   The New York Times, August 9, 1997, p. 50.

   Paul Rudolph Is Dead at 78; Modernist Architect of the 60's

   By Herbert Muschamp

   Paul Rudolph, an architect whose career epitomized the
   turbulence that engulfed American modernism in the 1960's,
   died yesterday at New York Hospital. He was 78 and lived in
   Manhattan.

   The cause was mesothelioma, or asbestos cancer, according
   to Ernst Wagner, a close friend.

   Mr. Rudolph leaves behind a perplexing legacy that will
   take many years to untangle. With the exception of Louis I.
   Kahn, no American architect of his generation enjoyed
   higher esteem in the 1960's. As chairman of the School of
   Architecture at Yale University from 1957 to 1965, Mr.
   Rudolph wielded enormous influence over the direction of
   American architecture at mid-century. His buildings, often
   executed in concrete with a textured finish that resembled
   corduroy, were widely studied and imitated.

   At the same time, and partly in reaction to his influence,
   the school became a hothouse for younger architects who
   wanted to break out of the modernist mold Mr. Rudolph had
   helped to form. In recent years, his practice was largely
   concentrated in Southeast Asia, where respect for his
   strict modernist ideals endured.

   Two projects, both built in New Haven, helped crystallize
   Mr. Rudolph's reputation in the 60's. The Temple Street
   Parking Garage, completed in 1962, was a powerful
   horizontal design that recalled the dynamic forms of the
   German Expressionist architect Erich Mendelssohn. Like Eero
   Saarinen's terminal for T.W.A. at Kennedy Airport in New
   York, the garage created a monumental form for modern
   transportation.

   Mr. Rudolph's Art and Architecture Building at Yale,
   completed the following year, bore the influence of Le
   Corbusier's design for the Monastery of La Tourette. In
   place of monks' cells, Mr. Rudolph filled the top floor of
   his building with painters' studios.

   But Mr. Rudolph was never a pale imitator of European
   modernism. In a 1970 monograph on his work, the historian
   Sybil Maholy-Nagy hailed Mr. Rudolph as one of a handful of
   American architects who "broke the Atlantic sound barrier,
   creating designs that were more than the sum of their
   European influences." The result, in Maholy-Nagy's view,
   was "architecture that is experimental, contradictory,
   competitive, and bigger than life."

   Paul Rudolph was born in 1918 in Elkton, Ky. He received a
   bachelor's degree in architecture from Alabama Polytechnic
   Institute in 1940. After serving from 1943 to 1946 in the
   Navy, where he supervised shipbuilding at the Brooklyn Navy
   Yard, Mr. Rudolph completed his education at Harvard, where
   he received his master's degree in architecture in 1947.

   Mr. Rudolph began his professional practice in Florida in
   1948 in association with Ralph Twitchell. By the time he
   opened his own office in Sarasota in 1952, Mr. Rudolph had
   already established himself as a designer of private
   houses, many of them built in Siesta Key. Those houses are
   small gems of postwar architecture, structures that use
   slim columns and airy canopies to create oases of light and
   shade. In his mature career, by contrast, Mr. Rudolph would
   become known as an apostle of the megastructure, large
   buildings combining offices, apartments, shopping,
   transportation and public space.

   Mr. Rudolph was invited to become chairman of Yale's
   architecture school in 1957, largely as a result of the
   reputation he had gained with his Florida work. While at
   Yale, he tried to place the study of architectural design
   in a broader urban framework. "He started the first real
   dialogue about architecture in the context of the city,"
   observed Ulrich Franzen, the Manhattan architect, who
   served as a visiting critic at Yale in those years.

   The Art and Architecture Building, a landmark of Mr.
   Rudolph's years at Yale, remains perhaps his best-known
   building. Unfortunately, its reputation is not solely due
   to the strength of its design. In 1969, the building became
   a casualty of the 60's when a group of students set fire to
   it, regarding the building's severe concrete design as a
   symbol of the university's antipathy toward creative life.
   The building was restored.

   Though Mr. Rudolph had already left New Haven by then--in
   1965, he moved his office to a spectacular multilevel space
   on Beekman Place in New York--the fire nonetheless called
   into question the values his building represented. Mr.
   Rudolph's work also found disfavor in another quarter: the
   young architects and scholars who would shortly emerge as
   leaders of the post-modern movement. Architects like
   Charles Moore and Robert A. M. Stern, and such historians
   as Vincent Scully, turned away from abstract modernist
   esthetics toward historical mixtures.

   After 1970, Mr. Rudolph never fully regained the reputation
   he had enjoyed in the previous decade. Rather, the loss of
   prestige came to represent the collapse of the liberal
   consensus culture under assault from left and right. Mr.
   Rudolph's conviction in his architectural values never
   wavered however, and his practice remained active, though
   his most important commissions came from outside the United
   States. As Mildred F. Schmertz, the architectural writer,
   observed in Architectural Record in 1989, "Paul Rudolph
   does most of his work these days in places where
   post-modernism has yet to penetrate, namely, Hong Kong,
   Singapore, and Jakarta."

   In these Southeast Asian projects, such as the Bond Center,
   a faceted glass office tower in Hong Kong, Mr. Rudolph was
   able to pursue his passion for megastructures on a scale
   that surpassed even his most important American
   commissions. If his place in mid-century American modernism
   is assured, his role in the expanded culture of
   globalization remains to be assessed.

   In recent years, American architecture students too young
   to remember the 60's have rediscovered Mr. Rudolph as a
   model of rare integrity. In 1993, at a lecture at the
   Cooper-Hewitt Museum in New York, he drew a standing-room-
   only crowd composed mostly of the young and held the
   audience spellbound, as if he were a visitor from a long-
   vanished golden age.

   He is survived by two sisters, Marie Beadle of Decatur,
   Ga., and Mildred Harrison of Tucker, Ga.

   [Photos of Yale's A&A, Rudolph]

   [End]

