Paul Rudolph moved with his parents and three sisters – Mildred, Marie and Ruth – to Athens, Alabama in 1936. He went to Athens High School. The Rudolph’s befriended the Martin family and two decades later designed a house for them.
“In retrospect it was a simple house, even sober, but it was massively, irrevocably radical for its place and its day. The living room was an atrium, with a sunken floor and a clerestory, giving us a fifteen-foot ceiling and bringing the pines to the west and the oaks to the east into the house. You lived outside at the same time you lived in. Both the main roof and, obviously, the clerestory floated on their glass. There were even gallery windows (matching those in the clerestory) built into the walls between rooms, so that you could see through 18 Ridgelawn entirely, from wherever you were.”
Martin, Guy. “Greek Active.” Nest: A Magazine of Interiors 11 (Winter 2000-2001): 172-179.