“I feel the Le Corbusier’s Villa Savoie [Poissy, France, 1929] demonstrated the sense of continuity of space, the unfolding space, in an admirable way. It also stated eloquently Le Corbusier’s feeling about man’s relationship to nature, which has proved to be prophetic. I think that Mies van der Rohe’s 860 apartment houses in Chicago […
“Many of these drawings, especially the perspective sections, would encapsulate in a single image the range of Rudolph’s concerns as an architect. There was his quest to define and model space with light and planar surfaces – his interest in climate and the relationship between structure and services – his explorations into modularity and the…
“I was a visiting critic at Princeton and for reasons that I don’t remember, maybe I never knew, he was at Princeton and was brought into the drafting room where I was. We were introduced and he said, “And what are you doing here?” I said, “Well, I’m trying to teach a bit.” He said,…
Read More “Rudolph on his encounters with Frank Lloyd Wright” »
“An architect is a man concerned with building meaningfully. As opposed to someone who is interested in building efficiently, or sometimes even beautifully, or as opposed to the whole engineering aspects of building, as opposed to adorning buildings, as opposed to all the ramifications that consultants get into. We often apologize for being interested in…
“If one were to make a prognostication, again, one would say that the aesthetics of pre-cast reinforced concrete will lead us to an architecture which depends on the play of light and shadow, as opposed to the architecture which depends basically, for its aesthetic values, on reflections which come from a curtain wall. This does…
“I have been influenced by the fact that people perceive the first six stories (or 120 feet) of a high-rise building in a very different way from the rest of it. I came to that 120 feet because it has been shown (and I tested this myself) that most people can’t recognize other people from…
“Yes, I was fired. But in a sense, my influence and efforts did not change that drastically — not at first anyway — because the other architects — and I have to emphasize that there were many architects involved — understood that there was a pervading idea, series of ideas, welding the campus into one,…
Read More “On his firing from SMTI / UMass Dartmouth in 1966” »
“When working on the Tuskegee Chapel, I suggested a continuous slot of glass around the perimeter just below the roof, so the natural light enters the sanctuary diagonally. The roof is hyperbolic paraboloid in form for acoustic reasons, and the space rises diagonally and escapes through glass. The directions of the movement of space are…
“Well, I can’t say that I’m interested in a particular palette. For me, color is one of the most complex things in the world because it’s always so different in different lights, different quantities at different times of the day, and when juxtaposed against other colors the actuality and the appearance are two different things….
“And so we come to civic architecture, the grand omission for half a century. In its most simple terms civic architecture means assigning a proper role to each building so it works in concert with its neighbors, thereby creating a comprehensible whole. This is the opposite of the Madison Avenue view, which thinks of each…
