Paul Rudolph

The Ringling Museum is currently exhibiting a facsimile of a beach house by the architect Paul Rudolph done many decades ago.  The real beach house exists somewhere on a key in a rich man's grounds south of Sarasota.  I have now been three times to the exhibition; it is so beautiful a structure that I could go, nay, shall go many more times before it is taken down in the autumn.  Paul Rudolph who was a distinguished architect, pretty much started his career in the Sarasota area, although he is famous for buildings he designed later throughout the country and abroad.  There is a great sentimental draw as well.  I knew Paul but that is not so memorable as the encounter I had with his aesthetic when I first went to the apartment of the woman who was to become my second wife.  She was a student at the Harvard School of Design and steeped in the design theories of Bauhaus which the school's director Walter Gropius had made to flourish in America.  I had never seen anything like the decor she had imposed on the small basement room in which she was living.  It was so spare, the few areas for sitting were all built into the walls, the small room was distinct in its divisions without any physical prompts .  The space beyond the door where I stood upon entering was created by stringing raw leather thongs from floor to ceiling.  It was, I recognized, a sort of vestibule, but there was no wall, only the intellectual and aesthetic sense of one.  I had grown up in the Middle Western affluence of a surgeon's home, rooms full of tables, chairs, Persian rugs, embroidered cushions, things and more things and more.  And here in this Cambridge basement I was confronted with spare, empty, stripped down spaces.  Paul was one of the critics the last year of her studies, he had been a judge on her qualifying project; he was also a friend.  It so happened when we moved to New Haven for my appointment a few years later he was arriving as the Dean of the School of Architecture, and our friendship flourished.  We were on hand to witness Paul's transformation of the Elks clubhouse building into his residence, inspiring us again and again to eliminate, minimize, go for the bones of the design, geometry and coordination over careless sensuality and comfort.  It was so exhilarating.  The beach house at the Ringling has glass walls, and panels that can be lowered or raised over the glass to create darkness or light, rooms that mimic the measurements of the exterior glass panels, so that the occupants will feel themselves in a Mondrian painting.  When we moved to California for my Stanford appointment we lived in an Eichler house made by a mass market housing developer whose allegiance was to Bauhaus.  Every piece of furniture we installed in the living room was in some geometric relationship with every other, nothing was random.  And then suddenly we had four children approaching their teens, and Bauhaus was over.  We moved back East to a large rambling house filled with too much furniture, too many casual messes strewn all over the place, too many dogs, people, residents and visitors, hullabaloo.  So the facsimile of the beach house draws me back again and again to a memory of the early years of our marriage, and a kind of special sanity.