An Architect's Last Word
By JOSEPH GIOVANNIN, Published: July 8, 2004
COMPLEX, interlocking space was Paul Rudolph's specialty. He seemed
to carve it out of the paper he was drawing on, like a sculptor working
marble. Rudolph was arguably the most prodigious architectural talent of
his postwar generation, and an influential dean of the School of
Architecture at Yale University. When he wasn't smudging the cuffs of
his white sleeves at his office drafting table overlooking West 57th
Street, he was living his baroque version of modernist abstraction in
his penthouse on Beekman Place. In 1997, he died in that famously
diaphanous four-story maze on 15 levels, where he used to recount with
mischievous glee that a dazed guest had to be carried out on a stretcher.
