Rudolph Designed Home For Sale in New York

In 1982, Paul Rudolph was asked by Maurits and Claire Edersheim to renovate a house they owned in Larchmont, New York. Mr. Rudolph and the Edersheims had a very close relationship ever since Rudolph's design for the couple's Manhattan apartment in 1970.


In 1989, Paul was asked to completely rework the interior of the house, and then in 1991 he created an addition to the front of the residence.


The Paul Rudolph Foundation visited the home and took photographs a few years ago, and knew of Mrs. Edersheim's wish to sell the house. This past week, we were contacted by a real estate broker at Houlihan Lawrence Inc. telling us that the house was indeed being listed for sale.


As we always wish to see that Paul Rudolph designed homes are preserved and in the hands of those who recognize and appreciate the unique character of Rudolph's work, we offered to list the house for sale on the Foundation's website. To see the listing, you can find it here.


The sale of a residence designed by Mr. Rudolph is a rare find, and does not always result in its preservation. The Micheels residence in Westport, Connecticut was demolished in 2006 following a court battle to save the building led by the Connecticut Trust for Historic Preservation and the Paul Rudolph Foundation. Another house, the Cerrito Residence designed by Rudolph in 1955 was demolished in 2007 following attempts to find the home an owner interested in its preservation.

Connecticut Exhibit To Remix Brutalism

The Westport Arts Center will present "Aggregate: Art and Architecture – a Brutalist Remix", Friday, September 25 through Sunday, November 22. WAC will host a public opening reception on Friday, September 25, 6:30 to 8:30 p.m. at the gallery, 51 Riverside Avenue, Westport, Connecticut. Exhibition programming includes a talk on the spirit of Brutalism by architect John Johansen at Westport Arts Center on Sunday, October 4 at 4:00 pm. Curator Terri C. Smith will also give an informal talk about the exhibition on Thursday, October 22 at 7:00 pm.

According to the Westport Arts Center website,

Aggregate is a new contemporary art exhibition designed to encourage fresh conversations about the impact of Brutalist architecture on society. The show features sculptures, videos, photography, prints, and documents that reflect, evaluate, and expand upon Brutalism’s monumental forms, social goals, gutsy materials, and mixed receptions. Brutalist architects aspired, in part, to create buildings that conveyed the visual immediacy of sculpture and were often designed to surprise, uplift, and challenge their users. The exhibition explores aspects of the theories, failures, materiality (especially concrete) found in Brutalist architecture by including artists who remix these qualities in ways that complicate or comment on them. Aggregate, through a combination of artworks and documents, asks visitors to look at the nuances of this, sometimes polarizing, twentieth-century architectural style.

Aggregate makes a metaphor of concrete, “a collection of items that are gathered together to form a total quantity” and the sand, gravel and crushed stone that is added to the chemical mix and water when making concrete.

Aggregate asks questions about how this type of architecture might challenge our expectations of beauty, good design, and useability. Of all the twentieth-century architectural movements, few have surpassed Brutalism’s frank use of materials and ability to elicit strong emotion in its users. By asking viewers to look more broadly at the intentions as well as the successes and failures of an often maligned (cold, ugly, aggressive) component of twentieth century architecture, Aggregate encourages us to take a fresh look at both distant and familiar environments.

Included in the show will be photos of Paul Rudolph's Micheels Residence - once located in Westport - which was photographed by Chris Mottalini shortly before its demolition in 2006.

For information contact Westport Arts Center at 203-222-7070 or go to the website at www.westportartscenter.org. Gallery hours are M-F, 10 a.m. to 4 p.m., Sat. and Sun. from noon to 4 p.m., at 51 Riverside Avenue, Westport.

Foundation Built Models On Display in Florida

Photos by Julien Aleksandres

The Paul Rudolph Foundation has built two models for the exhibit "Modernism at Risk: Modern Solutions for Saving Modern Landmarks", currently on display at the College of Design at the University of Florida.


Photo by Julien Aleksandres

The first model is a reconstruction of the original Riverview High School designed by Paul Rudolph in 1957-1958. Using copies of the original construction drawings, Foundation member Dan Webre built the 1/8" scale model of the structure, cut through the center of the building's courtyard.


Photo by Julien Aleksandres

The second model is a partial section through the center of John W. Chorley Elementary School, which was designed by Paul Rudolph from 1964-1969. The building's future looks in doubt after the Middletown, NY school board voted to tear it down following the construction of a new school adjacent to it. The 1/8" scale model was built by Foundation Co-Director Sean Khorsandi from drawings that were pulled from the Rudolph collection at the Library of Congress.



Photo by Julien Aleksandres

The exhibition is currently on view at the College of Design at the University of Florida and will later move to the College of Design, Construction and Planning in Gainesville. In January of 2010 it will be on display at the Center for Architecture in New York City.

To learn more about the exhibit, visit the UF College of Design website here.

Not Your Father's Architecture...

Why does 1920's architecture tend to get preserved yet mid-century modern buildings of equal importance often get demolished?

So asks Harold Bubil in an article in the September 6th issue of the Sarasota Herald-Tribune. Mr. Bubil put the question to Marty Hylton, assistant professor in the College of Design at the University of Florida, after the opening of his exhibition "Modernism at Risk: Modern Solutions for Saving Modern Landmarks". According to Mr. Hylton it was Lewis Mumford, the architecture and social critic, who postulated people reject our fathers and embrace our grandfathers.

One can see this occuring in Rudolph's work and the later reaction to it. First, it was Rudolph who early in his career began to reject the strict rigor of his teacher Walter Gropius and the International Style in favor of more "caves" and less "goldfish bowls". Functionalism in Rudolph's early work would eventually give way to his belief that unused space in a building is just as important to a building's occupants as the function of the building's program. That space he mused was "psychologically" occupied if not physically.

Later, it would be Rudolph's own students - notably Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown - who would hold up Rudolph's work as a foil to their own understanding of what is important for a building to represent. Rudolph's reputation would suffer only for his work to be rediscovered by students who had never had the chance to work for or be taught by him.

Mr. Hylton's exhibition focuses on the role architects and designers can play in preserving the recent past so that it does not fall prey to the whims of those who wish to reject the architecture of their fathers. As both he and Mr. Bubil note in the article - these important structures will eventually become the work of someone's grandfather.

The tour is currently on view at the College of Design at the University of Florida and later at the College of Design, Construction and Planning in Gainesville before moving on to New York City in January. To learn more about the exhibit, visit the UF College of Design website here.

Yale Reconsiders Rudolph

As we finished reading yesterday's articles about Rudolph's work in Docomomo's newsletter, we received the Fall 2009 issue of "Constructs: Yale Architecture Fall 2009" which featured two stories about Paul Rudolph's work.
The first is "Reconsidering Rudolph" by Brad Walters and it covers each of the speakers who presented during the "Rudolph Reassessed: Architecture and Reputation" symposium at Yale on January 23 and 24, 2009. The event, organized by architectural historian Timothy Rohan, featured several themes surrounding Rudolph's tumultuous career.

The first panel covered Rudolph's early projects and his examination of regionalism in regards to applying the tenets of the International Style to the local climate of Florida. The second panel then addressed Rudolph's experimentation with materials. During this part of the discussion, Rudolph's work with wood and glass segues into his later use of lucite and concrete.

The second day focused on Rudolph's spatially complex interiors. Beginning with a discussion of Rudolph's use of the perspective section to relate the interior and exterior spaces of his buildings, the panel then addressed Rudolph's blurring of interior and exterior, public and private as his work evolved over time. Despite the attention to detail exemplified in the interiors displayed during this part of the symposium, Rudolph continued to remain interested in architecture's other extreme - the environment of the cityscape.

The last part of the day addressed Rudolph's pursuit of relating the scale of his buildings to that of their surroundings, and his eventual experiments with mass-produced housing and megastructures.

At the conclusion of the article, Mr. Walters notes that the discussion turned to how Rudolph presented himself in the media and personal stories from those he influenced. Despite his much documented rise and fall in reputation, the symposium finished with recollections of people profoundly influenced by his work and teachings - a sign that Mr. Rudolph will continue to fascinate and inspire future generations.

The second article in the magazine, "Rudolph Hall Restoration Discussed" by Nina Rappaport, focused on the January 29th panel devoted to the restoration of Rudolph Hall and the addition by the late Charles Gwathmey. The panel addressed the complications of preserving the original building and restoring the parts that had been lost over time to insensitive renovations following the infamous 1969 fire. Ms. Rappaport notes the event concluded with Charles Gwathmey, a former student of Rudolph's:

[He] concluded the evening by comparing the intensity of the project to "being in school presenting a new project to a jury. That was the pressure that consumed us full-time. But I feel we have reincarnated Rudolph in his rightful place in the history of architecture."

Docomomo Revisits Rudolph

Docomomo New York/Tri-state's 2009 newsletter arrived today with not only one but two articles regarding Paul Rudolph's work.

The first article is a review of the Yale School of Architecture's January symposium "Reassessing Rudolph: Architecture and Reputation" by John Morris Dixon. Mr. Dixon's review focuses on how the symposium not only discussed Rudolph's career highs and lows following his leaving Yale; it also points out the role of reputation in the architectural community as a whole. He also notes that dispite what people think they know of Paul Rudolph's built works, the later obscure projects (including the architect's experimentation with materials in small residential interiors) hold just as much interest as the more popular projects featured in the glossy architecture magazines of the time.


Mr. Dixon also reviews "Paul Rudolph: Writings on Architecture" which was compiled by Nina Rappaport for the Yale University Press. The book, a piece released to compliment the symposium, allows Rudolph to speak for himself - just as others gather to discuss his public reputation.

The second article to feature Mr. Rudolph is "At Risk: Paul Rudolph's Chorley Elementary School" by Kathleen Randall. Ms. Randall's piece covers the proposed demolition of another school by the architect, coming after the demolition of Riverview High School this past June.

Rudolph's original rendering
In December 2008, the community voted to tear down Chorley Elementary, built originally in 1969, to be replaced by a parking lot for a new larger facility. If that story sounds familiar, its because that's what happened to Rudolph's Riverview High School in Sarasota, Florida.

The original school, a complex of classroom wings that branch off from a center spine, climbs up its sloped site as a repetitive series of single story classrooms covered with shed roofs. Clerestory windows are fixed into the sawtooths, echoing the nearby factories along the Hudson River, allowing natural light to flood the interiors and causing the roofs to appear to float.

the clerestory windows above the cafeteria
(photo: Andrei Harwell)
Maintenance was deferred until the cost to renovate and upgrade the building overcame the cost to build a new school. A referedum was proposed to approve the construction of a new school, but language was added at the last minute unbeknownst to the school board to allow for the demolition of Chorley Elementary.

The Paul Rudolph Foundation has discovered that in the rush to approve plans for the new school, architects and the current school administration downplayed the significance of the building's architect in papers filed with the state. The Foundation is working with organizations such as Docomomo New York/Tri-State and concerned Middletown community members to see that a reuse alternative can be proposed to save the building from demolition.