'Modernism at Risk' Coming to New York in 2010

Modernism at Risk: Modern Solutions for Saving Modern Landmarks, an exhibition organized by World Monuments Fund and sponsored by Knoll, Inc., will travel to design schools and other venues across the U.S. beginning in Gainesville, Florida, and traveling to New York City in 2010. The exhibit consists of large-scale photographs by noted photographer Andrew Moore and interpretative panels with five case studies exploring the role designers play in preserving Modern landmarks. In this brief gallery tour, Henry Ng (Executive VP of WMF) interviews Professor Marty Hylton of the University of Florida, Gainesville.

Models of Paul Rudolph's demolished Riverview High School and threatened John Chorley Elementary School are featured as part of the show and seen in the video.

Gwathmey Goes Gold

Yale's Rudolph Hall (photo: Kelvin Dickinson)
According to Dexigner, a website about design related news and events, the completely renovated and expanded Paul Rudolph Hall at Yale University designed by Gwathmey Siegel & Associates Architects (GSAA) has received a LEED Gold certification:

The 114,000 square foot building, constructed of cast-in-place concrete in the Brutalist style, was formerly known as the Art and Architecture Building.

It was designed by then chair of the Department of Architecture, Paul Rudolph and completed in 1963.

GSAA's design results from the integration of programmatic, structural and mechanical needs.

It includes the restoration of exterior walls, the installation of historically correct windows, and upgrades to all building facilities including the exhibition gallery, jury and studio spaces, study areas, and administrative and faculty offices.

It also introduces new lighting and furnishings throughout, in many cases replicating the originals, and brings the structure into compliance with current building and fire codes.

According to previous reports from Yale, the building originally was intended to be LEED Silver.

House Inspired by Rudolph On Best LA List

Pugh & Scarpa's Solar Umbrella House (photo: Marvin Rand)
The Solar Umbrella House designed by Pugh & Scarpa Architects has landed on Curbed LA's "Best LA Buildings - Top of the Aughts (runnerups)"

According to their website:

The Amazing Invisible, Energy-Efficient House:
Solar Umbrella House by Pugh + Scarpa.

Proving it is indeed possible to marry affordability, sustainability, and high design, architects Larry Scarpa and Angela Brooks' 2005 remodel of a 1920s Venice bungalow was at the forefront of solar design strategies. Inspired by Paul Rudolph's Umbrella House of 1953, it's almost 100% energy neutral, cost less than $400,000 to remodel, and--spoiler alert--appears to have no walls, no windows, and no roof. Hey, we said appears, since it has all of those things, and 89 amorphous photovoltaic panels for energy.

Built in 2005, the project was chosen as an AIA Committee on the Environment Top Ten Green Project for 2006.

Rudolph's 'Umbrella' sun shade in 1953
An extensive description of the house can be found on the AIA website here.

The house was also featured in a 2007 episode of 'Building the Ultimate House' TV series which has a page dedicated to it here.

Rudolph's Umbrella House Today (photo: Dan Webre)

Sarasota Architecture Exhibition Features Rudolph

The exhibit “Sarasota Modern: The Sarasota School of Architecture, 1941-1966” is open through Dec. 24 at the University of Florida in the Special Collections exhibit gallery on the second floor of the Smathers Library.

This exhibition features architectural models, drawings and photographs from John Howey’s Sarasota School of Architecture Collection in the UF Architecture Archives. Architects Ralph Twitchell, Paul Rudolph, Victor Lundy, Tim Seibert, Jack West and Gene Leedy, among others, are represented.

WHERE:
University of Florida
George A. Smathers Libraries
Gainesville, FL 32611-7000
(352) 273-2505

WHEN:
The exhibition runs now through December 24, 2009
The gallery is open 9 a.m. to 4:15 p.m., Monday through Friday.

Exhibition Features Rudolph's Temple St. Garage

Paul Rudolph's rendering for Temple St. Garage
An exhibition at The National Building Museum in Washington D.C. entitled "House of Cars: Innovation and the Parking Garage" focuses on the role of parking on the built environment. According to the exhibition's website:

We have all spent time in parking garages, but we rarely stop to think about what they have meant for our cities and ourselves. House of Cars: Innovation and the Parking Garage explores the unique relationship between parked cars and the built environment and encourages visitors to see these familiar structures in a whole new way. A showcase for innovation; a training ground for the 20th century's best-known architects; and now, a new direction for sustainable city planning; the parking garage tells many stories.

As soon as there were cars, there was a parking problem, and cities responded both by finding ways to fit cars into old structures – such as carriage houses – and inventing a new building type made specifically for automobile storage. As the parking garage's building type evolved, innovative engineers explored the best ways to lay out parking places and create structural systems to accommodate both cars and people.

The parking garage may have a reputation as an eyesore, but House of Cars challenges this notion using examples of well-designed garages that add a creative tapestry to our streetscapes. It concludes with the question, "What does the future hold for parking?" and invites visitors to think about new types of parking solutions.

Included in the exhibition is Paul Rudolph's design for the Temple Street Parking Garage in New Haven, Connecticut.

Paul Rudolph visiting the job site
WHEN:
The exhibition is open from October 17, 2009 through July 11, 2010.

WHERE:
National Building Museum
401 F Street NW (Judiciary Square Metro, Red Line)
First Floor Galleries

Paul Rudolph atop the completed garage
For more information:
The National Building Museum website
New York Times article about the exhibition

One Step Closer...

Paul Rudolph's 23 Beekman Place
On Tuesday, November 17th, the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission held its monthly public meeting and on the agenda was the possible landmarking of Paul Rudolph's famous penthouse apartment building on 23 Beekman Place. The site, listed in the agenda as item LP-2390, covers the proposed site listed simply as "Paul Rudolph House" on Borough of Manhattan Tax Map Block 1361, Lot 118.

According to the Commission's website,

The Landmarks Preservation Commission is the mayoral agency responsible for protecting and preserving New York City’s architecturally, historically and culturally significant buildings and sites. Since its creation in 1965, LPC has granted landmark status to more than 25,000 buildings, including 1,245 individual landmarks, 110 interior landmarks, 10 scenic landmarks and 99 historic districts in all five boroughs. Under the City’s landmarks law, considered the most powerful in the nation, the Commission must be comprised of at least three architects, a historian, a Realtor, a planner or landscape architect, as well as a representative of each borough.

Kelvin Dickinson, Co-Director of the Paul Rudolph Foundation, attended a public hearing as a representative of the Paul Rudolph Foundation. Also attending was Joe Smith representing Docomomo, an organization dedicated to promoting the preservation of modern architecture.

Rudolph's original rendering
Matt Postal, an architectural historian who is a member of the Commission, made the initial presentation to the board:

Paul Rudolph, one of the most celebrated and original architects of the second half of the 20th century, owned 23 Beekman Place from 1965 till his death in 1997. A leading member of Florida’s so-called Sarasota Modern School, he studied at the Harvard Graduate School of Design and served as Dean of the Yale School of Architecture, where he designed the celebrated Art and Architecture Building, completed in 1963. Two years later, he moved his practice to Manhattan, purchasing a neo-Georgian style townhouse on Beekman Place, between East 50th Street and East 51st Street. During the next three decades, the five-story structure was continuously altered, producing one of Rudolph’s most best-known works. Initially, he converted the five-story structure into apartments, and later, between 1975 and 1982, added a multi-story, cantilevered, steel-and-glass penthouse that resembles a piece of architectonic sculpture. New York Times architecture critic Paul Goldberger praised the design, calling it "a handsome composition, a neat arrangement of geometric forms that is visually pleasing in itself and a welcome addition to Beekman Place’s already long list of architectural styles." 23 Beekman Place was also home to the prominent stage and screen actress Katharine Cornell (c. 1893-1974). Once described by drama critic Alexander Woolcott as the "First Lady of the Theater," she purchased the house in the 1920s and lived here, with director and producer Guthrie McClintic, until the early 1950s. Although the multi-level interiors fashioned by Rudolph have been modified by subsequent owners, the exterior is virtually unchanged. 23 Beekman Place is a significant and highly personal example of this important modern architect’s late work. Visible from Beekman Place and various points east, it is one of only four buildings designed by Rudolph in New York City, and arguably, his most significant.

A photo by Rudolph before
A photo by Rudolph with his planned addition
During the public comment portion of the presentation, Kelvin Dickinson presented the Paul Rudolph Foundation's statement of support for the designation:

The Paul Rudolph Foundation was established in 2002 with the intent to further the preservation, knowledge and understanding of the work of architect and educator Paul Marvin Rudolph. The Foundation has long supported the protection of Rudolph’s architectural legacy, which currently numbers 271 buildings throughout the United States and the world.

Paul Rudolph’s residence at 23 Beekman Place is one of a handful of works by Mr. Rudolph in New York City. Purchased in 1965, Mr. Rudolph began a decade later to add a multi-story sculptural cage that cantilevered over the traditional neo-Georgian style townhouse below. The exterior composition of shifting steel and glass cubes is a personal example of Rudolph’s evolving theories of modernism and has become one of the architect’s most recognized works.

The importance of Paul Rudolph’s contributions to the field of architecture has seen a resurgence upon the recent renovation and rededication of his Art & Architecture building at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut. Paul Rudolph’s work spans the period of modernism in America during which architects began to question the strict functionalism of the International Style. Mr. Rudolph’s design for his residence at 23 Beekman Place was used as a private laboratory to explore spatial concepts and his ideas regarding scale, complexity and urbanism.

Yet while appreciation of his legacy has grown, threats to his work have increased as well. The Foundation has identified 13 buildings which are presently threatened with demolition. The designation of Mr. Rudolph’s residence would protect one of his most celebrated works as a rare remnant of an enormously important time period.

The Paul Rudolph Foundation hopes you will expeditiously consider this vital and important piece of American architectural history for landmark designation.

Rudolph's original rendering
Speaking in addition was a lawyer representing the current owner of the property, who stated the owner will release a letter addressing the proposed designation before the final vote on the matter next month.

Finally, a representative of Community Board 6 stated they did not have an opinion on the matter, save for wondering what affect designating a modern addition would have on the future plans to designate the entire block as a historic district.

The matter will come up again for a vote by members of the Commission during the next month's meeting.

Immediately following the meeting, City Room - a blog hosted by the New York Times - prematurely reported that the property had been designated a landmark by the city.

We will have to wait another month to find out the commission's decision.

Invisible Cities Filled With Rudolph

Fedora by Colleen Corradi Brannigan

'In the center of Fedora, that gray stone metropolis, stands a metal building with a crystal globe in every room. Looking into each globe, you see a blue city, the model of a different Fedora. These are the forms of the city could have taken if, for one reason or another, it had not become what we see today. In every age someone, looking at Fedora as it was, imagined a way of making it an ideal city, but while he constructed his miniature model, Fedora was already no longer the same as before, and what had been until yesterday a possible future became only a toy in a glass globe.'

So writes Italo Calvino in his 1972 book 'Invisible Cities', which imagines descriptions of various cities as related by Marco Polo to the aging emperor Kublai Khan. As mentioned in its wikipedia page,

The book, because of its approach to the imaginative potentialities of cities, has been used by architects and artists to visualize how cities can be, their secret folds, where the human imagination is not necessarily limited by the laws of physics or the limitations of modern urban theory. It offers an alternative approach to thinking about cities, how they are formed and how they function.

In his story about Fedora, Marco Polo tells Khan that in his large Empire there must be a place for both Fedoras - big and small ones, as they are both real cities as well as assumptions, as a big one represents what is accepted as necessary and a small one what is imagined as possible. The difference between what might have been and what actually exists is a common dichotomy in architecture and urban design. And like other architects, Paul Rudolph had a number of proposed buildings which continue to exist only on paper.

Rudolph's Lower Manhattan Expressway
With the dramatic drop in real estate over the last years, much has been written about New York City's construction boom and later bust. The New York Times wrote 'Ghost Buildings of 1929' about proposed buildings that were abruptly halted after the stock market crash and later Great Depression. More recently, Curbed featured 'The Missing Skyline' about a number of planned developments that were,

'starchitectural masterpieces, neighborhood-creators (or neighborhood-destroyers, depending on who you talk to), or, well, just freaking huge buildings that were totally-definitely just last year.'

With so much planned and so much lost - and other shoes still waiting to drop - is it no surprise when technology steps in to organize a collective 'what if'?

'The building with the globes is now Fedora's museum: every inhabitant visits it, chooses the city that corresponds to his desires, contemplates it, imagining his reflection in the Medusa pond that would have collected waters of the canal (if it had not been dried up), the view from the high canopied box along the avenue reserved for elephants (now banished from the city, the fun of sliding down the spiral, twisting minaret (which never found a pedestal from which to rise).' -Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities

An unrealized apartment building for Donald Zucker
UrbanOmnibus, a project of the Architectural League of New York, has been following an iphone application called 'Phantom City' which was created to,

"transform the city into a living museum of speculative proposals for the city of New York."

In addition to downloading the iphone application, you can visit the project's website to see more information and even add projects for consideration. The advantage of having the iphone application, besides being able to see a project as you stand in the very spot it was to have occupied, is the ability to rate it:

A rating function allows one to vote on each proposal, and to see how others have voted: Was Paul Rudolph’s Lower Manhattan Expressway project utopian or dystopian? Beauty or beast? Yawn or yell? You decide. Then roam elsewhere and discover another city that could have been.

So far, the application and site only identifies Paul Rudolph's 1967-1972 proposal for the Lower Manhattan Expressway sponsored by the Ford Foundation. What's missing are his 1970 plans for 725 units of public housing, the 1967 Fox Hill Development in Staten Island, his 1970 plans for 10 apartment towers in Kew Gardens and the enormous 1967 proposal for the Graphic Arts Center.

A model of the proposed Graphic Arts Center
As technology continues to advance allowing the imagined to meet the real in realtime, we can foresee the day when handheld devices would really become the glass globes that Calvino's imagined Fedora residents use to inhabit the city of their desire.

'On the map of your empire, O Great Khan, there must be room for both the big, stone Fedora and the little Fedoras in glass globes. Not because they are equally real, but because all are only assumptions. The one contains what is accepted as necessary when it is not yet so; the others, what is imagined as possible and, a moment later, is possible no longer.' -Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities

Calvino must be pleased.

To read more about the iphone application:
New York Times - 'An iPhone App to Tour the City That Never Was'
Flavorwire - 'iPhone App for Architecture Geeks'