Paul Marvin Rudolph

Paul Marvin Rudolph (1918-1997), American architect, whose work was highly influential as an alternative to the rectilinear glass-and-steel International Style. He was born in Elkton, Kentucky, and was educated at the Alabama Polytechnic Institute and at Harvard University, where his teachers included the German American architect Walter Gropius. After practicing in Florida, Rudolph served (1958-1965) as chairman of the School of Architecture at Yale University and then worked in New York. His early Florida beach houses were designed with glass doors, bent plywood vaults, and translucent screens appropriate to a semitropical climate. After 1958 he primarily created large public buildings such as the School of Art and Architecture (1964) at Yale—a massive, complex arrangement of interlocking vertical piers and horizontal window walls, boldly sculptural in its use of concrete.