He preferred caves to goldfish bowls and had a transparent-bottomed bath poking through his kitchen ceiling – but most of his audacious work has been demolished. In a new exhibition, it rises again
striking matrix of slender steel struts and intersecting planes of glass stands on a street in midtown Manhattan, forming a crystalline tower amid a regular row of townhouses. The layered elements of the facade appear to slip and slide past each other, puncturing a vertiginous stack of interior spaces, where suspended staircases connect floating mezzanines and houseplants trail from hovering balconies.
The art students weren’t so enamoured. The building, completed in 1963, while Rudolph was chair of the architecture department, became notorious for its poor workspaces and overbearing feel. Sculptors complained of their low-ceilinged “dungeon” studios, while painters had to endure rooms with too much south light. A fire in 1969, which gutted the building, was unsurprisingly blamed on disgruntled students.
Rudolph’s own forays into housing had mixed results. His early Florida homes, which used lightweight principles he had learned in the navy, are now beloved gems, highlights of the annual. But later experiments didn’t fare so well. A prefab housing project in New Haven, built in 1970 with vaulted plywood roofs, suffered from leaks and was demolished a decade later. Hisin Buffalo, New York, also struggled.
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