Architect 2014-07.pdf

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ARCHITECT THE AIA MAGAZINE JULY 2014 WWW.ARCHITECTMAGAZINE.COM
A LESS BRUTAL READING
A NEW PAUL RUDOLPH MONOGRAPH OFFERS A FRESH TAKE
ON THE ARCHITECT’S CONCRETE PROJECTS
THERE’S ONE in every group.
A nonbeliever, that is. Most of
the people attending a recent
Saturday afternoon tour of
Paul Rudolph’s Government
Service Center (1971) in Boston
are already convinced there
is something to see here. We
listen as Timothy M. Rohan,
author of the first complete
monograph of Rudolph’s work,
talks about the theatrical, even
therapeutic, components of
the Mental Health Building.
A middle-aged man in a
plaid shirt is having none
of it. His body language
and increasingly aggressive
mutterings point to just one
question: “You like this stuff?”
After too many such
outbursts, he had to be asked
to leave. But I had him in
mind as I read Rohan’s The
Architecture of Paul Rudolph
(Yale University Press, 2014).
Could such a book—wellargued,
well-illustrated,
well-edited—convince him
of Rudolph’s worth in a way
the tour did not? It’s a timely
publication, as the architect
has become a central character
in present-day discussions
of how, why, and when to
preserve Brutalist buildings.
Rohan’s book offers important
context for those works, and
new insight into Rudolph’s
conflicted personality. That
personality—obsessive,
aggressive, vulnerable—
took him from early life as
a solitary minister’s son in
Alabama to the Harvard
Graduate School of Design,
from building experimental
seaside cottages in Sarasota,
Fla., to creating concrete
campuses in the Northeast.
One of Rohan’s key insights
is his emphasis on Rudolph’s
interest in interiors. From his
first house in Auburn, Ala., in
1940, Rudolph was intimately
involved with the art, colors,
textiles, and furnishings. This
is something we should have
known from the architectural
fragments and orange carpet
at his Yale Art & Architecture
Building (1963), but given the
episodic nature of his career,
his later New York residential
projects and his middleperiod
concrete works have
rarely been considered as a
continuum. But Rohan returns
to this theme and cracks open a
discussion yet to be had about
art, color, and ornament in
Brutalism and beyond.
Rohan keeps Rudolph
in context in a way many
monographs forget to do.
I don’t think of Rudolph’s
work as similar to that of
Edward Durell Stone, Minoru
Yamasaki, and Philip Johnson.
But, indeed, critic Reyner
Banham lumped them
together as the “Ballet School,”
its members more interested
in ornament and aesthetics
than the ethics of the British
incarnation of New Brutalism.
Every believer will have
favorite Rudolph projects that
get short shrift. I missed the
spectacular Milam residence
(1961) and the Rudolph-doespreservation
First Church in
Boston (1968). But it is a sign
of a good monograph that it
does not exhaust your interest.
ALEXANDRA LANGE
Above: Timothy Rohan, an
associate professor of art history
at the University of Massachusetts
at Amherst, has written the first
in-depth scholarly assessment of
Rudolph’s work.
MIKE BASHER