March 7, 2007 12:59
The Hits Just Keep on Coming
I see in today's New York Times that Boston is thinking of demolishing a 13 story building by Paul Rudolph to make way for an 80 story skyscraper by Renzo Piano.
PHOTO:The New York Times/Jodi Hilton
Rudolph, who died ten years ago, wasn't always the easiest architect to love. (What can you expect when you make your name in a style called "Brutalism"?) All the same, at times he coaxed some wonderful results out of all that forbidding concrete. Taking lessons from the thrusting planes of Frank Lloyd Wright and the power of Le Corbusier's later work, he found ingenious ways to express a building's structure. But lately he seems to have become a state of the art wrecking-ball magnet. Two Rudolph-designed houses were demolished in recent years, one of them just two months ago in Westport, Conn.
PHOTO:The New York Times/Doug Healey
And Riverview High School in Sarasota, Fla., the city where Rudolph started his career in the 1940s and '50s, is now in danger of being sacrificed for a parking lot.
PHOTO:Sarasota Herald-Tribune/Dan Wagner
The mid-century Modernists could be pretty dry eyed themselves when it came to tearing down earlier work to make way for their own. Rudolph once even proposed a mammoth structure in lower Manhattan that would have pretty much wiped out SoHo. It took a while for the Modernists to accept the idea of preservation. And now when it comes to their own work, it looks like the lessons need to be learned all over again.
One other thing. Supposedly Rudolph's Boston building has to go to make room for a public plaza as part of the project that Piano is designing. But -- golly -- I notice that in the Times story today Piano also mentions that he's under pressure from the developer to widen the proposed tower. If the Rudolph goes, let's see how much space "the public" -- that would be you and me and everybody else who isn't getting a cut of the rents -- actually gains in the end.
About Looking Around
Richard Lacayo writes about books, art and architecture at TIME Magazine, where he arrived in 1984. He is the co-author, with George Russell, of Eyewitness: 100 Years of Photojournalism and has won various lesser known journalism prizes, which he keeps in his desk drawer. Read more
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Reader Comments (2)
That is a shame. It is like an artist's painting being destroyed. If he were alive today, he would be devastated, and no matter what people feel about his work, it is unfair to destroy his buildings.
Posted by Anonymous | March 8, 2007 4:03 PM
I love Paul Rudolph’s domestic architecture, which is planar and rectilinear in wonderful proportions and uses glass sparingly but beautifully, like Neutra – for light and views but not to expose the inhabitants, unlike seminal Johnson and Mies houses. I recall a Rudolph house in Sherman Oaks, L.A. that was somehow just exactly right. But his adventures in massive concrete by now just seem clumsy, academic, and wholly over the top, with one exception: His grand and extraordinary parking garage in New Haven.
Buildings need to be graceful, whatever the term means at the time, and at minimum they need to function as comfortable, enfolding shelters. At the Yale School of Art and Architecture building and Rudolph’s 13-story office building in Boston, among others, I submit he tried but failed on both counts. And these structures have had ample time to win us over on their aesthetic merits. Well, ahem.
The failure of Rudolph’s commercial and educational buildings as architecture is not his choice of materials – concrete is, of course, wonderful stuff, if you know what are doing, as in the masterful Temple Street parking garage. The failure is Rudolph’s attempt to argue his ideology in concrete form, forgive the pun. Today an elegant small-footprint building whatever the material with systems that actually work and minimize energy use – that seems a good place to start. These are not new ideas. Frank Lloyd Wright used concrete and other nontraditional building materials deftly and with considerable beauty, in reaction to what he called “the box.” Bruce Goff also comes to mind. A long list could easily be made. And few notable contemporary architects – Hadid, Gehry, Diller & Scofidio, Libeskind, Foster, Mayne, Piano, Tschumi, to name several – seem to own little to Rudolf except as a door they could close with relief.
Rudolph’s public structures will be monuments to an ideologue’s sway with those who can pay for what turns out to be an architectural dead end. Meanwhlle his private buildings, while they survive, will be continuing delights. Though I am crazy about that garage.
Posted by parrett | May 29, 2008 10:33 AM