Hurricane Ian threatens Rudolph's Florida legacy as Residents Evacuate

By Wednesday night or Thursday morning, the National Weather Service projects that Ian will hit Manatee County, just north of Sarasota. Siesta Key, Longboat Key, Casey Key and Anna Maria are facing mandatory evacuations, restricted entry, and water will be shut off to prevent damage to the county's water system infrastructure.

According to the local Sarasota Herald-Tribune, Sarasota County called for evacuations starting yesterday. All residents in evacuation zones A and B (red and orange areas below) are under a mandatory evacuation, which includes anyone living in a mobile home. Residents living in evacuation zone C are strongly recommended to evacuate.

Evacuation centers are opening, including one at the new Riverview High School which replaced Rudolph’s original 1957 building that was demolished in 2009.

Sarasota County Evacuation Levels

Sarasota has faced significant storms in the past, but the last hurricane to directly hit the region was Category 3 Hurricane Donna in 1960. In 1966, the pavilion roof of Rudolph’s Umbrella Residence was blown off the house by winds from nearby Hurricane Alma. It was eventually rebuilt in 2011.

We wish everyone to stay safe and have spoken to friends in the area about the ongoing situation.

Some of Rudolph’s notable structures in the area threatened by Hurricane Ian are the following:

1948 Lamolithic Residence

1948 Revere Quality House

1949 Bennett Residence

1950 Healy Guest House

1952 Hook Guest House

1952 Sanderling Beach Club

1953 Cohen Residence

1953 Umbrella Residence

1956 Burkhardt Residence

1956 Deering Residence

1957 Harkavy Residence

Celebrating Ralph Twitchell, Architect: With and Beyond Paul Rudolph

The plan of the Twitchell Residence: Ralph Twitchell’s residence in Sarasota, Florida, a design of 1941. It is Paul Rudolph’s second built design, and his first in association with the senior architect. What might one learn (or speculate about) from studying such a floor plan?

Ralph Spencer Twitchell, Architect (1890-1978)

RALPH TWITCHELL

It is the birthday of Ralph Spencer Twitchell (July 27, 1890 – January 30, 1978)—and we take this moment to celebrate this architect, one who not only played a key part in the life and career of Paul Rudolph, but who contributed to the Sarasota community.

TWITCHELL AND RUDOLPH

Even to those who have a deep interest in the history of Modern architecture, Ralph Twitchell is not known much beyond a brief summary that peppers many biographies of Rudolph. What one often reads is that the senior architect gave Rudolph his start (Twitchell was nearly 3 decades older than Rudolph), bringing the young designer into his practice, and (and, as soon as Rudolph obtained his architectural license, taking him into partnership).

To this alliance, Twitchell is seen as having contributed an established position in the Sarasota community, a track record of successful projects, a way with clients, and a firm knowledge of construction—and Rudolph was the ultra-talented (and hardworking and prolific) youthful design genius. A productive period ensued, with many houses built and proposed—some of them among Paul Rudolph’s most striking designs, including: the widely-published Healy (“Cocoon”) House; the innovative Knott Residence; and the proposal for a complex of houses for the Revere Development (which showed Rudolph working skillfully within the vocabulary of Mies van der Rohe's “courtyard house” design experiments).

The Knott Residence, proposed for Yankeetown, Florida

The Healy (“Cocoon”) House, built in Sarasota, Florida

The Revere Development, proposed for Siesta Key, Florida

But, after about a half-decade of intense and successful work, Rudolph splits with Twitchell—apparently after a disagreement. Rudolph went on to found his own firm, attaining amazing success in the coming decades—both professionally and artistically.

ARCHETYPAL STORIES

So the impression one gets, from this highly condensed duo-biographical sketch, is that Twitchell provided the assets of the establishment: boring but practical and useful; whereas Rudolph injected the artistically energetic ingredients which really made their work interesting. Then, ultimately, it is the young genius who rebels and pursues his own path: an adventurous road to great achievement. From then on, we hear no more of Twitchell.

It is an appealing story, with its depiction of the talented and irrepressible “rebel”—and one wouldn’t have to search very hard into the work of Joseph Campbell to find, within the world of comparative mythology, that this is tale that can be found in all ages and cultures across the globe: the archetypal “Hero’s Journey”.

DEEPER AND BROADER

But, if there’s one thing that historians learn, it is that no story is simple—and, if one has the interest to dig, and to challenge the received wisdom, all stories keep opening up new questions and possibilities. The honest historian always wants—needs—to go deeper into the evidence, and look ever more broadly at what might have influenced/created a situation.

So let’s see if we can open-up (or as historians say, “unpack”) the above story. To do that, let’s consider the Twitchell Residence: how much is Twitchell and how much is Rudolph? We’ll probably never know the exact ratio and nature of their contributions to the design, but we can consider some of the factors that might have affected its planning and form. Items to consider include:

• This is Twitchell’s personal home—and it is a natural feeling to be particularly focused on the design of one’s own home—and that’s especially true for architects! No matter how talented his young associate (Rudolph), is it plausible that a senior architect would hand-over the full responsibility for the architecture of his own home to someone else? Or is it more likely that he had important and key input into the design?

• The building was completed in 1941. War is raging in Europe and Asia, and tremors of possible US involvement in the war—and a general national nervousness—are pervasive. Twitchell was old-enough to recall what happened during the previous World War: labor and materials had been in short-supply, and most construction was put on-hold for the duration of the fighting. Twitchell might have wanted to get his house built while it was still possible to do so—and he’d have only one chance to get it right. So—for this one chance—would he completely abdicate design responsibly for that to another?

• There are many striking similarities between the Living-Dining area of the Twitchell Residence, and the famous drafting room at Frank Lloyd Wright’s Taliesin West—too many to be just a coincidence [See comparison photos, below.]

• There are other Wrightian aspects of the Twitchell House: the compactness of the bedrooms (Wright thought bedrooms should be small, almost cabin-like, and primarily for sleeping—and that residents would/should spend their time outside of them); Dining and Living Room Areas that merge into each-other; the primacy of a solid, prominent fireplace wall, as one of the defining elements of the Living Room; and the set of visually solid piers which define the parking area, which create a strong entry sequence to the house.

• We know that Paul Rudolph was an ardent admirer of Wright—and that visiting a Wright home, at an early age, had been a decisive moment in Rudolph’s development. Rudolph’s devotion to Wright is something he’d acknowledge for his whole life. But—

The drafting room of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Taliesin West —and iconic part of the Taliesin complex. Key features—the ones that create it’s overall character are: the open, uninterrupted space; the inclined ceiling; the expressed structure inclined beams across that ceiling: the directionality of the space, with one side opening to the exterior; the V-shaped, angled columns, at the open side of the room, which support the beams above.

Both Twitchell and Paul Rudolph were aware of Wright’s work—and, from a young age, Rudolph was especially influenced by Wright’s designs (something he’d warmly acknowledge all his life). Above is the main living space of the Twitchell Residence: one is looking South into the Living Room, with the Dining area in the foreground. Was it Rudolph who urged that it follow so many of the features of Wright’s Taliesin drafting room?

• But Twitchell could equally have been aware of Wright. Frank Lloyd Wright was a relentless self-promoter and had been widely published for decades—so it would be impossible for any architect, of Twitchell’s era and age, to be ignorant of Wright. Further, given Wright’s decades of fame, Twitchell’s awareness of Wright’s work would have started well before he met Paul Rudolph.

• But, beyond familiarity, there’s a strong affinity between Wright’s work and another Twitchell project: one of his largest works, the Lido Beach Casino in Sarasota. The complex—an extensive structure with multiple parts and functions—was built in 1940, and probably planned in the previous year(s)—well before Rudolph was engaged by Twitchell. It was a venue for beach and pool swimming, dining, dancing, a nightclub, and shopping—and events of all kinds (beauty contests, swim meets, school and social) were held there.

• The project bears a striking similarity to Wright’s Midway Gardens: excluding swimming, both the Lido Beach Casino and Midway are of similar scale, encompass nearly matching programs, and were aimed at the same type of audience.

Frank Lloyd Wright’s Midway Gardens in Chicago

Ralph Twitchell’s Lido Beach Casino in Sarasota

• The two entertainment complexes share a “parti" (their basic architectural organization): both having a large, central, open space—which is enclosed and defined by structures for various functions, and which is anchored at one side by a taller main building.

Beachside view of the Lido Beach Casino—a view from circa 1956—showing the main, central structure that visually anchored the complex.

• Other aspects of the building display possible Wrightian influences, such as—-

• The pronounced horizontality of the composition—both overall, and in its elements: the low, hipped roofs of the two towers (and in the linear detail at their mid-areas), and the disc-shaped cantilevered roof at the center of the beach elevation

• The detailing of the columns

• The use of block—and prominently including a pattern of penetrations in the block masonry walls

• The creation of deep colonnades—not only offering protection from the sun, but also creating dramatically shadowed areas

• The almost Mayan “introverted” feel of the building—like Wright’s Hollyhock House, due to the solidity of the massing and of individual elements like the columns

• The display/celebration of structure—as in the rafters over the beachside elevation’s central roof, the hefty piers supporting that roof, and the line of columns

• Altogether, one cannot ignore the possible Wright influences in this Twitchell-before-Rudolph project.

• So the question becomes: If we see Wrightian influences here, could Twitchell also have brought such design input into his work with Rudolph?

WITHER RALPH TWITCHELL?

In the standard history of their Twitchell and Rudolph’s partnership, Twitchell is known as the “business partner” -or- the “public face” (who charmed clients) -or- “the [construction] site guy”. But though he was all those things (and, apparently, excelled in those roles), perhaps he was more than that. He had an extensive career both before and after his partnership with Rudolph, and—as looked-at in the above two cases (his 1941 Residence, and the Lido Beach Casino) there are reasons to contend that he might have had more of a design talent and sensibility than he’s usually given credit for. The import of this is: his input into projects in the Twitchell and Rudolph partnership might possibly have been stronger than previously assumed.

THE HISTORIAN’S PERSPECTIVE

To be fair to both sides, we should mention that we do have Paul Rudolph’s counter-testimony to such an idea (Rudolph said that whatever was good and interesting in their work was attributed to himself alone!). We don’t mean to assail the integrity of Rudolph’s claim—but part of the work of history is to question such self-contained, categorical statements. “Meta-narratives”—the big, central stories by which we’ve long understood the course of events (at world, local, and personal scales)—are never quite inclusive-enough of all the facts: there always dissonant evidence (“out-of-place artifacts”), clues, even “hints” that stubbornly won’t go away, and a real historian will never ignore them. So the question of Twitchell’s ability and input as a designer is an open one.

CELEBRATING TWITCHELL

So today,. on his birthday, we give Twitchell some renewed attention and consideration—”giving him a little love” that he’s rarely received in the soundbite assessment that he often gets.

A talented, energetic, and enterprising figure—and one who may have had more focus on design than usually acknowledged—it is worth celebrating this important architect: RALPH SPENCER TWITCHELL

Ralph Twitchell (center) consulting with builders on-site. What’s intriguing about this image is that it shows the Healy (“Cocoon”) House under construction—and one can see the catenary metal straps, upon which house’s curved roof (its most pronounced feature) was to be suspended. Healy was the most famous building completed during Twitchell and Rudolph’s partnership, but after Rudolph departed, Twitchell continued to practice until at least the mid-1960’s, and lived until 1978—long enough to see his former partner, Rudolph, achieve stratospheric success and fame. One wonders what Twitchell thought of that: was he jealous, bitter, tranquil—or glad that he’d fostered such a profound and prodigious talent as Paul Rudolph?

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IMAGE CREDITS

NOTES:

The Paul Rudolph Heritage Foundation gratefully thanks all the individuals and organizations whose images are used in this non-profit scholarly and educational project.

The credits are shown when known to us, and are to the best of our knowledge, but the origin and connected rights of many images (especially vintage photos and other vintage materials) are often difficult determine. In all cases the materials are used in-good faith, and in fair use, in our non-profit, scholarly, and educational efforts. If any use, credits, or rights need to be amended or changed, please let us know.

When/If Wikimedia Commons links are provided, they are linked to the information page for that particular image. Information about the rights for the use of each of those images, as well as technical information on the images, can be found on those individual pages.

CREDITS, FROM TOP-TO-BOTTOM and LEFT-TO-RIGHT:

Floor plan of the Twitchell Residence: © The Estate of Paul Rudolph, The Paul Rudolph Heritage Foundation; Photo portrait of Ralph Twitchell: by Joseph Steinmetz, from the State Library & Archives of Florida, via Wikimedia Commons; Perspective renderings by Paul Rudolph of the Knott Residence, Healy (“Cocoon”) House, and the Revere Development: © The Estate of Paul Rudolph, The Paul Rudolph Heritage Foundation; Taliesin West drafting room: photo by Steven C. Price, via Wikimedia Commons [Note: to help facilitate comparisons between this space and the Twitchell Residence Living Room (the next picture), this photo of the drafting room has been flipped, and color was removed.]; Ralph Twitchell Residence Living Room: by Joseph Steinmetz, from the State Library & Archives of Florida; Midway Gardens: vintage post card. circa 1915, via Wikimedia Commons; Beachside view of Lido Beach Casino, circa 1956: photo, circa 1956, via Wikimedia Commons; Post cards and photos of Lido Beach Casino: vintage images; Photo portrait of Ralph Twitchell at Healy construction site: by Joseph Steinmetz, from the State Library & Archives of Florida, via Wikimedia Commons

Celebrating EZRA STOLLER

The famous architectural photographer (with his famous subject) himself gets photographed: During the 1963 New Haven session, during which Ezra Stoller made his iconic photographs of Paul Rudolph and his Yale Art & Architecture Building, Judith York Newman captured the two of them in action.

We celebrate the 106th Birthday of EZRA STOLLER (May 15, 1915 – October 29, 2004) — one of America’s greatest architectural photographers.

Anybody who has tried to capture a good image of a building (or architectural interior or detail) will know that there is no such thing as a purely objective photograph. Instead: the photographer makes significant decisions about composition, lighting, depth-of-focus, proportion, distance, contrast, framing, and other factors. Both the architect and the photographer have to deal with practical requirements but, no less than with the architect, the result of the photographer’s efforts is an artistic work: one which can be both expressive and meaningful.

What photographer operated at the highest level of this simultaneously practical and artistic discipline? When one thinks of architectural photography in America, the name—or rather: the images—of Ezra Stoller are what probably first come-to-mind. For decades, Stoller photographed many of the 20th Century’s most significant new buildings in the US and thereby created an extensive archive of the achievements of Modern American architecture. More than that, Stoller’s views are some of the most iconic images of that era of design, or of particular buildings.

EZRA STOLLER AND PAUL RUDOLPH:

Of the several photographers that Rudolph worked with, Ezra Stoller is likely the one with which he had the most involvement and lasting relationship. Stoller photographed much of his residential work in Florida—including some of Rudolph’s greatest and most innovative houses like the Milam Residence (as seen on the cover of Domin and King’s book on the Florida phase of Rudolph’s career (see image at right), the Walker Guest House, the Umbrella House, and the Healy “Cocoon” House. He also captured the Yale Art & Architecture Building (see below), Sarasota Senior High School, the Temple Street Parking Garage, Endo Labs, the UMass Dartmouth campus, the Tuskegee Chapel, the Hirsch (later: “Halston”) Townhouse in New York City , the Wallace House, Riverview High School , the Sanderling Beach Club, and numerous others—including the Burroughs Wellcome US headquarters and research center.

Ezra Stoller took a series of photographs of Paul Rudolph’s Yale Art & Architecture Building (now rededicated as Rudolph Hall)—including the above portrait of Rudolph with the building in the background. Decades later, Stoller issued a set of monographs on key works of Modern architecture—his “Building Blocks” series—and the Yale building was selected to be one of the structures upon which the books focused (see image at right.) One of Stoller’s photos of the building—taken when it was freshly finished, in 1963—was to become an iconic image, and was used on the cover of the book.

STOLLER: ON-EXHIBIT, IN-PRINT, AND ON-VIEW

EXHIBITIONS:

Ezra Stoller’s work was exhibited numerous times: we know of at least ten solo exhibitions (listed here)—and the countless times when his photographs were included as parts of other exhibits, around-the-world (including in major museums).

BOOKS:

His photographs are in magazines and journals, as well as books that cover architecture (and, significantly, they’re in the monographs of individual architects—including Paul Rudolph). Several books have been published which focus exclusively on Ezra Stoller’s work, from “Ezra Stoller: Photographs of Architecture” (1980) -to- “Modern Architecture: Photographs by Ezra Stoller” (1999). The latter’s cover features a stark photograph in color—and that illustrates an important point: although Stoller is most well-known for his work in black & white photography, he could also create striking images in full color.

More recently, his work has been collected into extensive, large-format monographs—which allow one to comprehend and appreciate his full career: “Ezra Stoller, Photographer” (2012); and “Ezra Stoller: A Photographic History of Modern American Architecture” (2019). At 288 and 416 pages, respectively, these two volumes offer comprehensive views of Stoller’s oeuvre—and of the Modern era, subjects, and architects upon which he was focused.

EZRA STOLLER — TODAY:

A screen capture from the ESTO website, of the page focusing on Ezra Stoller. It includes a portrait of the famous photographer himself, as one of his iconic images of a building by Louis Kahn: the Salk Institute.

ESTO, the organization founded by Ezra Stoller, continues to operate, and is now directed by his daughter, Erica Stoller. It provides access to their extensive photographic archive: a treasury of images of unique importance to the history and understanding of Modern architecture, and which documents the work of key architects of the 20th Century.

Within that archive are images of compelling photographic power. One can see its holdings via the Esto Stock collection here—and an indication of the depth its holdings can be judged by the fact that it includes nearly 800 photographs of Paul Rudolph’s work; as well as the work of Wright, Saarinen, SOM, Breuer, Meier, Kahn, Aalto, Johnson, Warnecke, Mies, and numerous others.

ESTO also continues to be the home of a group of professional. design-focused photographers who work in Stoller’s tradition of clarity, expressive imagery, and compelling vision—whether capturing a building complex, a set of interiors, or singular objects. At their website, one can can see these photographers’ portfolios.

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IMAGE CREDITS

NOTES:

The Paul Rudolph Heritage Foundation gratefully thanks all the individuals and organizations whose images are used in this non-profit scholarly and educational project.

The credits are shown when known to us, and are to the best of our knowledge, but the origin and connected rights of many images (especially vintage photos and other vintage materials) are often difficult determine. In all cases the materials are used in-good faith, and in fair use, in our non-profit, scholarly, and educational efforts. If any use, credits, or rights need to be amended or changed, please let us know.

When/If Wikimedia Commons links are provided, they are linked to the information page for that particular image. Information about the rights for the use of each of those images, as well as technical information on the images, can be found on those individual pages.

CREDITS, FROM TOP-TO-BOTTOM, AND LEFT-TO-RIGHT:

Ezra Stoller photographing Paul Rudolph: photo by Judith York Newman, © The Estate of Paul Rudolph, The Paul Rudolph Heritage Foundation; Cover of “Paul Rudolph: The Florida Houses”: from the Amazon page for that book; Photo portrait of Paul Rudolph, with the Yale Art & Architecture Building in the background: photograph by Ezra Stoller;  Cover of “The Yale Art + Architecture Building”: from the Amazon page for that book;  Cover of “Ezra Stoller: Photographs of Architecture”: from the Amazon page for that book;  Cover of “Modern Architecture: Photographs by Ezra Stoller”: from the Amazon page for that book;  Cover of “Ezra Stoller, Photographer”: from the Amazon page for that book;  Cover of “Ezra Stoller: A Photographic History of Modern American Architecture”: from the Amazon page for that book;  Esto page with Stoller portrait and Salk photo: screen capture from Esto website

You call that "Preservation" ? — UPDATE on the plight of the Biggs Residence

Paul Rudolph’s Biggs Residence in Delray Beach, Florida. Here it is shown in a 1956 photograph, in a prime, just-completed condition, as Rudolph had conceived it. But decades of changes by subsequent owners marred Rudolph’s design—and those included insensitively installed air conditioning equipment, and visually obtrusive additions. The intention: New owners and their architect declared that they wanted to “Bring it back to the way it should look..” and “Bring it back to the original layout and then assess what their next step will be.”

And what happened: Applying for a Certificate Of Appropriateness, they said: “The addition does not change or effect any of the distinctive features, finishes or construction techniques of the historic house. The house is being preserved and restored as originally designed by Paul Rudolph without any compromise arising out of the addition proposal, except for the connector at the rear, least public view.” In a report, commissioned by Delray Beach, the city’s consulting architect says: “In my professional opinion this is a false statement.”

“The demolition of this unique site has far reaching consequences for the legacy of Paul Rudolph, the Sarasota School of Architecture, the much-prized historical character of the city, and the neighbors who now have to contend with prolonged construction.”

—Official statement by the city of Delray Beach

THE BIGGS RESIDENCE: ITS IMPORTANCE—AND THE PROPER PROCESS FOR CHANGE

The city of Delray Beach’s map showing the buildings on their Local Register of Historic Places. The Biggs Residence (number 35) is within the red oval near the map’s right-hand edge. A larger version of the map is here.

The Biggs Residence—a Paul Rudolph design of 1955—is an important part of his oeuvre. It is also a prime example of Florida’s Mid-Century Modern architecture, by that era’s (and region’s) leader of Modern American design.

The Biggs Residence has been recognized as a significant part of Florida’s cultural heritage: in 2005 the city of Delray Beach’s Historic Preservation Board recommended that it be added to the city’s Local Register of Historic Places—and that was approved by the City Commission.

Any proposed changes to a building on that Register must be fully reviewed by the city’s preservation officer and and the historic preservation board. If approved by them, the project will receive a “Certificate of Appropriateness” (COA).

BIGGS: CHANGES AND CONTINUITIES

The Biggs Residence in 20i6, showing an accumulation of changes and/or additions.

Over the decades, subsequent owners to the Biggs Residence have not completely held to Rudolph’s original design. Additions and changes have departed from the building as Paul Rudolph conceived it—and the results have often been visually obtrusive. And, of course, any distinguished building that’s reaches a half-century of age will be in need of multiple kinds of care—just like a classic car—and how each owner handles that care & repair will vary with their knowledge, sensitivity, and means. Consequently, their effects on the building will range in quality—and sometimes the accumulated impacts will be profoundly contrary to the spirit of the original design.

Yet the main part of what Rudolph created at Biggs remained—the essential raised volume of living spaces. Also, as shown in the two comparison photos below, significant aspects of its original internal character had been maintained—and that’s to be valued and praised.

LEFT: An interior view of the Biggs Residence in 1959—showing the house in its original state, as designed by Paul Rudolph. This view of the central living-dining area is towards the dining table at the end of the room, which sits near the storage wall. At the far right is the entry passage to the kitchen. In this photograph, one of room’s pair of large and prominent steel ceiling beams is clearly seen

ABOVE: As of 2016, when this photograph was taken, the house’s main living space still retained its essential character of a spacious openness in its center, as well as other Rudolph-designed features: the emphatically displayed steel structure, and the wall of storage (behind moving panels) at one end of the room

CHANGES: The POSTIVE INTENTIONS

New owners acquired the Biggs Residence in 2018, and wished to make changes. That’s not unusual, nor is it to be disparaged: as lifestyles evolve, expectations for our residences change too—so even important and classic works of architecture sometimes undergo alteration, and this happens most often after they change ownership. But when someone buys a distinguished work-of-architecture, it is hoped that they will be sympathetic to the original architect’s conception, and any changes will be discrete and respectful—and, as noted in our last article, there’s a serious body of helpful preservation knowledge about how to proceed in such cases (and a whole profession standing ready to assist in these projects.)

In 2018 the owners visited the Paul Rudolph Heritage Foundation at our NYC headquarters in the Paul Rudolph Modulightor Building. They told us about their plans to remove the two additions (and add a discrete new one) that would allow the original home to look as close to Rudolph’s original design in almost 37 years. They also gave us copies of drawings and research they had collected as well as shared drawings and renderings of the final design with us. We were pleased with their proposal and considered this project to be in the “safe” category. We didn’t think anything of it at the time, but this would be the last communication we had with them.

As per proper procedure, the proposed alterations to the Biggs Residence were submitted for review (and re-review with amendments). The owner’s (and their architect’s) stated goals were admirable—and their declared intentions for the proposed work included:

“Bring it back to the way it should look.”

“Bring it back to the original layout and then assess what their next step will be.”

“The addition does not change or effect any of the distinctive features, finishes or construction techniques of the historic house. The house is being preserved and restored as originally designed by Paul Rudolph without any compromise arising out of the addition proposal, except for the connector at the rear, least public view.”

CHANGES: The RESULTS

We don’t dispute the good intentions of the owners and their architects. We realize that there’s often another side (or sides) to any story, and we truly welcome further information, input, and other points-of-view. But we were distressed when a report came in that far more changes had happened on-site than had been approved—as when we saw the March 12th headline from the Palm Beach Post (see it, with the beginning of their story, at right), along with a photo like the one at the top of this article.

We weren’t the only ones to be alarmed. The city of Delray Beach was on-the-case, bringing the owners before a magistrate. As part of their investigation, the city commissioned an investigative report from an independent architect (more about that, later).

THE CITY OF DEL RAY ISSUED THE FOLLOWING STATEMENT:

Delray Beach values and protects its historic buildings. The city’s Historic Preservation staff work hand-in-hand with property owners, architects, and builders to guide them through the approval process and serve as a resource when restoring or renovating historic buildings and sites.  

The site at 212 Seabreeze Avenue, known as the Sewell C. Biggs House, was designed in 1955 by internationally renowned architect Paul Rudolph, who was part of the Sarasota School of Architecture and later Chairman of the School of Architecture at Yale University. The Sewell C. Biggs House is a historic structure listed on the Delray Beach Local Register of Historic Places. 

During August 2020, the Sewell C. Biggs House was demolished down to its metal frame. This action was not approved by the city and is a stark contrast to the original plan presented to and approved by the city’s Historic Preservation Board, which emphasized a desire to respectfully rehabilitate and restore Paul Rudolph’s original building with minimal changes. 

The decision not to inform the city effectively denied staff the ability to determine if the demolition was warranted, and the opportunity to inspect the site to assess how much of the original, historically significant, structure could have been saved. 

The demolition of this unique site has far reaching consequences for the legacy of Paul Rudolph, the Sarasota School of Architecture, the much-prized historical character of the city, and the neighbors who now have to contend with prolonged construction. 

Moving forward, the city’s goal is to work with the owners and the Historic Preservation Board to bring this historically significant building back to a state of historical integrity, as much as may be possible. The city has hired an architect with expertise in historic buildings to provide guidance to staff and help establish a path forward for the owners.

THE INVESTIGATION REPORT

A page from the report. It includes a photo, taken at the construction site in 2020, showing the remaining steel after the house’s roof and walls had been demolished.

When Delray’s Principal Planner in their Historic Preservation department sent us the above statement, they also sent along.

“. . . .the consultant report we received from Mr. Richard Heisenbottle, the architect the city hired to review the project following the demolition.”

Richard Heisenbottle’s report traces the history of the project, including: proposals and the documents submitted for review, testimony made before the Historic Preservation Board, revisions offered and reviewed, decisions made—and what he observed during a site visit.

The report compares what he owners and/or their architects stated, and what Mr. Heisenbottle assesses as to what really is the case—and some of the contrasts are stark (and you can read the full report here.)

Below are a few excerpts. First, the report’s author quotes from a promise or assertion made by the owners or their architect—and then (in parenthesis) is his assessment of the actuality of the situation.

• “The proposed work does not involve any removal of any characteristic features of the original house, such as the previously proposed plan to remove the 2nd floor and the galley kitchen, both of which will stay intact.” (This is an incorrect statement or a statement that has been violated. The work performed most definitely involved removal of characteristic features. The entirety of the perimeter walls, siding and roof framing have been removed. The galley kitchen has also been removed.)

• Distinctive features, finishes, and construction techniques or examples of craftsmanship that characterize a property shall be preserved. “The characteristic elevated steel columns and steel beam structure will be structurally rehabilitated, but otherwise preserved as is with respect to its original design. (The steel column and beam structure are the only element of the original structure being preserved. All else, wall framing, roof framing, windows, doors and siding are all being replaced and replicated.)

• The proposed work does not add new features or elements from other buildings. (The Applicant’s plan does add new features.)

• “Deteriorated historic features shall be repaired rather than replaced. Where the severity of deterioration requires replacement of a distinctive feature, the new feature shall match the old in design, color, texture and other visual qualities and, where possible materials.” The existing steel structure will be repaired and rehabilitated not replaced. The characteristic features of the historic house such as the grooved wood siding, will be restored and replaced, and if damaged beyond restoration, will be replaced with matching materials.” (None of the grooved wood siding or exterior wall studs were saved or restored, everything was replaced without providing any notification to HPB of the need for or extent demolition.)

The report offers several conclusions, some key ones being:

• Upon review and evaluation of all materials submitted to the City by the Owner in support of their Certificate of Appropriateness Application No. 2 and Building Permit Application, and as a result of my on-site inspection of the property to access its current condition, I have concluded that the owner and his general contractor have gone well beyond what was authorized in the COA and what was authorized on the approved Building Department Permit Plans.

• The extent of demolition could not have been anticipated under the approved COA submittal documents or under the proposed Construction Documents.

• In addition to non-compliance with the LDR requirements for demolition of more than 25% of a historic structure, the owner raised the structure in violation of the approved COA and without advising and receiving permission to do so from the Building Department and the HPB.

He then looks at the option for reconstructing the building. “Reconstruction” has a specific and rigorous meaning and set of standards, as defined by the U.S. Department of the Interior’s “Secretary of the Interior’s Standards for Reconstruction and Guidelines for Reconstructing Historic Buildings” (and you can read more about them here.) The report’s author reviews the standards, in preparation for his final recommendation—one which we feel needs to be contested.

AUTHENTICITY?

While we applaud the thoroughness of the report, we dispute one of its conclusions—the one wherein its author says that a—

“. . . .properly executed rehabilitation and partial reconstruction can continue to be listed as a historic resource on the Delray Beach Local Register of Historic Places.”

Our experience, and supported by a professional preservation expert we reached out to about this matter, is that no reconstruction of a building can authentically match the original. That’s because of the several real and intractable phenomena of the construction process:

• No documentation is ever complete enough to convey all aspects of a building. Even the most through records will not include all of a building’s varying connections, adjacencies of materials, details, and the incorporation of various systems both material, structural and mechanical. [What architects term the “conditions”.]

• Current building, life-safety, and energy codes; rules imposed by insurance companies; and desired upgrades due to higher quality-of-life expectations can be accommodated—but one can only make a best guess at what the original architect would have done had they been commissioned to deal with these latter-day challenges.

• When one is trying to integrate such changed standards into a yet-to-be-built building (because the original had been demolished), there is no “push-back” from the material presence of an extant building—and hence nothing to discipline the new decisions.

• Every building project—no matter how thoroughly thought-out in advance (and no matter how complete the drawings and specifications seem to be)—has gaps in its conception. Questions inevitably come-up during construction: issues whose decisions definitely will affect the look and quality of the outcome of the project. Ideally, the architect is consulted on each of these issues (either during site visits, or during frantic phone calls from the site)—and gives their solutions. Each architect will solve things in their own way, and Paul Rudolph was well known to be demanding during such site visits. How, during a “reconstruction” could his reactions to construction issues possibly be anticipated? They cant.

We acknowledge that a “reconstruction” might proceed in the most conscientious and well-intended way, carefully attempting to recreate the original Briggs Residence. But, for the above reasons, the Paul Rudolph Heritage Foundation will not support such a rebuilding as an authentic Rudolph design—and we will note that in our comprehensive list of the works of Paul Rudolph. The original residence will remain ‘demolished’ in our project list.

Even with all the changes and additions over the years, this photo shows that essential aspects of the Biggs Residence were still extant as of 2016—prior to the recent act of demolition.

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IMAGE CREDITS

NOTES:

The Paul Rudolph Heritage Foundation (a non-profit 501(c)3 organization) gratefully thanks all the individuals and organizations whose images are used in this non-profit scholarly and educational project.

The credits are shown when known to us, and are to the best of our knowledge, but the origin and connected rights of many images (especially vintage photos and other vintage materials) are often difficult determine. In all cases the materials are used in-good faith and in fair use in our non-profit scholarly and educational efforts. If any use, credits, or rights need to be amended or changed, please let us know.

When Wikimedia Commons links are provided, they are linked to the information page for that particular image. Information about the rights to use each of those images, as well as technical information on the images, can be found on those individual pages.

CREDITS, FROM TOP-TO-BOTTOM, AND LEFT-TO-RIGHT:

Biggs Residence in the 1950’s: photo as shown in the report, “Evaluation of COA Approval 212 Seabreeze Avenue, Delray Beach, FL 33483 RJHA Project No. 20-3494”, commissioned by the City of Delray Beach;  Biggs Residence condition after current demolition work: photo as shown in the report, “Evaluation of COA Approval 212 Seabreeze Avenue, Delray Beach, FL 33483 RJHA Project No. 20-3494”, commissioned by the City of Delray Beach;  Delray Beach Local Register of Historic Places: courtesy of City of Delray Beach;  Biggs Residence with additions in 2016: © Linda Lake / The Fite Group Luxury Homes;  Biggs Residence Living-Dining area in the 1950’s: photo by Ernest Graham, from a vintage issue of House & Home magazine, June 1959, courtesy of US Modernist Library;  Biggs Residence Living-Dining area as of 2016: © Linda Lake / The Fite Group Luxury Homes;  Biggs Residence as of 2016: © Linda Lake / The Fite Group Luxury Homes

What's “REAL”? (and What’s RIGHT) In Preservation: Restoration? Recreation? Reproduction? Renovation? Rehabilitation. . ?

Mies van der Rohe’s Barcelona Pavilion—one of THE key icons and exemplars of Modern Architecture—was built for a 1929 international exposition in Spain. It lasted only briefly, and—for decades thereafter—it was only known via its floor famous plan, a detail drawing of a column, and a handful of photographs (of which this view is the one most repeatedly reproduced.)

Mies died in 1969, and—nearly two decades after he had passed—a reconstruction of the Barcelona Pavilion was completed on the same site as the original. It has provided interesting experiences for architects (who never had a chance to visit the short-lived original)—but whether it should ever have been re-built remains a question within the architectural community.

"Never demolish, never remove or replace, always add, transform, and reuse!"

"Demolishing is a decision of easiness and short term. It is a waste of many things—a waste of energy, a waste of material, and a waste of history. Moreover, it has a very negative social impact. For us, it is an act of violence."

— Anne Lacaton and Jean-Philippe Vassal, winners of the 2021 Pritzker Prize in Architecture

A CASE THAT RAISES QUESTIONS

The Barcelona Pavilion, designed by Mies van der Rohe, was built for an exposition in 1929—a “world’s fair” wherein 20 countries participated, and in which there were also exhibits on industry, science, art, history, crafts, science, and agriculture. The fair lasted for less than a year, and the structure which represented Germany—the Barcelona Pavilion—was demolished along with the rest of the fair’s buildings (as is usually done with such fairs).

The Barcelona Pavilion’s “cruciform column”: this plan-detail of it was one of the few original Mies drawings available—and has been the focus of attention for nearly a century.

After Paul Rudolph visited the Barcelona Pavilion, he made a series of fascinating analytical drawings—one of which is shown above—and all of which you can see here (where you can also read Rudolph’s thoughts about his moving experience of the building.)

Mies’ design became famous: an “icon”—an ontological distillation of a key thrust of architectural Modernism. Mies’ building lasted for only about 8 months, yet it continues to penetrate and have hegemony over architectural imaginations to this day. It did that via a handful of photographs and a couple of drawings—and it’s a testament to the power of the Mies’ concept that the Barcelona Pavilion has remained relevant for nearly a century, even on such thin evidence.

Later in Mies’ life, he was asked about rebuilding the Barcelona Pavilion, and he’s reported to have thought that it wasn’t a bad idea, and—-as the original construction drawings had been lost—he mentioned that his office could cooperate by making drawings for it. But, during Mies life (1886-1969), nothing came of the project.

In the mid-1980’s that changed: between 1983 and 1986 the building had been permanently rebuilt—and on the same site it had originally stood.

Very few of the people who’d be the most interested in the building—the architectural community—had a chance to visit the Barcelona Pavilion when it was briefly extant (and obviously none after its destruction). So the rebuilding has been celebrated, as it has allowed one to finally experience, in person, what they’d read about, studied, obsessed over, and dreamt of. [Paul Rudolph made a visit, which he found highly moving—and which you can read all about, here.]

Even though the reappearance, “in the flesh”, of the Barcelona Pavilion has benefits, its rebuilding has also been not without controversy—and it has brought forth serious questions:

1. Could a truly accurate rebuilding be done without the original architect’s direct involvement? [Which was clearly not possible in this case, as Mies had passed years before the rebuilding project even started.]

2. Even if Mies had been involved, would he have made changes in the a rebuilt design?—and how would that affect its authenticity. [Paul Rudolph observed that many things he saw at the site were not architecturally “resolved”—and that, Rudolph thought, was part of its magic. That imperfection may be “par for the course” with a rapidly planned and constructed, temporary exposition building—-but the temptation to “fix” such things, later, might have been too much for anyone (especially Mies) to resist.]

3. An important part of the experience of the Barcelona Pavilion was the effect caused by the materials used: slabs of natural stone—including some personally selected by Mies. These had been destroyed or dispersed, when the building was demolished in 1930. [How could one know that the newly chosen materials truly matched the originals in tone, grain, color, and texture?]

4. How much documentation was actually available, in order to do an accurate rebuilding? [In this case, while valiant attempts were made to sift for all documents and archeological evidence, there was still a significant gap between whatever original information was found, and what had to be extrapolated.]

5. Are there things that are better left in the realm of the imagination, and which should not be materialized (even when we have the power to do so)? [Philip Johnson—THE long-time associate, expert, and evangelist for Mies—said of the rebuilding project: “The problem before us is should a dream be realized or not? We have made such a myth of that building. Shouldn’t it be left in the sacred vault of the memory bank?”]

These questions remain—-and they are pertinent today, as we are, more-and-more, presented with new building projects which, allegedly, intend to rebuild, recreate, reproduce, or restore something that has been lost.

One problem is that the the thinking and language around these questions has become elastic, slippery, and with elusive meaning or intent. There is a lack of rigor in preservation—-not in the professional field, per se (about which we have immense admiration—-more about that below), but in the way that claims of preservation have been made which seem questionable. Making the situation even more difficult is that all this exists in a troublesome (and troubling) larger cultural context…

A REALITY / TRUST DEFICIT

A chart from the Pew Research Center’s study of Public Trust in Government: 1958-2019 The overall downward trend, from 1964 to the present, is evident. [Note that the largest and steepest drop was in the wake of the mid-1970’s Watergate scandal.] Whether such mistrust is deserved (and how one might ever determine such a titanic question) is another issue—nevertheless, the general direction of public sentiment is quite clear.

At the end of the 20th century, a symposium was held in New York on the topic of “Authenticity”. Topics ranged from the ubiquity (and intense popularity) of un-authorized “knock-off” copies of fashion items (like Gucci handbags) -to- the legitimacy of sampling in music; and—perhaps to spur new thinking about the question of “realness”—the event’s organizers had arranged for a drag queen to be the day’s host. It’s no secret that what can (and cannot) be trusted to be real, to be authentic, seems to be increasingly fluid — i.e.: the ongoing excitement about developments products for virtual reality (and their increasing consumer availability); that polls show trust in government has been on a nearly 60-year downward trend; our present (and elongating) moment when business, schooling, and socializing is done via screens; and everybody seems to have their own (and mutually exclusive) set of “facts.”

In the context of this, is it any wonder that we’re sensitive to such questions as:

• What’s real ?

• What’s authentic ?

• What’s “Original” (and what’s “Original Intent”) ?

• What has integrity ?

And these questions of integrity, of what is original, of what is authentic—the kind of truthfulness that might be found in architecture —comes up starkly in the domain of architectural preservation.

Ayn Rand’s architect hero, Howard Roark (at right) at a moment-of-truth: considering whether to compromise on the integrity of his design.

INTEGRITY aND ARCHITECTURE

Perhaps you’ve come across a building (or part of a building) which has been newly constructed—and the sponsors claim that their project is historically renovated, or that it is an authentic recreation, or that it is true to the spirit of the original architect, or that it is rehabilitated to match the original construction (or they characterize the work with similar such language.)

Do such claims have a solid basis? Or are they part of the “Creeping Surrealism” noted earlier?

Clearly, there shouldn’t be blanket verdicts on this (and one must judge on a case-by-case basis) — But, these days, one could hardly be overcautious when considering such claims, for, as Ayn Rand put it so starkly:

“A building has integrity, just as a man and just as seldom."

And that integrity (or lack thereof) can apply to preservation projects—ones which claim to be done with care, and rigor. But there’s also good news: there is a body-of-knowledge—and a profession to apply it—where such rigor can be found.

PRESERVATION—a pROFESSIONAL APPROACH

Fortunately, there is a well-developed discipline of Preservation—by which we mean the field that is historically and scientifically rigorous, professionally ethical, and which has a well-developed set of supporting institutions. activities, and tools. Some of those include:

• standards-setting organizations

• schools

• certifications

• professional groups, conferences, and ways of identifying and honoring distinguished work in the field

• journals

• publications

• databases

• government and public engagement

For example: One can see the wealth of preservation knowledge that’s been developed by looking at its publications. We asked Barbara A. Campagna, FAIA, LEED AP BD+C—a leading professional in this field, with in-depth experience in preservation—about this. We asked for the names of some of the key journals of the field—ones in which the profession of preservation shares its growing body of information and practical wisdom—and she mentioned: the Association for Preservation Technology’s APT Bulletin, the Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, and DOCOMOMO International’s DOCOMOMO Journal—all of which are peer reviewed.

PRESERVATION LANGUAGE FOR CLEAR THINKING

The profession has as worked-out an extensive vocabulary—terms which can help bring clarity to any proposed project.

For example: The National Parks Service refers to “Four Approaches to the Treatment of Historic Properties”—and offers a concise glossary of the key terms:

• Preservation focuses on the maintenance and repair of existing historic materials and retention of a property's form as it has evolved over time.

• Rehabilitation acknowledges the need to alter or add to a historic property to meet continuing or changing uses while retaining the property's historic character.

• Restoration depicts a property at a particular period of time in its history, while removing evidence of other periods.

• Reconstruction re-creates vanished or non-surviving portions of a property for interpretive purposes.

Each of the highlighted words above has their own separate set of standards (and clicking on them will bring you to the the relevant pages where that’s gone into.) The National Parks Service also offers training and an extensive set of publications which cover many areas, including general preservation strategy as well as in-depth technical information—and you can access them here.

But they is just one of numerous preservation organizations (both national and local) which also offer advice, data, and a great range of assistance—the National Trust for Historic Preservation being another major resource.

CASE STUDIES sHOWING A POSITIVE DIRECTION

There are several projects, within Rudolph’s oeuvre, where renovation was done with responsibility and care. Notable is that these were done well after Rudolph’s passing—so they show that it is possible to do such work (including bringing a building up to later standards) well, and still be loyal to the original architect’s vision.

HEALY GUEST HOUSE (THE “COOCOON” HOUSE)

The Healy Guest House (1950) in Sarasota, Florida, is a waterside vacation residence designed near the beginning of Paul Rudolph’s career. Known for its catenary roof, inventive structure, and fresh form, the design—combined with Rudolph’s virtuoso drawing technique—was to help initiate Rudolph’s fame as one of America’s most creative young architects. Much published and studied over the decades, the City of Sarasota has added it to its list of Locally Historically Designated Properties in 1985.

In 2018, the house was leased to the Sarasota Architecture Foundation. They did a number of important renovation projects at the house, and—according to David Zaccardelli, the SAF board member overseeing the process—they “. . . .replaced the front door; restored the louvers, stripping them to natural grain wood; painted the exterior; and restored the front and rear porch, including the originally designed metal bench on the porch overlooking Bayou Louise. We also repaired the driveway and walkway pavers and installed new screens.” Following the renovations, the SAF contracted a local interior designer to furnish the residence in period-appropriate 1950’s-style furniture—and then reopened it for public tours.

Paul Rudolph’s perspective rendering of the Healy Guest House—which shows its iconic catenary curve roof.

The guest house, a Florida vacation structure built for the Healy family, sits along the water in Sarasota.

JEWETT ARTS CENTER AT WELLESLEY COLLEGE

The Mary Cooper Jewett Arts Center (1955-1958) was a breakthrough for Rudolph: it was his first major non-residential project to get built (and indeed, his latter career would include numerous buildings for education.). A complex program had to be accommodated—but, just as important: Rudolph sought to design a Modern building that would be sympathetic with the Wellesley’s existing vintage buildings. Those had been done in a “Collegiate Gothic” mode—a traditional style which had been popular approach for the design of campuses. Rudolph had no interest in reproducing the exact forms and details of the older buildings, but he did seek to resonate with them—and so he used shapes, proportions, glazing, and structure in ways that would fit well into the existing campus.

After about a half-century of use, the building needed a variety of repairs, and the college commissioned a comprehensive study of its condition. Significant work was judged to be needed for the windows: Rudolph had framed the glazing in wood, and by the mid 2010’s the window assemblies were in need of replacement. Several options were considered, but the best one—rebuilding the windows to match Rudolph’s design, but using a hardier wood, and carefully integrating double-glazing—was seen to be too expensive for the available budget. In 2019, the Paul Rudolph Heritage Foundation participated in discussions about the renovation plans, and encouraged the preservation team to hold to Rudolph’s vision—and suggested a funding and scheduling approach that would allow the university to do the renovations correctly (and be able to afford to do so.)

Paul Rudolph’s Jewett Arts Center, at Wellesley College. To resonate with campus’ other buildings (which had been designed in the Collegiate Gothic style), the new building was detailed to include coupled columns, pointed skylights, modulated metal screening, and a carefully articulated wood-framed window system.

One of Paul Rudolph’s details of the building’s exterior. This is a plan-detail, showing a concrete column (In a 4-lobed shape, which evokes the campus’ vintage Gothic-style building details), and a corner of the wood-framed glazing system. When constructed, the building was single-glazed (which was standard for the time).

YALE ART & ARCHITECTURE BUILDING

Paul Rudolph’s most famous work, the Yale Art & Architecture Building (1958-1964, rededicated as “Rudolph Hall” in 2008) had—after a major fire, years of patchy repairs and partial/unsympathetic renovations, and four decades of hard use by students—fallen into sorry shape. Yale even considered demolishing it, but a variety of causes (including significant support from Sid. R. Bass) brought forth a respectful and comprehensive renovation. The work included a focus on major systems (HVAC, lighting) and materials (particularly the condition of the exterior concrete and the glazing): they were upgraded, brought up to code, fixed, and—most important as the guiding principle—done in a way that maintained the forms and spirit of Rudolph’s vision for the school.

Although Paul Rudolph is famous for his perspective drawings, he also sometimes chose other graphic forms—like axonometric or isometric projections (the latter of which is used here, in his drawing of the Yale building.)

Windows—their form, details, and framing—are a part of every architects palette—and Paul Rudolph varied how they were handed in his design at Yale. Here they’re shown the process of replacement during the renovation.

PRESERVATION: THE ONGOING CHALLENGE

Sometimes preservation is straightforward—but more often there are difficulties—technical, budgetary, and philosophical. The ancient Greek riddle of the Ship of Theseus provides a paradigmatic example of the latter:

That legendary hero, Theseus, upon finishing his adventures and long journey, returned to Athens by ship. Honoring him, the ship was kept in the harbor for hundreds of years—held sacred as a memorial to this great and most heroic warrior. But, over centuries, the ship’s parts needed to be replaced: first a few planks, then a mast, a beam, some decking…. By end of many years, every part of the ship had—piece-by-piece—been replaced. It happened slowly—so gradually that it had hardly been noticed—but what ultimately stood in the harbor was a ship made entirely of new materials, none of which had been present in Theseus’ time. So the questions arose: Could this really be considered Theseus’ ship? Did it have a claim on authenticity? The form of the ship was the same, and the replacements were done slowly, over long years—and each time with meticulous care and good faith—but was it the same ship?

Had Theseus’ ship been preserved? That’s the essence of the question—one that’s been puzzled over for two millennia. The model can applied to many things: How much of the human body can be replaced, and still be considered human (or the same person)? How much can the staff of a design firm turn-over, before the fundamental nature of the entity is lost? How many members of a group can be replaced, and it still be the “same” band (or sports team)?

And what about when preserving a buildings? How much can be changed, and still be an authentic work of the original architect?

These issues are pertinent to the legacy of Paul Rudolph!

• How much of a Paul Rudolph building can be changed or replaced, and it still really be a Paul Rudolph design?

• Can one demolish a Rudolph building and re-build it later (with all or substantially new materials)—and claim that it is still a real work of Paul Rudolph?

The Paul Rudolph Heritage Foundation is pledged to protecting Rudolph’s legacy—including a focus on preservation. We are alive to these questions—and we aspire to bring integrity, knowledge, and rigor into all the cases which come to our attention. WE ARE WATCHING.

WHAT YOU CAN DO

• If you know of any Paul Rudolph buildings that might be threatened—please contact us at: office@paulrudolphheritagefoundation.org

• If you are thinking of renovating or changing a Paul Rudolph design, please feel truly welcome to talk to us: we’ll be happy to share our knowledge and experience.

• Stay up-to-date with bulletins about the latest developments—and to get them, please join our foundation’s mailing list. You’ll get all the updates, (as well as other Rudolph news.)—and you can sign-up at the bottom of this page.

The Ship of Theseus, a famous and ancient riddle (and philosophical problem) with ongoing relevance for preservation—including for Paul Rudolph buildings.

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IMAGE CREDITS

NOTES:

The Paul Rudolph Heritage Foundation (a non-profit 501(c)3 organization) gratefully thanks all the individuals and organizations whose images are used in this non-profit scholarly and educational project.

The credits are shown when known to us, and are to the best of our knowledge, but the origin and connected rights of many images (especially vintage photos and other vintage materials) are often difficult determine. In all cases the materials are used in-good faith in our non-profit scholarly and educational efforts. If any use, credits, or rights need to be amended or changed, please let us know.

When Wikimedia Commons links are provided, they are linked to the information page for that particular image. Information about the rights to use each of those images, as well as technical information on the images, can be found on those individual pages.

CREDITS, FROM TOP-TO-BOTTOM, AND LEFT-TO-RIGHT:

Barcelona Pavilion, 1929: vintage photo;  Barcelona Pavilion, rebuilt in the 1980’s: Ashley Pomeroy via Wikimedia Commons;  Mies’ Barcelona Pavilion cruciform column detail: vintage drawing;  Paul Rudolph analytical drawing of the Barcelona Pavilion: © The Estate of Paul Rudolph, The Paul Rudolph Heritage Foundation;  Chart of trust in government: Pew Research Center;  Drawing of Healy Guest House: © The Estate of Paul Rudolph, The Paul Rudolph Heritage Foundation;  Photograph of Healy Guest House: courtesy of the Sarasota Architectural Foundation;  Photograph of Jewett Arts Center: © The Estate of Paul Rudolph, The Paul Rudolph Heritage Foundation;  Detail of column and glazing system at Jewett Arts Center: © The Estate of Paul Rudolph, The Paul Rudolph Heritage Foundation;  Isometric drawing of the Yale Art & Architecture Building: © The Estate of Paul Rudolph, The Paul Rudolph Heritage Foundation;  Photograph of glazing renovation at the Yale Art & Architecture Building: Hoffmann Architects, Inc., via Wikimedia Commons;  Mosaic of ancient Greek ship: Dennis Jarvis, via Wikimedia Commons

Rudolph's BIGGS RESIDENCE: Demolition (but No Permission?)

The Biggs Residence—a Rudolph design of 1955-1956, in Delray Beach, Florida—has just now been demolished. It is pictured here from the time it received a Merit Award in the 1959 Homes for Better Living Awards sponsored by the AIA.

AN ACCELERATING RATE OF DESTRUCTION

The Burroughs Wellcome headquarters building and research center, in Durham, North Carolina—one of Paul Rudolph’s most iconic designs, and a structure of historic importance—has been turned into demolition debris.

In the last several years, it seems like we’ve experienced an acceleration in the destruction and threats to our architectural heritage—and this has hit the works of Paul Rudolph especially hard. Several important Rudolph buildings are now threatened, or have been outright destroyed or removed—and they are some of Paul Rudolph’s profoundest, key works:

• Burroughs Wellcome: DEMOLISHED

• Walker Guest House: REMOVED—taken apart, and moved to an unknown location

• Orange County Government Center: DEMOLISHED—partially, with the balance changed beyond recognition

• Niagara Falls Main Library: THREATENED

• Boston Government Service Center: THREATENED

• Milam and Rudolph Residences: SOLD -or- ON THE MARKET—with no assurances that new owners won’t demolish or change them beyond recognition

The Paul Rudolph Heritage Foundation advocates for the preservation and proper maintenance of buildings designed by Rudolph—and is available to consult with owners about sensitive adaptive reuse, renovation, and redevelopment of Rudolph buildings (especially as an alternative to demolition!)

But, vigilant as we are, sometimes we’re taken aback by news of a precipitous demolition or marring of one of Rudolph’s great designs.

THE LATEST DESTRUCTION OF A RUDOLPH BUILDING

The opening of Mike Diamond’s article about the demolition of the Biggs Residence, which appeared in the March 12, 2021 issue of the Palm Beach Post.

We’re shocked that yet another of Paul Rudolph’s fine works of architecture has been demolished—and, if the news report is accurate, it’s been allegedly done without even a permit.

The Biggs Residence is a Rudolph-designed residence in Delray Beach, Florida, from 1955-1956. Over the years, the subsequent owner or owners have not been kind to it: there have been numerous and highly conspicuous changes and additions which cannot be called sympathetic to Paul Rudolph’s original design. New owners have, in the last few years, been planning to remove the offending changes and accumulated construction—and have been lauded for their good intentions. Repairs and restorations were to be done, as well as alterations and additions that were to be sympathetic to the building (and be resonant with Paul Rudolph’s approach to planning and construction.) Plans were filed, and the owner’s architect—an award winning firm—produced a well-composed “justification statement” which offers some interesting and convincing thinking about how they intended to proceed with the project, their design strategies and solutions, and how they were to have the property “rehabilitated.”

But—

But, according to March 12th article in the Palm Beach Post, much more has actually happened at the site. Their reporter, Mike Diamond, reports that the current owners “. . . .were found to have violated the city’s building code by demolishing the house without a permit from the city’s Historic Preservation Board.”

This site photo shows that, as of the moment it was taken, some of the Biggs Residence’s structural steel was still in place—but most of the rest of the house (exterior and interior walls, windows, ceilings, finishes, cabinetry, fittings…) has been demolished and removed.

The article further says that the owners “. . . .must obtain an after-the-fact demolition permit. . . . They also face steep fines for committing and ‘irreversible’ violation of the city’s building code.” The owners are disagreeing, and claiming that the city misinterpreted their documents and, in the article’s words, their lawyer claims that “. . . .the city should have realized that the approvals for renovation could have resulted in the house being demolished based on its deteriorating condition….”

That is a claim which an attorney for the city and a city planner both dispute.

SERIOUS QUESTIONS

Perhaps there were good reasons for the owners to proceed this way—but there are serious questions:

• What were their compelling reasons?

• What were the building’s actual conditions, which led them to decide for demolition?

• What alternatives were considered?

• Could there have been other approaches?

• What did the architect think of this decision to demolish?

No doubt, there will be further developments in this case, and we will be following it.

PAUL RUDOLPH’S DESIGN AT tHE BIGGS RESIDENCE: PURITY OF CONCEPT

The Biggs Residence was—and now, unfortunately, we’ll have to speak of it in the past tense—an important part of Paul Rudolph’s oeuvre. There he continued exploring several design themes he’d been working on, ever since he’d returned from service in World War II and restarted practice in Florida—and at Biggs, perhaps, he brought one of those themes to its most perfect realization.

Rudolph’s perspective rendering for the Biggs Residence—a drawing which shows his original platonic intent: a pure “rectangular prism” floating above the ground.

Illustrations from Le Corbusier’s manifesto, “Vers une Architecture” (“Towards An Architecture”), in which he speaks of the compelling beauty of pure forms.

As you can see from Rudolph’s perspective rendering (above-left), his conception was quite “platonic”: he was intent on creating a pure form, “floating” above the earth, and tethered to it as lightly as possible—in this case, by an open staircase and a few slender uprights. Even the service block (presumably to contain or screen the boiler, and maybe an auto,) sheltering below, was fully detached from the prime living volume. Such a conception (and goal) comes out of one of the root obsessions of the Modern movement in architecture: a kind of purism which is animated by a love of geometric forms, and which eschews all that might obscure that purity. Le Corbusier, in his foundational book, “Vers une Architecture” (“Towards An Architecture”) puts it boldly:

“Architecture is the masterly, correct and magnificent play of masses brought together in light. Our eyes are made to see forms in light; light and shade reveal these forms; cubes, cones, spheres, cylinders or pyramids are the great primary forms which light reveals to advantage; the image of these is distinct and tangible within us without ambiguity. It is for this reason that these are beautiful forms, the most beautiful forms. Everybody is agreed to that, the child, the savage and the metaphysician.”

Of course, interest in (and obsession with) such “pure” geometric forms goes back to the ancients (i.e.: the term “platonic”), and even in the 18th century—a time when classical architecture was dominant, including its full ornamental armamentarium—architects like Claude-Nicolas Ledoux and Étienne-Louis Boullée produced visionary drawings of architectural projects that embraced such purity (with perhaps the most famous being Ledoux’s design for a spherical villa.)

Claude-Nicolas Ledoux’s view of a spherical country house. He fully developed the design, including plans and sections.

Paul Rudolph, born during Modernism’s heroic years. was educated by the founder of the Bauhaus himself, Walter Gropius (who was head of the architecture program at Harvard while Rudolph was a student there). He could not have helped being immersed, taught, and saturated in such aesthetic ideals—and he brought them into his work.

Looking at Rudolph’s oeuvre, we can see that he tried this platonic approach to residential design prior to Biggs: with the Walker Residence project of 1951—but that remained unbuilt; and the Leavengood Residence of 1950—but that building had a more complex program, and thus many more appurtenances outside of the house’s main body (and it also had visually firmer connections to the ground.) So Leavengood did not approach the platonic ideal anywhere as closely as Biggs.

THE AESTHETICS (AND DRAMATICS) OF STRUCTURE

An view of the interior of the Galerie des Machines, one of the exhibition buildings erected for the 1889 world’s fair in Paris. The architects (headed by Ferdinand Dutert) and the engineers (headed by Victor Contamin) dramatically showed the potentials of steel and iron—both as spanning structure and as an expressive medium. The size of the building can be judged from the figures in the distance.

In the initial decades of Rudolph’s career—given the simplicity of the programs for which he was asked to design, and the often limited budgets—structure was one of the few ways that he could explore the potentials of architectural design, and he fully used it as an expressive tool. Whether by doubling vertical members (as he did at the 1951 Maehlman Guest House and the 1952 Walker Guest House), or by using a dramatic suspended catenary roof system (as at the 1950 Healy (“Cocoon”) Guest House), or anticipating the utilization of curved plywood for structural roof arches (as at the 1951 Knott Residence project), Rudolph was always looking at ways to transcend structure’s function, and raise it to the poetics of design.

Certainly, this expressive use of structure has always been a concern of architects, from Gothic cathedral builders to the creators of the titanic structures of iron and steel which emerged during the 19th Century (especially in France, England, and the US).

The “masters” of modernism—having abandoned expressive styles, modes, and motifs available to previous generations—often turned to using structural systems as an important part of their architectural palette, and they did so in inventive ways. Mies van der Rohe’s Farnsworth House ((1945-1951) is an icon of Modern architecture and residential design—and one of the most notable aspects of his design is the relationship he set-up between the planes of the floor and roof, and the building’s vertical steel columns. The columns are, or course, supporting elements—yet Mies plays with their role, having them visually slide past the floor and roof’s perimeter steel members. This confers a partially floating quality to those planes—possibly one of Mies’ prime goals. [It’s also notable that Philip Johnson, at his Glass House (1947-1949), took yet another direction with these relationships. He placed the vertical steel structural members inside the house’s volume, and integrating them with the frames which held the walls of glass—and thus absorbed the structure into the design of the building’s envelope.]

The eyes of the architectural world were on Mies’ design (and Johnsons!)—and Rudolph would have known them well. At Biggs, in contrast to Mies or Johnson, Rudolph chose to pull the perimeter structural frame noticeably inward from the outer edge house’s main floor volume above. Thus, instead of experiencing the building as a pair of planes (as with Mies), Biggs main living area is perceived as a separate volume (reinforcing its “platonic-ness”), only resting upon the structure. Moreover, instead of placing the beams in an overlapping relationship (as Mies did), he intersects them boldly—and they appear to be penetrating through each other.

LEFT: The Farnsworth House (1945-1951) by Mies van der Rohe. Its vertical steel columns visually “pass by” the floor’s and roof’s horizontal structural steel “C” members. ABOVE: In contrast to the Farnsworth House, the Biggs' steel columns and beams appear to pass through each other.

Not only can this be seen on Biggs’ exterior, but it is experienced on the inside as well: the large ceiling beams, which dramatically span the living room, also have the same interpenetrating relationship to the interior’s steel columns.

Those column-beam relationships did not exhaust Rudolph’s exploration of structure at Biggs. He had one more occasion in which he used exterior steel elements in an intriguing way: When the perimeter beams met at the outside corners, instead of butting them (as would be done in standard steel construction), he mitered them at the corners. [You can see this in an exterior photo below.] In this way, the upper and lower flanges of the steel beams were not just there for their structural role, but—via this mitering connection—their visual power as a pair of parallel planes was revealed.

THE PRACTICALITIES OF COMFORT AND CONVENIENCE

Even with such geometric ideals, structural intrigues, and the other fascinations in which creative architects like Rudolph engage, he was also a very practical designer—and sensitive to his client’s needs. At the point when he received the Biggs commission, he had nearly three dozen constructed projects “under his belt.” So, whatever his interest in building pure forms, his planning of the Biggs Residence included features which the owners would find gracious and practical.

The main (upper) floor contained:

• two bedrooms (well separated, providing for excellent spatial and acoustic privacy, and each with a significant amount of closets and its own bath)

• a central living/dining area (with large amounts of windows for good cross-ventilation—and the ability to catch breezes from the house’s raised design)

• a kitchen adjacent to the dining area (with a wise balance of openness and enclosure)

• a broad “storage wall” in the central area—a feature of American post-World War II residential design, pioneered by George Nelson

Paul Rudolph’s floor plan of the upper (main volume) level of the Biggs Residence, exhibiting his practical and gracious sense of planning.

The ground floor was also well thought out, and included:

• An exterior sitting area (well shaded from the Florida sun)

• A covered parking area (also shielding the car from solar overheating, as well as Florida’s occasional heavy rains)

• The entry and stairs (up to the main level)

• Additional storage or mechanical space (always useful)

The Biggs living room, in which some segments of the house’s structural steel can be seen—especially the pair of long beams which span the living space.

Another view of the living area—this time, towards the dining table at the end of the room, which sits near the storage wall. At the far right is the entry passage to the kitchen. In this photograph, one of room’s pair of large steel ceiling beams is strongly emphasized.

Raising the body of the building liberates space at the ground level, which is left open for shaded outdoor seating and parking. Structural steel—for the columns, and the inset perimeter and intermediary beams—is exposed, and the connections are composed and detailed with care.

FURTHER DEVELOPMENTS (AND WHAT YOU CAN DO)

We’ll keep looking into the Biggs case, and let you know how this develops.

If you have any information on this situation—or know of any other Paul Rudolph buildings that might be threatened—please contact us at: office@paulrudolphheritagefoundation.org

We can keep you up-to-date with bulletins about the latest developments—and to get them, please join our foundation’s mailing list. You’ll get all the updates, (as well as other Rudolph news.)—and you can sign-up at the bottom of this page.

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IMAGE CREDITS

The Paul Rudolph Heritage Foundation gratefully thanks all the individuals and organizations whose images are used in this scholarly and educational project.

The credits are shown when known, and are to the best of our knowledge. If any use, credits, or rights need to be amended or changed, please let us know.

Note: When Wikimedia Commons links are provided, they are linked to the information page for that particular image. Information about the rights to use each of those images, as well as technical information on the images, can be found on those individual pages.

Credits, from top-to-bottom, and left-to-right:

Biggs exterior view: photo by Ernest Graham, from a vintage issue of House & Home magazine, June 1959, courtesy of US Modernist Library;  Section-perspective drawing of Burroughs Wellcome building: by Paul Rudolph, © The Estate of Paul Rudolph, The Paul Rudolph Heritage Foundation;  Demolition photo of Burroughs Wellcome building: photography by news photojournalist Robert Willett, as they appeared in a January 12, 2021 on-line article in the Raleigh, NC based newspaper The News & Observer;  Perspective rendering of Biggs Residence: drawing by Paul Rudolph, © The Estate of Paul Rudolph, The Paul Rudolph Heritage Foundation;  Mies’ Farnsworth House column-beam relationship: photo by Benjamin Lipsman, via Wikimedia Commons;  Plan of Biggs Residence: © The Estate of Paul Rudolph, The Paul Rudolph Heritage Foundation;  Photographs of interiors and exterior of Biggs Residence: photo by Ernest Graham, from a vintage issue of House & Home magazine, June 1959, courtesy of US Modernist Library;  Photograph of Paul Rudolph: © The Estate of Paul Rudolph, The Paul Rudolph Heritage Foundation

The Plan's The Thing: Comparing the Plans of Master Architects (including Rudolph)

COMPARING ARCHITECTS: DIFFICULT AND DANGEROUS

Trying to compare architects (or more precisely: comparing their bodies of work) is a dangerous game—for the challenge immediately brings up a number of thorny, imponderable questions:

Balancing the factors to be judged, as listed at left, is part of the challenge.

• Where would one begin?

• What exactly is one comparing? [Technical mastery? Efficient planning? Aesthetic delight? Spatial variation? Contextual sensitivity? How much they changed the direction of architectural history? Diversity of building types? Energy efficiency? The satisfaction of their clients?. . . ]

• If one is looking for an assessment of overall excellence, judging on a multi-factorial basis (including the above items), how does one balance and weight the factors?

• For each factor, hat would one measure?

• On what scale would one measure?

• Is the notion of “measurement” meaningful in this domain?

• Who are to be the judges?'

• What values do the judges (the ones doing the comparing) bring to their decision-making?

All of these questions become ever more fraught in the context of our present culture, one whose behavior vibrates between two modes: pluralist, permissive non-judgementalism -vs- abrupt severity when making judgements. In architectural matters, we often feel sure of the rightness of our assessments (even the ones offered off-the-cuff) —yet we can crumble if ever asked to seriously and patiently address the questions of Who are we to judge? and Where do our standards originally derive from?

THE UNAVOIDABLITY OF JUDGEMENT

Philip Johnson: “We cannot Not know history” —a point which Johnson and Rudolph could both agree upon (but these long-time friends each used that lesson in very different ways.)

Paul Rudolph’s friend, Philip Johnson once scandalized the Modern architecture community by asserting:

“WE CANNOT NOT KNOW HISTORY.”

When offered, at mid-century, it seemed an outrageous claim. At that time many architects believed that (with the advent of Modernism) architecture had left history behind as something irrelevant to current practice.

[By-the-way: Johnson’s claim is one which we believe Rudolph would have agreed with—though with his own, very different ideas about what to do with such historical knowledge.]

Just as Johnson is reminding us that history is something that an honest and cultured architect cannot pretend to ever transcend, we also cannot pretend that we are exempt from making judgements—however difficult it is to try to make them.

Not only is it in our nature to offer judgement, but we are constantly called upon to do so in numerous domains and occasions, as when we are selecting collaborators, teaching, assessing what’s worth preserving, participating in juries, and prioritizing what to focus upon when working on a design (including where to allocate the budget). Most consequent of all judgements is when a client, about to enter upon a building project, makes the judgement about which architect to select for the commission. So we can make a parallel assertion to Johnson’s:

WE CANNNOT NOT MAKE JUDGEMENTS

—and, since in our education, work, and personal development, we model ourselves after the designers we admire, that inevitability of judgement applies to architects: we’ll never stop comparing them.

MAKING THE TASK A LITTLE LESS IMPOSSIBLE

Even though we’ll never stop trying to compare architects (judging their relative worth), we’ll never arrive at a broadly agreed-upon method for making “final and ultimate” assessments—and that’s owing to the fact that the scales-of-value shift in each era, as does the culture’s changing mood about what it finds interesting or crucial.

So the task is impossible—and even if it wasn’t impossible, it would be overwhelming because there are too many factors to consider. The good news is that the path is sometimes made a bit smoother for us by researchers who focus-in on a single aspect of architecture. By doing so—by showing how various architects have dealt with a specific issue—-these writers bring some clarity to the discussion. The seeming narrowness of their investigations calms the storm of mental overwhelm, and opens-up space for clearer thinking.

An excellent example is the work done by Kevin Bone and his associates, shown in the book “Lessons from Modernism,” which looked at the various ways that Modern architects—Wright, Aalto, Bo Bardi, Niemeyer, , Rudolph, and others—dealt with environmental issues, especially how they handled solar loads.

Lessons from Modernism, edited by architect and educator Kevin Bone, focused on strategies several prominent architects used when dealing with environmental concerns—especially solar loading. Two of Rudolph’s houses are analyzed in the book, and his Walker House is shown above.

Another example of this type of highly focused study are books which highlight the use of a particular architectural material (i.e.: glass, concrete, ceramics, metalwork…) and show a banquet of photos and drawings of how various architects used and detailed them. “Design With Glass” and the two-volume “Aluminum in Modern Architecture” (see image at right), both by architectural writer John Peter, are classic examples of such books from the “mid-century Modern” period—and the one he wrote about glass included Paul Rudolph’s Jewett Arts Center at Wellesley College.

COMPARING ARCHITECT’S PLANS

Hideaki Haraguchi’s book— A COMPARITIVE ANALYISIS OF 20TH-CENTURY HOUSES — is in this tradition of studies which concentrate on one aspect of architectural creation. The author focuses-in on floor plans designed by the most prominent and creative architects of the Modern period—and he shares his research and conclusions in three illuminating ways:

• Chapter essays (“Tripartite Composition”, “The English Tradition”, “Towards Universal Space”…) about the various families of approaches used in the the design of house plans—richly illustrated with many examples from each era

• An extensive timeline, from the 1400’s to the 1980’s, showing transformations in the design of residential plans—with examples of representative plans inserted within the chart

• Numerous illustrations of the houses, based of the plans: over 100 axonometric drawings

Paul Rudolph’s work is cited in the chapter in which the author analyzes how Mid-century designers began to depart from the use of the “Universal Space” concept for residential planning (an approach which had previously been favored among Modern architects.)

The book includes a fold-out timeline to show the evolution in Modern architects’ approaches to residential planning. Rather than just name the architects (or the houses), the author places small images of the each of the plans on the chart—a graphically helpful method.

GRAPHIC AND SPATIAL ANALYSIS

The author’s depiction of two levels of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Robie House—one of the numerous drawings in the book which use the axonometric drawing technique to convey spatial quality as well as the plan layout.

The author, via those 3 ways of telling the story of the changes in house design, offers rich insights into master architects’ planning philosophies, techniques, and styles—and the historical context in which they operated.

But the real glory of this study are the abundance of drawings which the Haraguchi created for the book. These drawings show the plans, but also convey a sense of the each house’s spaces by also showing the walls, columns, and window & door openings—and the author does this in through axonometric drawings.

That’s a type of drawing where it looks like the walls are being extruded upward from the plan—so it an axonometric drawing not only shows the layout of the rooms, but also tangibly suggests the type of spaces which the layout gives rise to. [Although Paul Rudolph was known as a master of perspective drawing, he sometimes also utilized the axonometric drawing technique—and we posted an article about that here.]

In addition to using this explanatory drawing technique, Haraguchi’s drawings are reproduced as white images on a black background. This not only evokes the authority of traditional architectural blueprints, but this graphic approach also adds a sense of visual drama which focuses the reader’s attention.

RUDOLPH, IN WHITE ON BLACK

Those drawings are the real treasures of this book. Using that technique, Haraguchi drew over 100 axonometric plans of house designs, by forty-five 20th Century architectural masters, including:

Wright, Hoffmann, Lutyens, Niemeyer, Taut, Sharoun, Le Corbusier, Rietveld, van Doesburg, Chareau, Mies, Breuer, Neutra, Kahn, Venturi, Eisenman, Tigerman, Botta, Rossi—and Rudolph!

Paul Rudolph is represented by houses designed across a quarter-century of his prolific career—from the 1948 Siegrist Residence -to- the 1972 Micheels Residence. The author gives emphasis to one of Rudolph’s finest designs: the Milam Residence of 1959, showing both levels of the house.

The two-page spread wherein Haraguchi explores—via axonometric drawings—three of Rudolph’s house designs. LEFT-HAND PAGE: the 1959 Milam Residence (showing both levels.) RIGHT-HAND PAGE: the 1972 Micheels Residence (shown lower-left), and the 1948 Siegrist Residence (shown upper-right.)

A closer view of the page with the Haraguchi’s drawings of Rudolph’s Milam Residence in Ponte Verda Beach, Florida. It shows the house’s two levels, and the use of axonometric drawings convey information not only abut the layout of the rooms, but also about how the walls, windows balconies (and double-height planning) shape the interior spaces.

THE POWER OF COMPARISONS

Brian Sewell was one of Britain’s most perceptive art critics (and one of the most controversial.) In this powerful video segment, about developing one’s aesthetic sense, he cites the effective use of comparison.

Comparison can be a powerful tool—especially when a scholar provides opens up the question by providing materials which allow us to intensely focus-in on an aspect of architectural design.

Brian Sewell (1931-2015), the British art critic known for his fiery opinions, as well as the depth and sensitivity of his knowledge, spoke inspiringly about the importance of comparison—what he called “a repeat experience”—for developing a deeper sense of what’s significant and beautiful. He was speaking of painting and sculpture—and the same approach can be applied to the art of architecture.

For gaining an in-depth knowledge of the approaches that were used in designing the Modern masterworks of residential architecture—how such strategies evolved, varied, an reflected larger issues and philosophies in the architecture of that century—Hideaki Haraguchi’s A Comparative Analysis of 20th-Century Houses is an indispensable resource, guide and well of insight. That he included several examples of Paul Rudolph’s work is additional evidence of the author’s wisdom.

Returning to our original theme—the difficulty of comparing architects—and the multiple obstacles entailed in such a task: this book’s concentrated examination of a single aspect of architects’ work is the sort of study that can aid—via its focus and profound clarity—in making such challenging assessments.

BOOK INFORMATION AND AVAILABILITY:

• TITLE: A Comparative Analysis of 20th-Century Houses

• AUTHOR: Hideaki Haraguchi

• PUBLISHER: In Great Britain: Academy Editions; In the US: Rizzoli International

• FORMAT: Paperback, 11-1/2” x 11-1/2”, 92 pages, hundreds of illustrations

• YEAR OF PUBLICATION: Great Britain: 1988; US: 1989

• ISBN: 0-8478-1023-2

• AMAZON PAGE: here

• ABEBOOKS PAGE: here

A broader view of the timeline in Haraguchi’s book, in which the author traces the evolution of architects’ residential planning over the course of the several centuries. Plans, representative of changing philosophies of design, are inserted into the chart—aiding the clarity of the presentation.

IMAGE CREDITS:

Balance scale: photo by Poussin jean, via Wikimedia Commons; Photo portrait of Philip Johnson: photograph by Carl Van Vechten, from the Van Vechten Collection at the Library of Congress

Paul Rudolph is ICONIC— in the New Book on American Houses !

We already knew that Paul Rudolph’s work is “iconic”—especially if one goes by the dictionary definition:

widely known and recognized, and acknowledged especially for distinctive excellence

But it’s always good to have that affirmed by others—and we’re even more delighted when that assessment takes the form of a beautiful new book on residential architecture:

THE ICONIC AMERICAN HOUSE

The time-scale which the book covers is from 1900 to the present—well over a century of innovative, forward looking, elegant, and striking designs. Introducing it, Dominic Bradbury writes:

“The houses in this book chart a journey across America and across time, embracing many different aesthetics and expressions of form. . . .They are shining landmarks. . . .full of life, drama, and invention.”

The book manifests excellence by several criteria:

Sample spreads from the book—the ones above and below are of Rudolph’s Healy (“Cocoon”) Guest House; and the two spreads below that are of Rudolph’s Hiss (“Umbrella”) House.

• Selection and surprise: Many of the fifty houses profiled are well-known to all lovers of architecture (Fallingwater, the Eames House, the Glass House….) But part of the delight of this book is that one discovers houses that are unfamiliar, or designs that you’d only vaguely-but-intriguingly heard about. Thus, in this volume, you can finally visit the near-legendary High Desert House (Joshua Tree, CA) by Kendrick Bangs Kellogg"; and get to look inside houses you’d previously only known by a single glimpse—like the Sculptured House (Golden, CO) by Charles Deaton.

• Freshness of View: Bradbury brings keen insight, and offers key information for every project—but it’s the book’s visual sense that stands-out for us. Even with buildings which we’ve looked at over-and-over, Richard Powers’ photographs help us see them with a first-time freshness—and that allows us to discover new aspects of buildings and interiors which had been as familiar as the faces of old friends.

• Production Values: Reinforcing the sense of the specialness, of the houses chosen for inclusion, are the physical aspects of the book: the volume’s overall size (allowing one to even see details with clarity), the choice of paper (of a luxurious thickness), and the careful color balance of the printed images (neither dry nor saturated).

• Highlighting Paul Rudolph: Of course, the book is filled with he work of some of he most famous architects of the 20th Century—boldface names like Wright, Johnson, Niemeyer, Venturi, Kahn, Shindler… But Rudolph is one of the few architects to have two houses in the book: the Healy (“Cocoon”) Guest House, and the Hiss (“Umbrella”) House (both in Sarasota, FL, where Rudolph started his career.)

Each of the book’s 50 residences is presented across several pages, with photos, descriptive text, and informative captions.

Shown here are some of the page spreads, from the sections on the two Rudolph’s houses chosen for the book. [But Note: our photos of the book cannot begin to convey the richness, sharpness, and careful color balance of the photographs in the actual book!]

WHERE CREDIT IS DUE

Our only quibble with the book—but one worth noting in the interest of historical accuracy—is in the identification of Rudolph’s design work with his early partner, Ralph Twitchell. The book seems to give an equal measure of credit for the late 1940’s Healy (“Cocoon”) Guest House to both Ralph Twitchell and Paul Rudolph. It’s true that they were partners at that time, and that Twitchell had the “contacts” to bring in work, and that he was a highly knowledgeable presence on the construction site. But the consensus among historians is that Rudolph was the firm’s prime designer—and certainly the creative source for the kind of architectural innovation shown in the Healy project. As historians, we reject any attempts to erase figures from architectural history, or to underplay authentic contributions to the design process—but we also seek accuracy, and we hope that this point about design responsibility will be adjusted in any future editions of this fine book.

RELATED VOLUMES

Writer Dominic Bradbury and photographer Richard Powers—both energetic participants in covering the world of design—have partnered on numerous other books on architecture and interiors. This new book might be considered to be part of a series, as they’ve previously published two volumes on related topics, with the same publisher, and in a matching format: The Iconic House and The Iconic Interior.

Two other of their design-focused books, forming an…

…“ICONIC” series, published by Thames & Hudson.

THE AUTHORS

DOMINIC BRADBURY - WRITER

Prolific author of books with a strong focus on architecture and design, Dominic Bradbury is a writer, journalist, consultant, and lecturer—including having been guest speaker at the Victoria & Albert Museum. His abundant books (many done with photographer Richard Powers) include: Mid-Century Modern Complete, The Iconic House, The Iconic Interior, Atlas of Mid-Century Modern Houses, and The Secret Life of the Modern House—and as a journalist he has contributed to magazines and newspapers internationally, including The Financial Times, House & Garden, World of Interiors, The Guardian, and Architectural Digest.

RICHARD POWERS - PHOTOGRAPHER

In his quarter-century of professional experience, Richard Powers has developed a remarkable oeuvre, specializing in the photography of interiors, architecture, and the built environment. With a portfolio that shows a worldwide scope, he has received commissions from design firms and publications such as Architectural Digest, The Wall Street Journal, World of Interiors, and publishers like Thames & Hudson and Rizzoli. His photographs are featured in over 20 books (many done with Dominic Bradbury), including The Iconic Interior, New Natural Home, Superhouse, and Waterside Modern.

BELOW are two further spreads from The Iconic American House, from the section on Wright’s Fallingwater—additional evidence of the beautiful and informative work of this talented partnership.

BOOK INFORMATION AND AVAILABILITY:

• TITLE: The Iconic American House

• AUTHORS: Dominic Bradbury, with photography by Richard Powers

• PUBLISHER: Thames & Hudson

• FORMAT: Hardcover; 11-1/4 x 10-1/2 inches; 320 pages; 400 illustrations

• ISBN: 9780500022955

• PUBISHER’S WEB PAGE FOR THE BOOK: here

• AMAZON PAGE: here

• BARNES & NOBLE PAGE: here

Shown below are the book’s Contents pages, with a grid of photos of the 50 houses which the authors chose to include—and above is a portion of one of those pages, showing Rudolph is in very good company with Frank Lloyd Wright, Eero Saarinen, the Eames, Alden B. Dow…

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Rudolph And His Architectural Photographers — PART TWO

P. J. McDonnell’s photograph of the Burroughs Wellcome building, in its current state, shows how great architecture has the power to always maintain its dignity. Photograph courtesy of © PJ McDonnell, The Paul Rudolph Heritage Foundation Archives

In the first part of this study, Paul Rudolph And His Architectural Photographers—PART ONE, we looked at some of the most important architectural photographers of the 20th Century—Stoller, Kidder Smith, Molitor…—ones whose work had included a focus on the architecture and interiors of Paul Rudolph.

PART TWO—this article—will look at architecture & interiors photographers of the current era (almost all of whom are now very active!) whose work has also focused upon Rudolph. While this is not an exhaustive review of every photographer who has taken on that fascinating subject, it does show that an impressive range of talents have turned their attentions to Rudolph.

Above: Paul Rudolph’s bedroom, within his penthouse apartment. Below: an interior of the Modulightor Building. Photographs © Peter Aaron / OTTO, Archives of the Paul Rudolph Heritage Foundation

PETER AARON

Peter Aaron writes of his work: “I have been shooting architecture and interiors for thirty-five years. I started my career as a cinematographer, but consistently found myself more attracted to still photography. After working for designers Ward Bennett and Joseph d’Urso as they developed their High Tech style, I began a transformational apprenticeship with the great architectural photographer Ezra Stoller. After two years I began working on my own, adopting Ezra’s strong compositional approach while developing an individual style through the use of dramatic camera angles, theatrical lighting, and cinematic techniques. Since that time I have photographed structures by many of the most influential and groundbreaking architects of the last thirty years, including Robert A.M. Stern, Rem Koolhaas, Charles Gwathmey, Michael Graves, Peter Eisenman, Robert Venturi, Skidmore, Owings and Merrill, and Raphael Vinoly. I have been a contributing photographer for Architectural Digest and my images frequently appear in other magazines and books.” You can see an extensive selection of his work here, and learn about his recent book here.

AARON AND PAUL RUDOLPH: In 2018, the Paul Rudolph Heritage Foundation created two exhibits to celebrate Rudolph’s centenary, and also published corresponding catalogs for each. In preparation for these exhibits, while researching within our archives, we came across a beautiful image of Rudolph’s own bedroom within his Beekman Place Quadruplex penthouse—and that photograph was by Peter Aaron. We contacted Mr. Aaron and he graciously gave us permission to use the photograph. This opened up a dialogue with him, the result of which is that he has gone on to make light-filled photographs of the interiors of Paul Rudolph’s Modulightor Building (which you can see on that building’s project page.) Mr. Aaron has written of his goals: “As a photographer, my mission is to provide an image that’s a sort of ‘Platonic ideal’ of each structure, to show the building as the architect originally envisioned it…” —and we believe that his photographs of the work of Paul Rudolph are superb examples of the achievement of that aim.

One of the spectacular interiors of Paul Rudolph’s Deane Residence. Photograph © John Dessarzin

JOHN DESSARZIN

Mr. Dessarzin is a professional photographer of many decades experience, whose work has hardly been restricted to architectural subjects. As his impressive portfolio shows, his photography has focused on the human form, nature, news events, the famous and the anonymous, the foreign and the domestic—as well as architecture. Of that subject, he says: “At times [he pictures] the ineffable splendor in modern architecture as a haunting, commercial phantom among the iconic, storied skyscrapers of profit. In other instances, he presents ancient stone singularities as a charismatic existence that amply forges, but also devours human character in shades of ambivalence suggesting confused or decadent aspects of civilization.” Clearly, this is a photographer who is using his visual work to reach beyond the tangible to the ineffable—a commendable goal for any artist. You can learn more about him, and see his artistry in light and color, here.

DESSARZIN AND PAUL RUDOLPH: Paul Rudolph’s Deane Residence—a design he commenced at the end of the 1960’s—is known for its empathic use of structure, with geometrically composed framework expressed on both the exterior and interior. We came across a suite of photos of this dramatic design—images of spectacular color and drama—and it was the work of John Dessazin. He has graciously allowed us to include them on the Paul Rudolph Heritage Foundation’s project page for this house.

ED CHAPPELL

Ed Chappell, based in Florida, is a photographer with a special eye for the splendor of color in shooting architecture, fashion, landscape, and other subjects. He says of his work “I capture images. Make visions visible. Bring concepts to light. . . .I’m faced with challenges of every description—each of which calls for a unique solution, and all of which present the same demand: make it work. . . .You have to know the rules to break the rules, which may be exactly what is required. Experimentation and thinking ahead always pays off.” His website, here, displays a great range of his work.

CHAPPELL AND PAUL RUDOLPH: Paul Rudolph’s home in New York City, his “Quadruplex” penthouse, has been photographed a number of times. Perhaps the best article (with the most complete set of pictures) that has ever been published on it—as it looked the way that Rudolph had occupied and furnished it—was in a 2007 issue of Florida Design Review (and it was the cover story.) Richard Geary, a great admirer of Rudolph, wrote the text; and Ed Chappell did the photographs. The article conveys the sensual-layered composition of the spaces which Paul Rudolph created and in which he lived. Unfortunately, the Florida Design Review is no longer published, but you can still get a copy of that issue here.

A view of the opening spread of an article in an issue of Architectural Digest, in which Rudolph’s Deane Residence is profiled—with photographs by Cervin Robinson.

CERVIN ROBINSON

(1928-) One of the most celebrated of the second generation of great architectural photographers, Mr. Robinson was born in Boston, and started photographing at the age of 12. He attended Harvard University and in the 1950’s worked as an assistant to one of America’s most distinguished photographers, Walker Evans. He has said that “pictures of buildings seem to me as satisfying as pictures of people were frustrating”—and architectural photography became the focus of his long, creative, and prolific career. He traveled widely and has worked in a freelance capacity as a photographer for architects and design magazines since 1958—as well as himself being the author and illustrator of several books. Robinson’s work has been shown in many gallery and museums, including the Brooklyn Museum, the Ammon Carter, and the Philadelphia Museum. His website can be found here.

ROBINSON AND PAUL RUDOLPH: In a career that created some of the most dramatic formal solutions in Modern architecture, Paul Rudolph’s Deane Residence is among the most striking that he designed—famous for its rhythm of polygonal structural frames. Cervin Robinson photographed it for an article in Architectural Digest (with text by the late architect, Frank Israel). This master photographer was able to capture the variety of experiences inherent in this the house’s multi-level organization of overlapping spaces, and complex exterior geometries.

ANNIE SCHLECHTER

Ms. Schlechter says of herself and her work that she is “. . . .a native New Yorker who has been working as a photographer since 2000. Her clients include House Beautiful, New York Magazine, Better Homes & Gardens, Veranda, CN Traveler, The World of Interiors. Her commercial work ranges from hotel groups such as The Bowery Hotel and The Greenwich Hotel Group to designers and architects such as Marianna Kennedy, Chiarastella Cattana, Joe Serrins Studio, Inc Architecture & Design among others.” You can see Annie Schlechter’s splendid work here.

SCHLECHTER AND PAUL RUDOLPH: Ms. Schlechter collaborated with well-known writer Polly Devlin to create a book on amazing interiors in New York City—but, being largely private, these were spaces which the public had rarely or never known about or seen. The result was a book rich in story and color, “New York: Behind Closed Doors". They approached Ernst Wagner, the owner of the Paul Rudolph-designed Modulightor Building, about including it in the book—to which he not only agreed, but he also worked with them to provide the full background story, including Paul Rudolph’s intent for building, as well as Wagner’s reflections on it. Ms. Schlechter has graciously allowed the Paul Rudolph Heritage Foundation to include her photographs of the building and its interiors on their project page for the Modulightor Building.

The Modulightor Building—as seen in the evening, within its urban context. Photograph © Joe Polowczuk, The Paul Rudolph Heritage Foundation Archives

JOE POLOWCZUK

Among the younger generation of design-focused photographers, those who have a sensibility that makes for great architectural images, is Joe Polowczuk. We may say “younger,”, but to look at his portfolio—which is full of variation in subject and varieties of visual delight—is to see someone with great experience and an exceptional eye for the possibilities of light. You can learn more about Joe, and see a beautiful selection of his work here—and you can read our article about him here (in which you can also see some of the photos he took of the exterior and interiors of Rudolph’s Modulightor Building).

POLOWCZUK AND PAUL RUDOLPH: In 2019, in cooperation with the Paul Rudolph Heritage Foundation, Joe made some luminous photographs of Paul Rudolph’s Modulightor Building, as well as the Rolling Chair that was also designed by Rudolph for use in his own penthouse home.

Ms. Broder captured the sense of deep space and spreading light, within one of the upper floors of the Modulightor Building. Photograph © Anne Broder, The Paul Rudolph Heritage Foundation Archives

ANN BRODER

Anne Broder is a photographer who works both in the professional world, making photographs of interiors with an unerring eye for composition and color, and also uses photography to create moving artistic images of architecture, sculpture, and abstract forms. Of her work, she says “Today, I freelance as a real estate photographer and work the camera for architects, interior designers, retail shops, portraiture and for my own joy of photography.” You can see her beautiful work here.

BRODER AND PAUL RUDOLPH: Ann. Broder had become aware of the light-filled and varied spaces of Paul Rudolph’s Modulightor Building in New York City—a project that Rudolph had commenced in 1988. She approached us about photographing the building, and we were delighted to have Ms. Broder bring her eye and skills for recording this amazing building (especially, but not limited to, the recently finished uppermost floors of the building.)

An interior of Paul Rudolph’s penthouse apartment, in its current state. Photograph © Francis Dzikowski / OTTO, Archives of the Paul Rudolph Heritage Foundation

FRANCIS DZIKOWSKI

Mr. Dzikowski writes of his himself and his work that he “. . . .attended Virginia Polytechnic Institute’s foundation program in architecture and studied photography at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia Pennsylvania. He spent a decade living and traveling abroad photographing historical restoration projects and archaeological excavations. While photographing in Egypt’s Valley of the Kings for the Theban Mapping Project, Francis also taught photography at the American University in Cairo. He currently lives in Brooklyn, New York working as an architectural and interiors photographer. In 2009 he completed publication of a book titled, Public Art New York. . . .” You can see his work here, and learn more abut his book here.

DZIKOWSKI AND PAUL RUDOLPH: Paul Rudolph’s own home in New York City, his “Quadruplex”, has been photographed at various times over the decades. But it has been relatively inaccessible in recent years—so it was a great delight when the building’s current owners allowed the Paul Rudolph Heritage Foundation to visit it at the beginning of 2020. Francis Dzikowkski was present during that visit, creating a vivid portfolio of images to document the current state of that fascinating set of spaces.

A middle-distant view of a side elevation of the Burroughs Wellcome building, stately sitting within North Carolina’s landscape. Photograph © PJ McDonnell, The Paul Rudolph Heritage Foundation Archives

P. J. McDONNELL

Mr. McDonnell, who is based in North Carolina, says of himself: “I am a photographer, originally from New Jersey. I came across the Burroughs Wellcome building while browsing maps of the Research Triangle. Learning about the building is what sparked my interest and appreciation for Paul Rudolph's work.” You can see more of his photography—which certainly displays his strong interest in architecture, but which also embraces other visually fascinating subjects—on his Instagram page, here.

McDONNELL AND PAUL RUDOLPH: We came to really appreciate the work of P. J. McDonnell during our current campaign to save the Burroughs Wellcome building in North Carolina. The building had been the US headquarters and research center of the pharmaceutical giant, but it is now under threat of demolition. While the most familiar and frequently published published images of the building show it pristine and new, P. J. McDonnell’s photographs—made much more recently—show it in its current state. These powerful images share with us a building which, while needing work, also shows that great architecture can always maintain its power and dignity. McDonnell states “Like all of his work, the Burroughs Wellcome building is otherworldly, awe inspiring, and a one-of-a-kind building that could never be replaced.”

Rudolph And His Architectural Photographers — PART ONE

A compelling photo by G. E. Kidder Smith of Paul Rudolph’s Burroughs Wellcome US headquarters and research center, shown near the time of the building’s completion. Here, the photographer gives us an image which simultaneously captures the architecture’s play of volumes, structural and geometric adventurousness, aspects of its siting, and scale. Photo courtesy of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology

PHOTOGRAPHIC POWER

What’s more important: a great building -or- a great photograph of it?

It’s an impossible question to answer—not because of its difficulty, but rather: because the question itself attempts to compare such different entities. The “actuality” of architecture—the way one would come to know a building, in-person, by entering and moving through it and experiencing the spaces sequentially (truly a four-dimensional phenomenon), and also through other senses (sound and touch)—is wholly different from the way that one takes-in the information embodied in a two-dimensional photograph.

Then how are architectural photographs important?

The answer: in their potential for influence.

ENDURING AND WIDESPREAD INFLUENCE

No matter how many people see a building in-person, an uncalculable greater number can see it in photographs—-and those viewings continue onward, even if the building ceases to exist.

Probably the most famous case is Mies van der Rohe’s Barcelona Pavilion. It was built for a 1929 international exposition, and—from the time of its inauguration-to- its demolition—it only existed for less than a year. Since then, it has been known from a handful of photographs and its plan.

Mies’ Barcelona Pavilion, was built in 1929 and demolished within the following year. Of the handful of photographs recording what it looked like when extant, this is probably the most famous image.

Mies van der Rohe’s Barcelona Pavilion of 1929 was built for an international exposition. It is preponderantly known only through a handful of photographs and two drawings (the plan, above, and a detail of a typical column.) Yet on the strength of this small group of images, it gained—and retains!—world-class status as one of the ultimate icons of architectural Modernism.

Of that small group of photographs, the most famous image is probably the one shown above. Those photos, combined with the plan drawing, have been included in countless books, articles, lectures, curricula—-and, even more important: they’ve become integrated into the thinking of every Modern architect. [We’ve written here about Rudolph’s own interest in the Barcelona Pavilion, and also here about his relationship to Mies’ work.] Now, coming-up on a century since it’s demolition, this iconic building continues to resonate through architectural education, scholarship, and practice— mainly because of photographs.

Further: try as we may to visit the great, iconic examples of architecture, they are just too dispersed. So even a devoted architectural traveler could spend decades just trying to see most of them. So, practically speaking, we have to experience and learn about most of of the world’s architecture from photographs.

THE GREAT PHOTOGRAPHERS OF MODERN ARCHIECTURE—CREATING THE ICONS WE REMEMBER

The 20th and early 21st centuries have been graced with architectural photographers that can be considered “artists-in-their-own-right”. That’s because they’ve not only been able to capture the formal essence of architectural works, but—like visual alchemists—they have also created images which (through their choices of point-of-view, lighting, focus, and composition) have virtually created the vital identities of those buildings.

Prime examples would be the powerful photo that Ezra Stoller took of Paul Rudolph’s Yale Art & Architecture Building—it’s the image we “have in our head” when we think of the building; Yukio Futagawa’s chroma-rich capturing of the interior of Rudolph’s Tuskegee Chapel; and Balthazar Korab’s photos of the soaring wings of Saarinen’s TWA “Flight Center” terminal at Kennedy Airport. To many of us, those images are the building.

Ezra Stoller’s photograph of the exterior of Paul Rudolph’s Yale Art & Architecture Building became the iconic image of it—and it’s included on the cover of his book on that famous building.

Each issue of Futagawa’s journal, GA (Global Architecture) focused on one or two buildings. This one is on Rudolph’s Tuskegee Chapel and Boston Govt. Service Center—and Tuskegee is on the cover.

Balthazar Korab photographed a number of designs by Eero Saarinen, including the TWA terminal for Kennedy airport. His photographic work on that project ranged from recording the Saarinen office’s working models, to construction photos (like the one above), to the finished building. Even in its construction stage, when it was only raw concrete, Korab was able to capture the drama of the building. Photo courtesy of the Balthazar Korab Photographic Archive, Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division.

RUDOLPH AND HIS PHOTOGRAPHERS

Paul Rudolph worked with some of the century’s greatest architectural photographers—the ones who are celebrated for working with the leading figures in the world of architectural Modernism. While Rudolph might have been directly involved with some photographers—commissioning them, or requesting that they focus on certain aspects of a building—in other cases, even without Rudolph’s involvement, great photographers have been engaged (by others) to shoot his work; or have done so just out of their own interest in his oeuvre.

While not exhaustive, we’ll review a round-up of many of the photographers who have been focused on the work of Paul Rudolph—and we’ll do this in two parts:

• PART ONE (this article) looks at the great architectural photographers of the early-to-late 20th Century, who have worked on Rudolph’s oeuvre.

• PART TWO will look at photographers—most still very active—who have more recently focused on Rudolph’s work.

EZRA STOLLER

(1915-2004) When one thinks of architectural photography in America, the name—or rather: the images—of Ezra Stoller are what probably first come to mind. For decades, he photographed many of the 20th Century’s most significant new buildings in the US (by the country’s premier architects), thereby creating an archive of the achievements of Modern American Architecture. More than that, Stoller’s views are some of the most iconic images of that era.

STOLLER AND PAUL RUDOLPH: Of the several photographers that Rudolph worked with, Ezra Stoller is probably the one with which he had the most involvement and lasting relationship. Stoller photographed much of his residential work in Florida—including some of Rudolph’s greatest and most innovative houses like the Milam Residence (as seen on the over of Domin and King’s book on the Florida phase of Rudolph’s career—see image at right), the Walker Guest House, the Umbrella House, and the Healy “Cocoon” House—the Yale Art & Architecture Building in New Haven, Sarasota Senior High School, the Temple Street Parking Garage in New Haven, Endo Labs, the UMass Dartmouth campus, Tuskegee Chapel in Alabama, the Hirsch (later: “Halston”) townhouse in New York City , the Wallace House, Riverview High School in Florida, the Sanderling Beach Club in Florida, and numerous others—including the Burroughs Wellcome US headquarters and research center in North Carolina’s Research Triangle Park. One can access the extensive and fascinating archive of Ezra Stoller’s work (including the Rudolph projects that he photographed) here—and an extensive selection from throughout Stoller’s career (including numerous images of Rudolph’s work) can be viewed in the book “Ezra Stoller, Photographer” (see cover at right).

The first monograph on Rudolph which featured extensive color photography, all of which was done by Futagawa.

YUKIO FUTAGAWA

(1932-2015) The dean of architectural photography in Japan, and with a world-wide reputation, for over six decades Futagawa made magnificent and memorable photos of important buildings (new and traditional) around the world. Interestingly, he created his own “platform” to publish his work: he founded GA (“Global Architecture”), GH (“Global Houses”), and published other series and individual books. Those contained not only of photography, but also architectural drawings and full project documentation of distinguished works of architecture.

FUTAGAWA AND PAUL RUDOLPH: Futagawa traveled the US to make the photographs for the monograph, “Paul Rudolph” (part of the Library of Contemporary Architects series published by Simon and Schuster)—and the archives of the Paul Rudolph Heritage Foundation posseses a note by Rudolph, testifying to his appreciation of Futagawa’s work. In the GA series, he published one on the Tuskegee Chapel and the Boston Government Service Center. Futagawa extensively photographed the work of Frank Lloyd Wright and, as part of the GA series, he asked Rudolph to contribute the introductory essay to the issue on Wright’s Fallingwater. He also published the large monograph on Rudolph’s graphic works (copiously including his famous perspective drawings): Paul Rudolph: Architectural Drawings.

Kidder Smith’s two-volume “A Pictorial History of Architecture in America,” published in 1976, includes Rudolph’s work. Below: one of his photographs of the Niagara Falls Central Library, taken near the time of its completion. Photo courtesy of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology

G. E. KIDDER SMITH

(1913-1997) Along with the other ultra-prominent names we’ve been mentioning, in the world of architectural photography, we must include G. E. (George Everard) Kidder Smith. Trained as an architect, Kidder Smith was not only a photographer of architecture, but also an historian-writer, exhibit designer, and preservationist (helping to save/preserve the Robie House and the Villa Savoye.) His numerous books are still important resources for anyone doing research on the architecture of America and Europe His series of “Build” books (“Brazil Builds” “Italy Builds” “Switzerland Builds” “Sweden Builds”) provide abundant images and information about the rise of Modern architecture in each of those countries.

KIDDER SMITH AND PAUL RUDOLPH: Kidder Smith’s “A Pictorial History of Architecture in America” is a 2-volume work that was published in 1976, and—utilizing the photographs that Kidder Smith had made—it covers all eras of American architectural history, region-by-region. Kidder Smith must have admired Paul Rudolph’s work, for it shows up throughout this major, encyclopedic work, and includes: Rudolph’s Boston Government Service Center, Tuskegee Chapel, Niagara Falls Central Library, UMass Dartmouth, the Orange County Government Center—and Burroughs Wellcome (whose double-page spread image is the photographic climax at the end of Volume One.). This set of buildings are of particular poignance and and meaning to us, as they include a major Rudolph building that has been altered/disfigured (Orange County); and three which are currently threatened (Boston, Niagara Falls, and Burroughs Wellcome.)—and we are using Kidder Smith’s images to help fight for their preservation.

This monograph from 1984 shows work from the several generations of photographers who have worked for Hedrich-Blessing, and the book includes an image of Paul Rudolph’s Christian Science Student Center. An even larger monograph of Hedrich-Blessing’s work was published in 2000, which also included that photo of Rudolph’s building.

HEDRICH-BLESSING

(1929-Present) The other photographers of Rudolph’s work, mentioned in this article, were primarily based on or towards the US’ East Coast. But for the middle of the country, the kings of architectural photography were Hedrich-Blessing. The firm was founded in 1929 by Ken Hedrich and Henry Blessing and—though based in Chicago and famous for photographs of buildings in that region—they have done work all over. Among the distinguished architects, whose work they photographed, were: Wright, Mies, Raymond Hood, Keck and Keck, Albert Kahn, Adler & Sullivan, SOM, Harry Weese, Breuer, Saarinen, Gunnar Birkets, Yamasaki, and Alden Dow. Since its founding, the firm has employed several generations of photographers, and is still very much active today.

HEDRICH-BLESSING AND PAUL RUDOLPH: To our present knowledge, Hedrich-Blessing did not photograph many of Paul Rudolph’s buildings. [Perhaps because Rudolph did not build much in their part of the country. That may have been different had Rudolph become dean of IIT’s School of Architecture in Chicago—an offer he briefly considered.] We do know of at least one superb photo Hedrich-Blessing took of his Christian Science Student Center. This building, which Rudolph designed in 1962 near the University of Illinois Champaign-Urbana, was unfortunately demolished in the mid-1980’s. So it is important that we have Hedrich-Blessing’s photograph, which was taken by their staff photographer Bill Engdahl in 1966: it shows the building at night: dramatically shadowed on the outside, but enticingly glowing from within.

Above: Shulman’s extensive oeuvre is documented in a three-volume monograph published by Taschen. Below: One of Shulman’s photographs of Rudolph’s Temple Street Parking Garage. © J. Paul Getty Trust. Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles (2004.R.10)

JULIUS SHULMAN

(1910-2009) Shulman was an almost exact contemporary of some of the other legendary architectural photographers on this list (i.e.: Stoller and Kidder Smith), and his professional career extended over 7 decades—from the 1930’s into the 2000’s. The body of work for which he is most well known is the large set of photographs he took of Modern architecture in California—centered in Los Angeles, but extending to cover buildings in other parts of the state. His clients included some of the most famous makers of Modern architecture: Pierre Koenig (for whom he took a night time photo of the Stalh House which became the iconic emblem of modern living in Southern California,) Neutra, Wright, Soriano, the Eames, and John Lautner. Christopher Hawthorne, of the Los Angeles Times, said of his work: “His famous black-and-white photographs. . . .were not just, as [Thomas] Hines noted, marked by clarity and high contrast. They were also carried aloft by a certain airiness of spirit, a lively confidence that announced that Los Angeles was the place where architecture was being sharpened and throwing off sparks from its daily contact with the cutting edge.” Shulman also had commissions in other parts of the country, as in: his photographs of Lever House in New York, a house by Paolo Soleri in Arizona, and work by Mies in Chicago—and he worked internationally, for example: photographing a residence by Lautner in Mexico. He authored 7 books, participated in 10 others, and his extensive archive is in the Getty Research Institute.

SHULMAN AND PAUL RUDOLPH: While Julius Shulman is identified with the photography of key examples of architectural Modernism in California, he also took assignments for other locations, and his images of Paul Rudolph’s works in New Haven are strong examples of Shulman’s image making. Several can be seen on the Paul Rudolph Heritage Foundation’s project pages for the Temple Street Parking Garage, and the Yale Married Students Housing. The photographs of the garage are intense with visual drama, highlighting its scale and sculptural qualities.

Above: Molitor’s photo of UMass Dartmouth. Below: Niagara Falls Central Library. Images courtesy of Columbia University, Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library, Joseph W. Molitor Photograph Collection

JOSEPH W. MOLITOR

(1907-1996)  We are fortunate that the the Joseph W. Molitor Photograph Collection is now part of the Avery Architectural & Fine Arts Library, where it is made available to scholars, researchers, writers, and students. The Avery Library describes Molitor and his career: “Joseph Molitor, recognized as a peer of such leading 20th-century American architectural photographers as Hedrich-Blessing, Balthazar Korab, Julius Shulman, and Ezra Stoller, documented the work of regional and national architects for fifty years. Trained as an architect, he practiced for twelve years before briefly working in advertising. Molitor turned exclusively to architectural photography in the late 1940s, maintaining his studio in suburban Westchester County, New York. Working primarily in black and white, Molitor's images appeared in Architectural Record, The New York Times, House & Home, and other national and international publications.”

MOLITOR AND PAUL RUDOLPH: Avery’s text also mentions “His iconic photograph of a walkway at architect Paul Rudolph’s high school in Sarasota, Florida, won first place in the black and white section of the American Institute of Architects’ architectural photography awards in 1960.” You can find Joseph Molitor’s photographs on several of the project pages within the Paul Rudolph Heritage Foundation’s website, including the pages devoted to the Milam Residence in Florida, and the Niagara Falls Central Library—and his book, Architectural Photography, published in 1976, features an abundance of images of Rudolph’s work. Recently, the Paul Rudolph Heritage Foundation has been focused upon Molitor’s work because of the endlessly intriguing set of photographs he made of the Burroughs Wellcome building—showing them with a crispness and sense of drama that few other photographers have approached.

Above and Below: two of Henry L. Kamphoefner’s photographs of interiors within the Burroughs Wellcome building in North Carolina—both images displaying the striking geometries which Rudolph used in the design.

HENRY L. KAMPHOEFNER

(1907-1990) Unlike the above figures, Henry Leveke Kamphoefner is not primarily known as an architectural photographer—but he was well-known in the South as a champion of Modern architecture, especially in North Carolina. Graduating from the Univ. of Illinois with a BS degree in architecture in 1930, in the following years he received a MS in architecture from Columbia and a Certificate of Architecture from the Beaux Arts Institute of Design in New York. From 1932 until 1936, he practiced architecture privately, and one of his most well-known works is a municipal bandshell Sioux City (which was selected by the Royal Institute of British Architects as one of "America's Outstanding Buildings of the Post-War Period.") In 1936 and 1937, he worked as an associate architect for the Rural Resettlement Administration, and during summers after that he was was employed as an architect for the US Navy. He had an ongoing and significant involvement with architectural education: in 1937 he became a professor at the Univ. of Oklahoma and during 1947 was also a visiting professor at the Univ. of Michigan. In 1948 Kamphoefner became the first dean of the North Carolina State College School of Design, creating strict admissions policies and instituting a distinguished visitors program which brought in architects such as Frank Lloyd Wright. He remained dean until 1973, but continued teaching until 1979. From 1979 to 1981 he served as a distinguished visiting professor at Meredith College. Kamphoefner’s importance has been highlighted in a new book, Triangle Modern Architecture, by Victoria Ballard Bell.

KAMPHOEFNER AND PAUL RUDOLPH: The Paul Rudolph Heritage Foundation has included several of Kamphoefner’s photographs of the Burroughs Wellcome US headquarters and research center on its project page for that building. It is natural that, as a resident of North Carolina, and as an advocate for Modern architecture, that he would be focused on that building. His photographs of the interiors highlight the striking diagonal geometries that Paul Rudolph incorporated into the project. We have included his images of Burroughs Wellcome in several of our blog articles, as part of our fight to preserve this great work of architecture.

COMING SOON: PART TWO

Be sure to look for PART TWO of this study of Paul Rudolph And His Architectural Photographers. It which will look the more recently active photographers, each of whom have focused on the work of Paul Rudolph.

McMansion Hell's Kate Wagner on Open Plans vs. Walls [And its resonance with Paul Rudolph's spatial archetypes]

The floor plan of Paul Rudolph’s Revere Quality House, used as an example of residential open-space planning in Kate Wagner’s article. The house was built in 1948 in Siesta Key, Florida, and was widely published. © The Estate of Paul Rudolph, The Paul Rudolph Heritage Foundation

KATE WAGNER STRIKES AGAIN

Everyone loves Kate Wagner’s site, McMansion Hell—well, almost everyone, for we can imagine the chagrin of being subject to her clear-eyed assessments of “McMansions” which have saturated the housing market. We’ll skip showing a picture of the house which was the focus of one of her analyses—but here’s a sample text from Kate Wagner and one can get a clear idea of her tone:

“If you combine all of the insipid elements of the other houses: mismatched windows; massive, chaotic rooflines; weird asphalt donut landscaping; pompous entrances, and tacked on masses; you’d get this house. The more one looks at this house the more upsetting it becomes . . . . What sends this one over the top is its surroundings: lush trees and clear skies that have been desecrated in order to build absolute garbage.”

More—much more—can be seen at her site, as well as the site’s archives. But it’s important to know that her work is not just about take-downs of dimwitted design and comatose construction. Ms. Wagner has delved into other design-related topics of significance—like land use, urbanism, and the history of architectural styles—and she’s one of the few writers on design to give a fascinating (but accessible) look at the intersection of acoustics and residential design. Nor is her work published only on her own website—Wagner has been a featured writer in Architectural Digest, The Atlantic, Curbed, and other venues.

It is an article by her, on the ever-fascinating CITYLAB website, that has our attention, as it intersects with a aspects of Paul Rudolph’s work and philosophy—and, as noted at the top of this post, a Rudolph house plan was used as one of the article’s illustrations.

“THE CASE FOR ROOMS”

Her post, The Case for Rooms is subtitled: It’s time to end the tyranny of open-concept interior design.

A screen-shot of the opening of “The Case for Rooms”, an article by Kate Wagner on the CITYLAB website. The illustration—showing diverse activities through the house—makes a case for the usefulness of separate rooms.

She opens by clarifying the definition of her topic:

“Much has been written about the open floor plan: how it came to be, why it is bad (or good), whether it should or shouldn’t be applied to existing housing. The open floor plan as we currently understand it—an entry-kitchen-dining-living combination that avoids any kind of structural separation between uses—is only a few decades old.”

She then gives a history of the [pre-“open concept”] development of separate rooms for different functions and family members—a significant evolution in residential design—and then covers the reasons (historic, social, economic, industrial, and aesthetic) why there has been a departure from such spacial differentiation. That departure is manifest in the open concept arrangement of so many houses and apartments today: where living-dining-cooking spaces meld into each other.

The Revere Quality House, a 1948 design by Paul Rudolph, was widely published—and is used in the article as an illustration of “open concept” home planning which began to permeate residential design in the housing boom after World War II.

While Rudolph’s elevations for the Revere Quality House are not included in the article, it is worth looking at them to see that design’s large expanses of “see-through” areas (at the Porch, Living Room, and Dining Room)/ They confirm the characterization of the house as an open plan (or “open concept”) design. Those rooms are examples of Rudolph’s “fishbowl” spaces. By contrast, the Kitchen, Bedrooms, and Bath use more solid walls and partitions—conferring on them the protective spatial quality of what Rudolph called “caves.” © The Estate of Paul Rudolph, The Paul Rudolph Heritage Foundation

Today—to judge from the floor plans, photos, and renderings seen in real estate advertising, the “open concept” approach prevails in the layout of houses and apartments.

The article goes on to question open concept planning on practical terms:

• whether houses laid-out this way can give their residents the visual, acoustic, and mental privacy that is useful and healthy

• whether they promote (or get in-the-way of) communication

• whether they are energy-wise

• whether the fixes that have been invented to compensate for their problems (like having a separate “mess kitchen” which is visually hidden from the open-plan areas) are just masking an overall planning mistake

Another Paul Rudolph design, from the post-World War II building boom era: the Lamolithic House of 1948, built in Siesta Key, Florida. As shown in Rudolph’s perspective rendering, the Living Room, Dining Room, and Kitchen merge into each other, and are primarily bounded by large (and openable) glazing. This arrangement is a manifestation of the open planning approach which was becoming increasingly popular—and also worked well to allow for cross-ventilation in a hot region like Florida (and a pre-AC era). The Bedrooms and Bath are more conventionally enclosed with walls and shuttable doors. These two sets of rooms adhere to Rudolph’s differentiation of “fishbowl” and “cave” spaces. © The Estate of Paul Rudolph, The Paul Rudolph Heritage Foundation

The article provides a deep (and wonderfully-illustrated) dive into these issues, the emergence of the open plan approach, and its permutations through the 20th (and now 21st) Centuries.

Kate Wagner’s right, as always: open plans can have problems—and this has been observed not only in residential design, but also about the quality-of-life within open plan offices (though a recent study is beginning to challenge that), schools, health facilities, restaurants, and architecture/design/art studios. In all of these, the lack of acoustical privacy and its evil twin—noise—are prime offenders. But so is the absence of visual privacy. Moreover, in a set of joined open plan spaces, missing are the strong visual cues which gives that sense of security that helps occupants feel situated in the world. Peninsula shaped built-in seating and conversation pits try to make up (though not always completely) for absent walls and doors.

FINDING A BALANCE

As with many design problems, perhaps the real issue is disproportion—a lack of balance in the various forces and approaches: plans which rely almost exclusively on open planning will have the above-mentioned problems. But plans which only include closed-off spaces—having one door-shuttable-room-after-the-other—are doomed to architectural claustrophobia, and maybe induce a kind of over-privacy that is also destructive.

RUDOLPH ARTICULATED THE POLARITY (AND VARIETY) OF SPATIAL NEEDS

It’s one of Paul Rudolph’s most provocative quotes:

“We desperately need to relearn the art of disposing our buildings to create different kinds of space: the quiet, enclosed, isolated, shaded space; the hustling, bustling space, pungent with vitality; the paved, dignified, vast, sumptuous, even awe-inspiring space; the mysterious space; the transition space which defines, separates, and yet joins juxtaposed spaces of contrasting character. We need sequences of space which arouse one’s curiosity, give a sense of anticipation, which beckon and impel us to rush forward to find that releasing space which dominates, which acts as a climax and magnet, and gives direction.”

There, Rudolph was challenging the aridity of mainstream Modernism’s approach to city planning—but he might as well have been talking about the need for such variety within residences—and, as his career went on, he’d practice what he preached.

Distilling this even further, Rudolph spoke of the two archetypal spaces which humans create and need—the poles on the range of spaces that we inhabit. He called them The Fishbowl and conversely, The Cave.

We can describe and give examples for each:

THE FISHBOWL is the open/exposed space. Sometimes it is the type of residence where a Living Room flows into a Dining Room and then into the Kitchen (the planning approach for homes, which is the topic of Kate Wagner’s article)—but it could describe places as civically grand as the podium of the Pantheon or the balcony from which the Pope addresses the crowd in St. Peter’s square. The most frequent way that the entry spaces of an opera house are characterized are as “places to see and be seen”—a perfect example of this spatial type! You’ve probably seen the way the offices of a newspaper newsroom or a police precinct interior are depicted in films and on TV: there’s a glazed-in office within which sits the editor or police captain (observing and directing the action—but also being the object of observation).

THE CAVE is the enclosed space—maybe cozy, maybe fortress-like in its defensibleness—but above all protective and evoking security. A place where one is not exposed, but where one can be (and share) one’s private self. The most frequently cited room-type would be a bedroom—and every child who has ever built a “sofa cushion fort” will know the sought-after feeling of security of such spaces. But ‘the Cave” would also apply to other kinds of spaces: entry vestibules where potential visitors are vetted (and, if necessary, warded-off), rooms for medical examinations and healing, offices and studios for quiet creation, library spaces for study, chapels for contemplation, galleries for art appreciation, and restaurant booths for sharing confidences.

Rudolph knew (and preached) that well-planned residences, workplaces, museums—indeed whole cities, and all the places we live—need to have both.

A RUDOLPH DESIGN WHICH ACHIEVES BOTH

Early in his career (in his first independent commission) Rudolph designed a house which allows the owner to have either the character of a Fishbowl -or- a Cave—and every graduation in-between. His Walker Guest House—a work from 1952 which was built in Sanibel, Florida—had adjustable flaps on most of the house’s perimeter, and they provided almost infinite options for achieving a sense of enclosure -or- openness.

Paul Rudolph’s drawings of his Walker Guest House, showing how the exterior flaps work: the hinged panels (balanced by a simple counterweight system) swing open and closed, and can be set at almost any angle. This allows for flexibility in dealing with changes in sun, wind, and rain, and desire for privacy or openness. © The estate of Paul Rudolph, The Paul Rudolph Heritage Foundation

RUDOLPH’S DEPARTS FROM THE OPEN PLANNING APPROACH

It is interesting that, as Rudolph’s career progressed, the open concept approach appears less frequently in his residential designs. This may have been due to several factors:

• The more complex programs for which he was asked to design

• The increased budgets he was given to work with

• Much of his early work was in Florida was designed & built well before air conditioning was widely and economically available—so open plans that allowed for cross-breezes were a practical (and “green”) way to work within that subtropical climate. As Rudolph did less work in Florida (and as AC became more affordable) open layouts were less needed.

• The evolution of his own thinking about the Modern movement in architecture. Rudolph made his first trip to Europe at the end of the 1940’s. His experiences of the spatial and formal variety of traditional cities and buildings spurred him to seek for a a richer approach to the making, shaping, and modulation of spaces.

Paul Rudolph’s axonometric-plan drawing for the Edersheim Apartment in New York. which was built in the early 1970’s. Separate spaces for the Dining Room, Living Room, and Library-Office occupy the right-most third of the plan—and Bedrooms and other spaces are each accessed off a central corridor. In contrast to his early residential works in Florida, the spaces here are almost hyper-differentiated by function—and privacy is readily available to each family member. © The Estate of Paul Rudolph, The Paul Rudolph Heritage Foundation

In Paul Rudolph’s civic work, he used a range of spatial archetypes (including the Cave and the Fishbowl) to create spaces appropriate for each of a building’s functions. A building with as varied a program as Rudolph’s Boston Government Service Center is a prime example of this—and in their July, 1973 issue, Architectural Record published an article which highlighted this way of analyzing the complex.

The cover of Architectural Record’s July 1973 issue, on which is shown a staircase within Rudolph’s Boston Government Service Center. That area’s enveloping shape, the organic curves, and its warm lighting come together to create a space which can be characterized as belonging to the “Cave” spatial archetype. Image courtesy of US Modernist Library

The article on the Boston Government Service Center, in Architectural Record, analyzed the building complex in terms of a range of spatial archetypes. Using text by Carl John Black, photographs, and Rudolph’s renderings and sketches, it culminated with “The Cave”—as exemplified by the building’s chapel. Image courtesy of US Modernist Library

THE OPEN PLAN REMAINS MANIFEST IN RUDOLPH’S WORK

But Rudolph did not totally abandon the open plan approach. He could (and did) deploy it in some projects—but with increased spatial variety, and a more developed sophistication than in his early Florida work. In these buildings’s public areas, he often used changing levels (as well as varied ceilings) to delineate different spaces. This provided the occupants a sense of spatial grounding—a sense of “here-ness” (if not always complete acoustical privacy.)

A prime example of his use of open planning—but with intense spatial variation through level and ceiling changes—would be his Deane Residence, a house design from the late 1960’s. The house’s rooms may flow into each other, but the occupant is made aware of the shift in uses—Living Room, Dining, Library, Music, and various Sitting Areas—by a banquet of level and ceiling changes (and articulations), almost unrivaled in Rudolph’s oeuvre.

An architectural model of the Deane Residence—a residence designed by Paul Rudolph in the late 60’s and built in Long Island, NY. It shows the volumetric and compositional complexity that he was achieving in his buildings—and contrasts with the more platonic forms he used near the beginning of his career (like the two houses in Florida, that were cited earlier in this article). But even the sumptuousness of its exterior forms only hints at the richness of the spaces inside. © The Estate of Paul Rudolph, The Paul Rudolph Heritage Foundation

Paul Rudolph’s section-sketch for the Dean Residence more than hints at the variety of levels he used to differentiate the house’s various spaces—and Rudolph’s scale figures (which he sprinkled throughout the drawing) assist in perceiving his intentions. © The Estate of Paul Rudolph, The Paul Rudolph Heritage Foundation

Paul Rudolph’s floor plan of the Deane Residence’s main interior area—or rather, areas-plural: the spaces for various functions—Living Room, Library, Dining Room, and various nooks and areas for study, music, and sitting—flow together, but are also delineated by multiple changes in level and ceiling heights. Plan © The Estate of Paul Rudolph, The Paul Rudolph Heritage Foundation

John Dessarzin’s lushly photographed view of the Living Room of the Deane Residence gives as sense of the house’s spatial variety—and that’s a quality which allows it to use open planning, while not giving up a sense of distinction between the spaces (and the sense of that some of them are “fishbowls” and some spaces are “caves.”) Photograph by John Dessarzin - Copyright Reserved