PAUL RUDOLPH: THE FLORIDA HOUSES
Christopher Domin and Joseph King
Christopher Domin and Joseph King: PAUL RUDOLPH: THE FLORIDA HOUSES. New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2002. First edition. Oblong quarto. Brown cloth decorated and titled in turquoise. Photo illustrated dust jacket. Turquoise endpapers. 246 pp. 150 duotone and black and white illustrations. Unmailed ‘Paul Rudolph: Florida Houses’ exhibition postcard invitation laid in. Interior unmarked and very clean. Lightly handled, but a nearly fine copy in a nearly fine dust jacket.
10.25 x 8.25 hardcover book with 248 pages and 150 duotone and black and white reproductions exclusively covering the Florida architecture of Paul Rudolph.
From the Publisher: “Paul Rudolph, one of the 20th century's most iconoclastic architects, is best known--and most maligned--for his large "brutalist" buildings, like the Yale Art and Architecture Building. So it will surprise many to learn that early in his career he developed a series of houses that represent the unrivaled possibilities of a modest American modernism. With their distinctive natural landscapes, local architectural precedents, and exploitation of innovative construction materials, the Florida houses, some eighty projects built between 1946 and 1961, brought modern architectural form into a gracious subtropical world of natural abundance. Like the locally inspired desert houses of another modern master, Albert Frey, Rudolph's Florida houses represent a distillation and reinterpretation of traditional architectural ideas developed to a high pitch of stylistic refinement. Paul Rudolph: The Florida Houses reveals all of Rudolph's early residential work. Along with Rudolph's personal essays and renderings, duotone photographs by Ezra Stoller and Joseph Molitor, and insightful text by Joseph King and Christopher Domin, this compelling new book conveys the lightness, timelessness, strength, materiality, and transcendency of Rudolph's work.”
Contents
- Preface: C. Ford Peatross
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction: Robert Brruegmann
- Twitchell and Rudolph: Joseph King
- Independent Practice: Christopher Domin
- Public Buildings in Florida: Christopher Domin and Joseph King
- List of Associates
- Bibliography
- Image Credit List
- Index
Paul Rudolph (United States, 1918 – 1997) was one of the most inventive, versatile and controversial members of the generation of American architects that has arisen since the war. Born in 1918 in Kentucky, Rudolph was trained at the Alabama Polytechnic Institue, and at the Graduate School of Design at Harvard under Walter Gropius, whose ideas (notably on the importance of teamwork and on the role of planners in architecture) was in due time to reject as he evolved his basic principle: that urban design is the prerogative of the arcchitect.
He began his career in partnership with Ralph Twitchell, an arachitect thirty years his senior, in Sarasota, Florida. The partnership concentrated on designing small houses, which already showed Rudolph to be abandoning the purist austerity of Gropius. Invitations to give lectures followed, and in 1958, with a school building in Sarasota, the Jewett Arts Center at Wellesley College, Massachusetts, and a project for a new American Embassy in Amman, Jordan, to his credit, Rudolph was appointed Chairman of the School of Architecture at Yale university. Among his larger projects during this period were a number in New Haven itself, including housing and the parking garage for 1500 cars. At Yale he designed the Greeley Memorial Laboratory of the Institute of Forestry, and the massive Art and Architecture Buildibng, built in ribbed concrete.
On leaving Yale in 1965, Rudolph moved to New York, where he continues to practice. His projects have assumed proportions that his early designs for houses did not presage. The New York Graphic Arts Center project of 1967, for example, embodies a gigantic framework intended to contain mobile prefabricated units - a combination of two concepts within one scheme, and an extraordinary example of Rudolph's creative virtuosity.
Christopher Domin is an architect and educator living in Tucson, Arizona. He is a professor at the University of Arizona where he teaches design studios along with history and theory seminars that focus on mid-century and contemporary architecture.
Joseph King is an architect practicing in Bradenton, Florida. He is a specialist in landscape, development, and design as related to regional issues of sustainability.