Paul Marvin Rudolph
Paul Marvin Rudolph
B. 1918 Elkton, Kentucky
D. 1997 New York City, New York
Paul Rudolph earned his bachelor’s degree in architecture at Auburn University in Alabama in 1940 and then attended Harvard Graduate School of Design to study with Walter Gropius. In 1943 he left school to serve in the Navy as supervisor of shipbuilding at the Brooklyn Navy Yard. He returned to Harvard University and earned his masters degree in 1947. For the following four years he partnered with Ralph Twitchell in Florida where he established himself as a designer of private houses. When this partnership ended Rudolph practiced independently in Boston, New Haven and New York.
Rudolph’s early designs used the glass walls and austere geometry of the International Style. After designing the Yale Art & Architecture Building, often considered his masterpiece, he was appointed Chairman of the Department of Architecture at that university, a post that he held from 1958 to 1965. There he gained a reputation for his design of urban buildings and structures (Tracey Towers and the Lewis S. Davidson Sr. Houses in the Bronx), influencing architecture students and young architects both at Yale and around the world. In 1965 Rudolph left Yale to practice in New York City where he designed plans for urban communities as well as designs for campuses and educational buildings, office buildings, and residential projects. Important works by Rudolph include the IBM Complex at East Fishkill, New York (1962; with Walter Kiddle), and the Burroughs Wellcome Corporate Headquarters, Research Triangle Park, at Durham, North Carolina (1969).
Known primarily for his concrete buildings with textured finishes, “Rudolph’s work exhibits a highly personal and uncompromising style. Although considered one of the most prominent Modernist architects in the United States after World II, Rudolph questioned the validity of the movement’s precepts in his later work.” These were primarily commissions from outside of the United States, particularly in Southeast Asia.