Salon Series to Focus on the Work of Alvar Aalto

The Paul Rudolph Foundation is pleased to announce the third installment of our salon series on Modern Architects with a discussion led by Eeva-Liisa Pelkonen. Ms. Pelkonen will discuss the enigmatic, and staunchly individualistic Alvar Aalto. We will talk about his role in evolving Finnish design and defining Finland's national identity. This will be contrasted with Rudolph's contributions in the U.S. in realizing the American Century.

Eeva-Liisa Pelkonen who holds a PhD from Columbia University and teaches at the Yale School of Architecture will lead our discussion. She is the author of three books including Achtung Architektur!, Eero Saarinen: Shaping the Future, and her latest work, our topic of discussion, Alvar Aalto: Architecture, Modernity and Geopolitics.

Ms. Pelkonen will present in the Modulightor duplex, and be on hand to dedicate copies of her book over refreshments, following the talk.


Tuesday, March 23rd, 2010
6:45 - 8:00 pm
doors open at 6:15 pm

Modulightor, 246 East 58th Street

Introduction by
Sean Khorsandi, Foundation Co-Director

Limited copies of Alvar Aalto: Architecture, Modernity and Geopolitics will be on hand for purchase and dedication.

Coffee and cookies provided by
The Paul Rudolph Foundation

Seats for the event are limited, so reserve your place today to ensure your attendance. Tickets are seldom available at the door.

To purchase tickets, please go to the event's website located here.

Der Scutt (1934-2010)

Der Scutt in 1997 (image: Don Hogan Charles, The New York Times)
The Foundation is sad to learn of the death this past Sunday of Der Scutt, an architect who studied under and later worked for Paul Rudolph. A biography of Der Scutt's life and work can be found here in an article in the New York Times, and his firm, now run by his son Hagen Scutt, can be found online here.

Kelvin Dickinson, Co-Director of the Paul Rudolph Foundation, remembers meeting Der Scutt:

Before I joined the Paul Rudolph Foundation, I went to see an exhibition in early 2005 of Rudolph's drawings at the New York School of Interior Design. A panel of speakers, including Der Scutt, spoke about their time studying under and employed by Paul Rudolph. I was fascinated to hear Der Scutt's recollections of working in Mr. Rudolph's office.

After the speakers finished, I went into the gallery and studied each of the drawings on display. Looking intently at a project I had never heard of - Rudolph's unpublished design for a building at Staten Island Community College - I was fascinated with Rudolph's use of color and puzzled by the little notes that were scribbled all over it. Perhaps sensing my interest, or that I was analyzing them so closely, I heard a voice next to me say that he had worked on the drawing that I was looking at. I turned to see Der Scutt standing next to me.

As I asked questions about what it was like to work for Rudolph, he explained that Rudolph used very specific colors and abbreviations to explain his ideas to his staff, who would later draft the plans and sections. Der Scutt said everyone that worked for Rudolph learned this 'code' and that it was essential to understanding how Rudolph thought, since he was constantly drawing and changing ideas very quickly.

As we continued to talk, I began to notice people gathered around to listen to our conversation, and I learned a great deal about Rudolph's design process. Afterwards, we shook hands and I could see that Der Scutt remained to that day deeply affected by his time in Rudolph's office.

Chorley's Threat Makes the Front Cover

Chorley Elementary's 'Spine' (image: Andrei Harwell)
The Chorley Elementary School, a 2010 Seven to Save project of the Preservation League of New York State, is featured on the front page of the Recent Past Preservation Network newsletter.

The article, written by Paul Rudolph Foundation Co-Director Sean Khorsandi, goes into the referendum passed by the voters of Middletown, NY to build a new elementary school. The construction of the new school, which is not opposed by the Paul Rudolph Rudolph Foundation, will be followed by the demolition of the adjacent historic structure designed by Paul Rudolph in 1964-1969 for a school bus parking lot.

The Paul Rudolph Foundation is working with the Preservation League of New York State and local members of the community to find alternatives to allow the historic register eligible building to either be preserved or saved for adaptive reuse.

A petition to save the structure has begun and can be found here.

To read the article, you can find it on the Recent Past Preservation Network's website here.

Yamasaki's Archives - Both Lost and Found

Yamasaki in the 1950's (image: The Detroit News)
We received an update from Dale Allen Gyure, Associate Professor of Architecture at Lawrence Technological University about the threat to Minoru Yamasaki's architectural archives. We originally received the news from the Society of Architectural Historian's listserv, and wrote a blog post about it here.

According to Mr. Gyure,

I have good and bad news to report about the Yamasaki archives.

The county had scheduled an auction on March 9 to sell off as many office furnishings and equipment as possible. Amazingly, they also intended to empty all the file drawers and throw away the contents. The good news is that representatives of the Michigan State Archives were given access to the material. They arrived only an hour ahead of the shredders! Much important material was saved. The team also examined a self-storage facility but found only recent financial documents. Go to the Michigan Modern site for more information and a press release (http://michiganmodern.org/).

The bad news, however, is that Kip Serota, a longtime former employee who worked with Yamasaki, reported that when the firm moved offices back in the 1980s or 1990s they rented three self storage units to store all the historical materials, but the people operating the firm didn't pay the rent. Eventually the three units were consolidated into two and then finally into one. According to Serota, each time they downsized they simply threw out what didn't fit into the other units. When there was one unit left they again failed to pay the rent and the last of the material was simply thrown into a dumpster by the storage company. So it appears that whatever the Michigan State Archives was able to save is all that is left to document the history of this important firm.

Look for a story soon in the New York Times. Photos of the rescue are available at the Michigan SHPO’s Flickr site:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/mishpo/sets/72157623429423325.

We hope something was able to be saved by these efforts - it is sad that so much can be lost by a little carelessness. Thanks for the update, and we hope to see Mr. Yamasaki's work get the attention it deserves.

Reading Rudolph's Work - from Paper to Reality

Rudolph's sketch for the unfinished Government Service Center
(image: archives of the Paul Rudolph Foundation)
Ian Baldwin, an architect and writer who lives in Providence, Rhode Island, has written a review of "Paul Rudolph: Writings on Architecture" for the Design Observer's website entitled "Reading Rudolph".

Mr. Baldwin begins his piece with the problem facing Rudolph's legacy - its connection in the eyes of the public to the architectural style known as Brutalism:

His brand of Brutalism (the term itself didn't gain traction until the late 1960s, and Rudolph himself never used it) was intriguing, powerful and intensely three-dimensional. By the late 1970s, Brutalism had gone mainstream, becoming derivative and banal, and changing tastes swept any building clad in exposed concrete into the aesthetic dustbin. The poor planning, deferred maintenance, ineffective mechanical systems and lack of owner stewardship plaguing Brutalist buildings became conflated, in the public imagination, with their design.

Interspersed with images of Rudolph's work, Mr. Baldwin summarizes the importance of collecting Rudolph's thoughts on Modernism, the architectural profession, and urban design:

This argument, like the others Rudolph weaves throughout his writing — the requirement for diversity in urban space, the futility of a continual search for novelty, the need for architects to practice urban design — remains unchanged over the four decades covered by the book. This means not that the Paul Rudolph of 1992 was outdated but that the Paul Rudolph of 1952 was well ahead of his time. Even then, he objected to the visual and spiritual emptiness of mainstream modernism, writing, "One doubts that a poem was ever written to a flat-roofed building silhouetted against the setting sun."

The author links Rudolph's thoughts on architecture to two later works: UMass Dartmouth in Massachusetts and Boston's Government Service Center. In each case Mr. Baldwin illustrates how Rudolph's thoughts about architecture and design were applied in a built context. But, sticking to his beliefs about Modernism and the profession ultimately colored the public's perception of his work:

Unlike his postmodern detractors, Rudolph actually tried to form novel urban solutions that went beyond artifice and labored symbolism. He knew the risks of doing so, and was willing to accept them. When he was interviewed about the Yale building in 1988, he was honest about the building's shortcomings but said that wouldn't change the design. His sanguine acceptance of changing tastes might be read as a resolution — or an epitaph — for any of his buildings:

"I'm pleased that the building touches people, and part of that is that people's opinions oscillate about it. That's okay. The worst fate from my viewpoint would be indifference."

Exploring the 'Architect as Urbanist'

Rudolph's original design for the Concourse in Singapore
Robert Bruegmann, an historian of architecture, wrote "The Architect as Urbanist" which appeared originally in Paul Rudolph: The Late Work, by Roberto da Alba, published by Princeton Architectural Press in 2003. With permission from the author, the website Design Observer has reprinted it in a two part series.

Mr. Bruegmann begins with Rudolph's idea that architects need to focus more on the issues of urban design:

One way to reconsider the work of Paul Rudolph, particularly his late work, is to follow a single thread that ran throughout his career — his concern for architecture as an urban art.

He continues by looking at Rudolph's position within the context of 'Modernist' architects:

Rudolph is consistently described as modernist and antagonistic to any kind of postmodernist pastiche. This commonly accepted dichotomy between modernist style and postmodernist style is unfortunate. It has tended to throw Paul Rudolph into the camp of many supposedly "modernist" architects, for example Peter Eisenman or Zaha Hadid, whose goals and methods he does not share, and to separate him from many architects, like Robert Venturi, whose goals if not whose stylistic sensibilities he does share. (...) To understand how this has happened, it is necessary to locate historically Paul Rudolph’s ideas about architecture and urbanism.

Mr. Bruegmann analyzes Rudolph's ideas concerning urbanism through the exploration of five projects late in the architect's career: the Lippo Centre in Hong Kong; the Daiei Company in Nagoya, Japan; the Colonnade and Concourse in Singapore; and the Dharmala tower in Jakarta.

Mr. Bruegmann also witnessed Mr. Rudolph's unwaivering dedication to his profession as he neared the end of his life:

In the months before his death, Rudolph was working on a new town outside Surabaya, the second largest city in Indonesia. In his New York office he pulled out huge sheets of drawings on which he had sketched the topography, the flow of the watercourses, and, on top of this natural data, the proposed town center, with a huge mound at the center providing parking and housing units, which rode the hills and gave views of the water. The city would conform to and be an extension of the underlying land, and it would have all the complexity of traditional urban forms. As he talked, he became carried away by the opportunities, the chance to show how to unite buildings and land, how to order the town in such a way that it might appear orderly, rational and spatially exciting. “I am hell-bent,” he said, “to get this town into comprehensible form.” Comprehensible urban form. That was the quest from the day Paul Rudolph first discovered architecture. It was a goal that remained constant over the years, despite his maturing and the oscillations in style of his colleagues. No one has ever worked with more energy or with more devotion to this task than Paul Rudolph, and no one has been as successful in creating a body of work in which those most ancient of architectural elements — space and light — are better fused with modern urban needs.

Part 1 of the essay can be found here, and part 2 of the essay can be found here.

Chorley Elementary in the Spotlight

Paul Rudolph's threatened Chorley Elementary (photo: Andrei Harwell)
The threat to Paul Rudolph's John W. Chorley Elementary in Middletown, New York will be featured in a panel discussion at the Center for Architecture in New York City this Thursday, March 11th.

The Paul Rudolph Foundation and several local activists are campaigning to prevent the tear down of this educational monument. Equipped with professional skills, architects can be instrumental in defending modern structures from destruction.

An introduction about Paul Rudolph's legacy and the current efforts to save Chorley Elementary will be by Sean Khorsandi, Co-Director of the Paul Rudolph Foundation.

Panelists will be on hand to discuss strategies used in recent preservation efforts, including Rudolph's Riverview High School in Sarasota, FL (demolished, 2009) and the Yale University Art and Architecture Building (renovated, 2008):

- Carl Abbott, FAIA, Carl Abbott FAIA Architects / Planners discussing Riverview High School, Sarasota, Florida

- Steven Forman, AIA, Senior Associate at Gwathmey Siegel discussing the Art & Architecture Building at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut

The event will be moderated by Fred Bernstein, an architecture critic whose work regularly appears in the New York Times. Fred has written a number of articles about Paul Rudolph.

Organized by the Center for Architecture in partnership with the Paul Rudolph Foundation. Additional support provided by the Preservation League of New York.

When:
6:00 PM - 8:00 PM
THURSDAY, MARCH 11

Where:
The Center for Architecture
536 LaGuardia Place
NY, NY 10012
(212) 683-0023
info@aiany.org

Price:
Free for Members
$10 for Non-members

At Risk! is organized as part of Modernism at Risk: Modern Solutions for Saving Our Modern Landmarks on view at the Center for Architecture through May 1.

Gallery Hours
Mon-Fri: 9am to 8pm
Sat: 11am to 5pm

Modernism at Risk is organized by the World Monuments Fund and sponsored by Knoll.

Everything's Coming Up Rudolph...

What a difference another year makes. In the rush of activity here at the Paul Rudolph Foundation, we completely passed by the anniversary of the third year of the Art & Architecture of Paul Rudolph group on Flickr.

online interest keeps growing
A year ago, the flickr group begun by members of the Paul Rudolph Foundation had 323 members and 4,226 images from fans of Rudolph's work from around the world. Today we have 429 members and 5,327 images.

The group began in early 2007 after the demolition of the Micheel's Residence in Westport, Connecticut. Members of the Paul Rudolph Foundation realized that preservation of Rudolph's work would be easier if more people in the general public knew about his contributions to modern architecture.




A number of Paul Rudolph's obscure works and drawings have been uploaded to the site by Foundation Co-Director Kelvin Dickinson, who has begun to make trips to the Library of Congress to obtain scans of photos and drawings to support the Foundation's preservation efforts. To date, the Foundation has compiled drawings for UMass Dartmouth, Chorley Elementary, the unbuilt Shuey Residence, Riverview and Sarasota High School, among others.

Visitors and Fans from around the World
Help us celebrate another year of Rudolph! If you have photos of his work and would like to contribute to this effort, you can go to the site here: http://www.flickr.com/groups/paulrudolph/

Lost Rudolph Residence Recreated for Exhibition

Paul Rudolph's Micheels Residence, built in 1972 in Westport Connecticut and demolished in January of 2007, is one of the features of a photographic exhibition of Modern architecture in Westport and Weston. 'Westport Modern: when cool was hot' is on display at the Wesport Historical Society from January 24 to May 1.

The reason for the show is noted in an article in the Connecticut Post,

"As preservationists we often show up on the scene too late," said head curator Morley Boyd. "This is a modest attempt to build a stage for a group of residences that haven't received the recognition they deserve."

Mr. Boyd and architect Michael Glynn were instrumental in leading the effort to save the Micheel's residence from destruction back in 2006. The Paul Rudolph Foundation joined them and was present at the end when a judge allowed a local developer to tear down the home after finding it did not have enough criteria to warrant its preservation.

The loss of the building resulted in a number of efforts meant to preserve modern residential architecture, which is often overlooked because it is hidden away in suburban enclaves where wealthy owners can afford to build bigger homes. The Connecticut Trust created a 'Modern Homes Survey' of residences in New Canaan, which features a page for each of the 91 homes that were discovered in the community. The Paul Rudolph Foundation created a flickr group to reach out to local fans of modern architecture, and in the process has been alerted to threats to Paul Rudolph's Chorley Elementary and Concourse building in Singapore.

The animation of the Micheels residence was created by Stephen Lasar Architects of New Milford using photographs, sketches and measurements made before the demolition by Trust staff and historical consultants. The materials produced during the survey of the home will be submitted to the Historic American Buildings Survey. To visit the exhibition:

Where:
Westport Historical Society
25 Avery Place
Westport, CT

When:
January 24th-May 1st

for more information, you can visit the event's website here.

When a House is not a Home

A house divided against itself cannot stand.. (image: Kelvin Dickinson)
Amir Sharif of the Yale Daily News reports today that students at the School of Architecture and the History of Art Departments are beginning to notice that a shared roof does not necessarily make a home. According to the article,

More than a year after the opening of the Loria Center in November 2008, which finally put the art history department and the School of Architecture under the same roof after some 40 years of separation, some students and faculty members in the two disciplines said they still feel as distant as ever.

Professor Peter Eisenman even goes as far as to compare the perceived separation between Paul Rudolph's iconic building and Charles Gwathmey's Loria addition to the Cold War. "I feel like I’m on the other side of the Berlin Wall," he told Mr. Sharif.

Difficulties in scheduling classes between the two disciplines is noted as one of the problems, but more interesting is that the architecture is seen to contribute to the feeling of separation. The article notes that student lounges, terraces and bathrooms in the Loria Center are exclusively for the use of the Art History students, and even require a card key to access them. Mr. Sharif continues,

"I honestly resent not being able to use those spaces, especially when walking by lounges that are completely empty,” Eisenman added. “It’s a hostile act. If I could meet somebody on the terrace [of Loria] on a nice spring day, that would be the start to a natural interaction."

But School of Architecture Dean Robert A.M. Stern believes the architecture students should meet in the Loria's Arts Library. Charles Gwathmey, the architect of the Loria Center, intended for the library to be a communal "bridge" which would allow the students from both schools to mix and socialize. According to Dean Stern, the library was the place for students to hang out in the 60's. But, as the article notes, "the loudest thing in the library is usually the paprika carpeting."