Paul Rudolph, a modernist architect who served as chair of the School of Architecture at Yale during the height of his career in the early 1960s, died of asbestos cancer on Aug. 8 in New York Hospital. He was 78 years old.
Known primarily for his concrete buildings with textured finishes, Mr. Rudolph designed three campus buildings during his years at Yale: the William B. Greeley Memorial Laboratory of the School of Forestry & Environmental Studies; the Art & Architecture Building, which remains one of his best-known creations; and the Mansfield Street Apartments for married students. He also designed the Temple Street Parking Garage in New Haven. Along with Louis I. Kahn, designer of the Yale Center for British Art, he is considered one of the most esteemed architects of the 1960s.
Mr. Rudolph came to Yale as chair of the School of Architecture in 1957 and "was one of the best deans the school ever had," according to Vincent J. Scully Jr., Sterling Professor Emeritus and lecturer in the history of art. "He came at a time when the school was severely disorganized and morale was low and turned it into the foremost architecture school in the country," Professor Scully recalls.
Noted architect Robert A.M. Stern, a graduate of the School of Architecture in 1965 and one of Mr. Rudolph's students, described his former teacher as "one of the most important American architects of this century."
"He came to prominence when American architects within the modern movement were trying to put their stamp on that movement," Mr. Stern says. "None had the pure talent and inventiveness, and the will to find his ideas realized, as Paul Rudolph."
Born in 1918 in Elkton, Kentucky, Mr. Rudolph received a bachelor's degree in architecture from Alabama Polytechnic Institute in 1940. From 1943 to 1946 he served in the Navy as a supervisor of shipbuilding at the Brooklyn Navy Yard. He earned a master's degree in architecture from Harvard University in 1947.
Prior to coming to Yale, Mr. Rudolph had a studio in Sarasota, Florida, where he established himself as a designer of private houses. It was during his years at Yale, however, that he gained a reputation for his design of urban buildings and structures, influencing architecture students and young architects both at Yale and around the world. When the nine-story School of Architecture opened in 1963, the top three architectural magazines featured the building at the same time, an occurrence usually unheard of, according to Mr. Stern.
"Usually one architectural magazine will shy away from doing the same article as another," he explains. "But his persona was so impressive at that time that they all covered him at once."
As a teacher, Mr. Rudolph was "mercurial and passionate," recalls Mr. Stern, who has also been a visiting professor at the School of Architecture. "He would defend any student whose ideas could be backed up, and at the same time, he suffered fools not at all. He took the wonderfully contrary point of view and was open to anything. He invited many critics to come lecture and criticize students' works, and he would talk and debate with them. So those of us who were his students always felt we were a part of a very exciting conversation about architecture."
After leaving Yale in 1965, Mr. Rudolph set up his practice in New York City. But toward the end of the decade, his popularity waned as younger post-modernist architects began to leave their mark, some critical of Mr. Rudolph's style, according to Mr. Stern. From then on, most of the architect's most important commissions came from outside of the United States, particularly Southeast Asia, where he continued to design urban megastructures in his modernist style. "His search for a convincing, rich architectural style within the modernist canon went as far as anyone could take it," explains Mr. Stern. "Sadly, he was never honored by the American Institute of Architects with the Gold Medal or with the Pritzker Prize, which he rightly deserved, and he became somewhat isolated in the field. Yet he never wavered in his own ideals, and in the past five or six years, young students have increasingly come to rediscover his work. I think a new appreciation of him will be the result, and it's unfortunate that he didn't live long enough to be able to see that."
Mr. Rudolph is survived by two sisters, Marie Beadle of Decatur, Georgia, and Mildred Harrison of Tucker, Georgia.