, never how I myself, as an architect, would try to carry something out. I really learned that from Gropius. All of us have our biases, and no matter how much we’d like to get rid of those, we can’t totally. But it’s the job of a teacher, I believe, to look objectively at something—not how he would do it, but to talk in terms of principles. Because I think principles don’t really change. How you carry them out changes and the problems change, but not the principles. But as an architect, I become a different person. I become very passionate, I suppose is the best word. I did and still do, and I can’t tell you why but certain things make an itch and I…well, the attitudes are different. I know that really well, and for the eight years I was at Yale I tried to be two different people, and finally I could not tolerate that any longer, so I left.
The contradiction to that is the fact that I indeed was the architect of the A&A building. I assure you that many times I thought then and still think that maybe I was the last person in the world to undertake such an assignment. It muddies the waters in terms of putting aside one’s prejudices. But, at the same time, I think people learn from buildings, not just the buildings that they’re in, but any building, good, bad, or indifferent. They learn positive things and negative things. So I thought that a building to house the people it was intended to house should be a work of architecture in as true a sense as I could make it.
Now, having said all that, as a would-be, sometime educator, I truly think there have to be things that students can fall back on—not formulas, but principles. It’s not that you follow someone else’s articulation of principles necessarily, but at least you know if you want to go in the opposite direction. There has to be a sounding board, there has to be a guidepost. That is the intention of the building. Whether or not it works that way is another matter. To me, you see, it doesn’t matter whether people like something or dislike it. The fact that they encounter this thing is important.
MJC:
Do you think that the fact that this building is still generating love and hatred simultaneously is a real measure of its success in the way you’ve described it?
PR:
The fact that there are those who have strong opinions about it, negative as well as positive, is okay. It’s a part of it. Maybe the degree of this is, for me personally, a little difficult to understand, sometimes. If I can look at it objectively, I would say that’s the purpose which it’s intended to serve.
MJC:
What did you learn by doing this building? How has it touched you in the way it’s evolved over the past 25 years?
PR:
I don’t know how to answer that. I regard it to this day as an expression of many things that I think as an architect, not as a sometime teacher–although that too, in a strange kind of way. I suppose this might sound like sheer obstinacy, but if I were to do it again, in detail I would certainly modify certain things.
But in principle, I’m not sure that I’d modify it a lot. In fact I’m quite sure that I would not. I’m sure this probably sounds like, “Oh God, he hasn’t learned anything.” Architects cannot look truly objectively at what they’ve done, and twenty five years later I find myself being still too close. A building for people as well as for architects is one of the most emotional affairs you can imagine. I think all of us know that, yet we talk about the tangible things and deal by and large with what is ostensibly very tangible. But the net result is a highly emotional affair, for its users, the commentators, and for the architect. And that can’t change.
MJC:
So how do you see the building now, and how has it changed you?
PR:
The two things that I believe to be the weakest points in 20th-century architecture are the fact that we cannot makecities—not cohesive cities or even one building next to another and that we don’t understand very well what I call the psychology of space, both interior and exterior. Now this building addresses both of those. I believe its strongest point in fact is that it’s sympathetic to its site and the Yale campus in general. By that I mean it does have a silhouette, a configuration in relation to the street, and a scale in relationship to the adjacent buildings. Not the immediate adjacent buildings, but this neck of the woods in general. Those formal relationships are there. I am talking about it essentially from the outside. I think that its character, without at all copying details from earlier buildings, blends in terms of its color, scale, texture, its placement, its dimensions, its profile. It’s a building that seems to belong. I believe that the A&A building demonstrates that you don’t have to pick up details from a Gothic building nearby to make it sympathetic. Now, the appropriateness of space inside is a mixed bag. I regret very much for instance my inability to get natural light into the second floor as it was intended. But the fire laws and so forth made that difficult, although I think that if I pursued it a bit further I could have managed it. But I didn’t, and the importance of natural light, and artificial light as far as that goes, becomes an integral part of the psychology of space. And the variety of space being simultaneously intimate and grand, sophisticated and simple—I think you find those characteristics in the A&A building, and subsequently I feel that I’ve carried many of those things much further. After all, this was an early building for me.
MJC:
How do you react to the fact that the building now seems to be enjoying appreciation among current students?
PR:
Buildings have lives of their own. Buildings are like people, they’re sometimes honest or sometimes not so honest. Attitudes change. The fact is that the building is in another cycle, opinions oscillate, and it matters little to me whether it’s up or down. It’s the nature of the beast. It brings up the question, of course, of whether the students set the building on fire. I don’t know. It’s what everybody’s pleased to say.
MJC:
What do you believe?
PR:
I don’t really know. I talked to the fire marshal.
MJC:
Were you satisfied with his report that it wasn’t arson?
PR:
I don’t know if that’s true. I don’t know. But I would prefer to think that it was not the students of architecture. All of us can deal in wishful thinking. It would be wrong of me to say that I’m not touched by the idea that students of architecture set the building on fire. Of course it touches me. But the worst fate from my viewpoint would be indifference. I’ve never worked on a building that affected me as much as that one does. I’d like to think that, in spite of everything, it says something about the nature of architecture.
Featured image: photo by Gunner Klack, via Flickr.
Uncovered windows have quietly become a fixture of high-end homes across America. How did ditching the curtains become such a common marker of wealth? Michael Waters reported in January: https://theatln.tc/SkTGEd6u
Lee Miller, born on April 23, 1907, in Poughkeepsie, New York, was not only a groundbreaking photographer but also a powerful symbol of women’s empowerment in the 20th century. Her artistic journey began as a model in the 1920s, where her striking looks and unique perspective caught the eye of renowned photographers like Edward Weston and Man Ray. Miller’s relationship with Man Ray in Paris profoundly influenced her style, as she adopted avant-garde techniques and developed her own voice within the Surrealist movement.
By 1931, when she shared a moment over breakfast in bed with fellow artist Tanja Ramm in her Paris studio, Miller was already establishing herself as a key figure in the art world. This intimate setting reflected not just their friendship but also the burgeoning spirit of female artists in an era dominated by men. In her photographs, Miller masterfully blended themes of femininity and identity, often challenging traditional gender roles and societal norms.
As a war correspondent for Vogue during World War II, Miller’s work took on a more profound dimension. She documented the harsh realities of the war, capturing haunting images of the liberation of concentration camps and the aftermath of destruction in Europe. Her ability to merge the aesthetic with the documentary made her one of the most significant photographers of her time, yet her contributions remained overshadowed for decades.
After the war, Miller continued to create, eventually settling in the English countryside. Today, her legacy is celebrated for its boldness and artistic integrity, inspiring a new generation of photographers and feminists. Lee Miller’s life and work serve as a reminder of the vital role women play in art and history, advocating for recognition and representation in a still-evolving narrative.
Discover the incredible career of Lee Miller – a celebrated photographer, member of the Surrealist art movement, war correspondent, model and gourmet chef.
Lee Miller was a remarkable woman who had an insanely interesting life – from model to photographer to Surrealist artist, war correspondent and gourmet chef!
