Paul Rudolph - An Exhibition of his Architecture - November, 1964

INTRODUCTION

The United States Information Service was an agency under the United States State Department [it was later renamed, and better known as, the United States Information Agency.] Most well-known for their broadcasting efforts (such as the Voice of America, Radio Free Europe, and Radio Liberty), the agency also engaged in a number of other informational and cultural projects, such as setting up libraries of American books in other countries, English language instruction, and exhibitions. Their stated mission was "to understand, inform and influence foreign publics in promotion of the national interest, and to broaden the dialogue between Americans and U.S. institutions, and their counterparts abroad."

Among the exhibits that the USIS sponsored was one on the work of Paul Rudolph, which was held from November to December, 1964. The location was the American Embassy Chancery Building in London, designed by Eero Saarinen (which had opened in 1960.) More people attended the exhibition than had ever attended one before in the building.

The archives of The Paul Rudolph Institute for Modern Architecture has a copy of a flyer which was given to visitors to that Paul Rudolph exhibit, written by Henry-Russell Hitchcock (1903-1987). Hitchcock was considered the dean of American architectural history, and a formidable figure in the writing of architectural history on a great range of periods and regions. While he is known for his many rigorously researched works, his most famous publication is probably The International Style, written with Philip Johnson and published in 1932. That book, published by and associated with the exhibit of the same name at the Museum of Modern Art, proclaimed and explained the new mode in architecture to an American audience.

[Note: The text contains a number of British spellings (i.e.: “colour” instead of “color”). Even though Hitchcock was born in the US (and wrote in standard American English), these spellings were probably used in deference to the London residents who were to be the most likely visitors to the exhibit. For historical accuracy, we have retained that spelling here.]

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Paul Rudolph - An Exhibition of his Architecture
By Henry-Russell Hitchcock

Presented by the United States Information Service

It is not easy to present the architecture of Paul Rudolph to the British.  He belongs to a line or group of American modern architects who have never received in England with much enthusiasm and have had no influence at all on British architects.  Despite the warmth of the introduction C.R. Ashbee wrote for the Wasmuth publication of Frank Lloyd Wright’s work, there was a gulf between Wright’s approach and that of the men of Arts and Crafts, a gulf of which Wright had been well aware since his youth in the 1890’s.

The very building in which Paul Rudolph’s work is being shown in London, though a relatively quiet example of Eero Saarinen’s middle period, had had to mellow for some years before it could be received with much general approval—or perhaps it has merely come to be ignored!  However that may be, Rudolph has most in common, among his American contemporaries, with the younger Saarinen and, among earlier American architects, with Wright.  This describes a characteristic, it is no necessary guarantee of equal quality.

The characteristic common to Wright, to Saarinen and to Rudolph can be most simply described as brashness, with all the connotations, many of them in England unfavourable, that brashness, implies. Wright and Rudolph, thought not so much Saarinen, have been notable for their brash statements, which often seem to manifest a somewhat juvenile delight in shacking and even offending.  In Wright’s case this sort of juvenility was, certainly increased over the years of his 70-year-long public careers, as those who heard him speak on his visit to London a decade or more ago will well remember.  But it is, of course, to the brashness of the architecture of these men that I more particularly refer.  Brash architecture has not been unknown in British from the work of Vanbrugh and Soane on either side of the 18th Century “Rule of Taste” to that of Lutyens.  But it is out of favour today in architectural circles, if not in popular music and “pop art”, the very name of which was invented by an English critic before he moved to America.

This brashness, this continuing desire to startle in order to impress, sometimes suggests that these American architects are essentially amateurs, as Vanbrugh certainly was.  But that is not at all the case.  Wright, heading towards an architectural career in the 1880’s when there were almost no schools for the study of architecture in America—or in England either, for that matter—had no formal professional training beyond two years in an engineering school.  But he was fortunate enough to become at 21 the lieutenant of Louis Sullivan, the most advanced architect in the world, perhaps, in those years of the early 1890’s.  Eero Saarinen had not only the background provided by his architect-father and his weaver-mother in a home run on a Finnish version of Arts and Crafts principals, but a full course of study in the School of Architecture of Yale University.  This he followed up with some years of partnership in his father’s firm, practical experience that was balanced by admiring worship—from a distance—of Mies van der Rohe, before emerging a few years after his father’s death as an individualist.  First came, however, a brief American period, as with many American architects of his generation and even quite a few older ones in the early 1950’s.

Paul Rudolph was born a pastor’s son in rural Kentucky in a region more Southern than Northern in tradition.  He received his basic traditional training in the small architectural school at Auburn, Alabama, in the deep south, from which Joseph Hudnut moved on, via Columbia in New York, to reform American architectural education as Dean of which is now called the Graduate School of Design at Harvard University.  It was not surprising, therefore, that Rudolph moved on to Harvard.  There he was a brilliant student in the “master class” of Walter Gropius in the same years around 1940 when Philip Johnson, John C. Parkin, I. M. Pei and several others, now recognized as leaders of the profession in the United States and other countries, were at Harvard.  He has, moreover, remained more devoted to the master, in warmth of respect and in principle than many of the others.

Gropius has been, throughout the long years of his international fame opposed to the idea of style in modern architecture— to him an “International Style” or a “Bauhaus Style” has always been anathema. Thus the Rudolphian practice, in which it has seemed almost (as with Wright and Saarinen) that each important commission initiated a new “styles” has not been un-Gropian, even if none of Rudolph’s “style” seem to have anything in common visually with the major works of Gropius and his successive partners, least of all with those of the last few years in New York and London.

The early work of Rudolph, the houses built in the late 1940’s and early 50’s in and around Sarasota, Florida, in association with the local well-established architect Ralph Twitchell, were not only calm and disciplined in their design, which was definitely by Rudolph and not by Twitchell.  If they are far less American than, for example, Saarinen’s General Motors Technical Institute in Michigan or Johnson’s houses in Connecticut of these years, they none-the-less have a severity of outline and a stripped frankness of structural expression that contrasts somewhat with the Wrightian openness of the planning and their adaptation, visually and functionally, to the flat coastal scenery of the Keys, along the Gulf of Mexico with their damp climate and their exposures to such serious local plagues as insect hordes and annual hurricanes.

Rudolph’s apprentice years beginning after his war-time service in the Navy, though less confined to a single line-than Wright’s with his “Lieber Meister” Sullivan, of Saarinen in the process of freeing himself from his father by a rather literal acceptance of the American discipline, were even more single-minded and self-consistent.  But he was, of course, older than Wright had been in his eclectic period in the 1890’s and had no Oedipal problem such as Saarinen’s.  A marked change came rather suddenly, or to it seemed at the time, when he was commissioned to design a large building in the North, in New England.  He was asked, first, by Wellesley College to design an educational “plant”, so to say, for the varied activities of a department of art and art history, always a major field in an American women’s college at university level, in Wellesley, a suburb of Boston, Mass.  Then—somewhat awkwardly, after the project was well advanced—further generosity on the part of the donor’s required that the scheme be much extended, indeed probably in the end, doubled in cubage, to house the music and drama departments as well.  The Jewett Art Centre, from the first publication of the early designs, attracted a great attention, and Rudolph was not silent about what he was attempting to do.  Where Lewis Kahn in his Art Gallery at Yale ignored the Neo-Gothic buildings of the early 20th century contiguous to the site, Paul Rudolph hoped, he said, to produce a mid-20th century equivalent visually to the Neo-Gothic buildings which were even more endemic at Wellesley than at Yale, if not quite such uncomfortably close neighbours.  This curiously enough was a problem that a decade later Saarinen faced, and on the whole solved successfully, in designing a few years before his death Stiles and Morse Colleges for Yale.

The Jewett Centre has not, as one says metaphorically, worn very well, partly for functional reasons beyond the control of the architect.  But a specific difficulty that the designing of the Jewett Centre revealed on Rudolph’s part would seem to have been that aspect of his talent which has more generally been considered an asset to those architects who possess it—Wright did, Gropius does not—namely Rudolph’s remarkable facility and virtuosity as a draughtsman.  As the Wellesley commission dragged on through several years, with the necessary major readjustment to include additional facilities and later, as costs rose, to cut down the scheme overall to come within the budget, fascinating perspectives, each slightly more elaborate than its predecessor, flowed from Rudolph’s agile pen.  As a result the building in the end was over-designed, and indeed, over-detailed, as Norman Shaw might have done in the 1870’s, revealed themselves as curiously inconsistent and indeed unthinkable in terms of the early work that he had done in Florida.

Something similar happened with the Blue Cross Building  in Boston, a small skyscraper carried out in concrete in association with the local firm of Anderson and Beckwith, dean and professor, respectively, at the school of architecture of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.  Curiously enough, and probably quite coincidentally, London has now a superior expression of rather similar ideas in the Economist’s small skyscraper, and Milan has for sometime had an inferior one.

Nor was Rudolph’s first building for Yale, where he is now chairman of architecture in the School of Art and Architecture, the Forestry Laboratories, a success either. In these years, all the same, he continued to build admirable schools in Florida.  Ironically, however, the Wellesley, Blue Cross and Yale commissions, which marked his rise from Southern obscurity to national and even international reputation—his fine project for an American Embassy in Amman, commissioned by the Foreign Buildings Administration has unfortunately never been built—are those that most clearly illustrate the dangers of a brash approach to architectural design.  His later career, so well illustrated in the exhibition, makes equally clear some of the advantages.

Brash architects are to some extent gamblers: the sure fling soon ceases to interest them, so they must always be trying a more difficult throw of the dice or combination of the horses.  But like professional gamblers, if the architects in question are trained and experienced professionals and not amateurs, the proportion and the size of their wins increases until the artistic profit overshadows the more comfortable earnings of the ploddingly respectable.  (It should be noted, however, that this may well apply in reverse to their respective financial rewards!) In Eero Saarinen’s case almost every new try was happily a success in his last years and all different from one another.  The Yale Colleges, the Dulles Airport and the Deere Plow offices certainly more than offset the very debatable TWA building at the Kennedy Airport.

Luck, or ever-increasing experience, has begun to serve Rudolph equally well in these same years of the early 1960’s.  To mention only buildings in the city where he now lives, practices and teaches—no more than Wright or Saarinen has he ever moved his headquarters to New York—there are in New Haven the modest but ingeniously organized Married Student’s Quarters for Yale, the parking-garage in downtown New Haven, sole earnest of a better future in a waste of “urban renewal”, and the Yale Art and Architecture Building for the School of which he is the most important member.

The Married Students Quarters, piled up in cubes like the towns on islands in the Aegean, has been especially influential with Yale students.  To English critics it has usually, however, been offensive, because the brickwork is not “honestly” structural, but a mere veneer over wooden construction providing in a long-familiar American vernacular way a permanent weatherproof sheathing as tile-hanging frequently does in England.  The parking-garage is one of the most successful of innumerable attempts since Mendelsohn’s Einstein Tower of 40 years ago to exploit concrete—in this case left raw—as a plastic or sculptural material in contrast to the more usual American expression as rectangular post-and-lintel construction.

The Art and Architecture Building, to judge from the latest to be completed of Rudolph’s buildings, that for the Endo Pharmaceutical Company at Garden City outside New York, and the project for the very large administrative building for the State of Massachusetts, occupying a considerable area adjacent to the new governmental centre in Boston (in association with the long-established local firm of Shepley, Richardson, Bulfinch and Abbott, professional heirs an actual descendants of H. H. Richardson) suggests that the gambler has, indeed, found the formula that assures a high proportion of wins, that the wheel has come a full circle, now that the modest beginner who designed the Sarasota houses has reached full maturity and can profit from all the varied experiments he has had along the road.

Finally, and it is so obvious it hardly needs saying, Rudolph, though he can house married university students with a skill rarely employed on larger housing schemes in America, not to speak of clients in individual houses (not yet an obsolescent kind of architectural activity in America), is no sociological architect.  He is, above all, in his failures and even more than in his successes, in his parking garages and his pharmaceutical plants as much as in his representational are buildings, an artist in architecture, concerned to dispose his spaces, to model his masses, to choose and treat his materials, as great architects have always done, in such a way as to achieve compositions, works of art, that are only possible to architectural scale.  No painter, as Le Corbusier has been throughout his career, no sculptor as Saarinen was before he turned to architecture, no theorist like Gropius though an active educator, he is one of several Americans who are attempting to prove, who on occasion in the last few years have proved, to most of those who were not prejudiced by a priori pseudo-historical considerations, that architecture can still be an art as well as technological process for solving problems of shelter.

Henry-Russell Hitchcock

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