Paul Rudolph, Expression of Living Environments

Abstract

The American architect Paul Rudolph (1918- 1997) contributed to introduce architecture in a phase of criticism and maturity. His interest for overcoming the international style was based on a way of understanding architecture that he synthesized into six determining factors: location, natural conditions, materials, function, psychology of space and spirit of the times.

With these paradigms, he sought personal responses to new environmental, spatial and social demands, giving drawing a central role in the creative process.

The purpose of this article is to analyze, through drawing, the relationship of his residential architecture with the natural environment as a factor of well-being, as well as the phenomenological character of the inhabited space, in which the physical, social and emotional connection with the landscape takes on special importance.

A research on Rudolph’s career is made, from his first single-family houses in the late 1940s in Sarasota, to the modular aggregations of horizontal development that he built in the northern United States during the 1960s. The methodology consists of analyzing the spatial vision and intellectual restlessness he shows in representing his architecture in natural settings, with special attention to graphic resources.

The connection of architecture with natural and forest spaces is constantly represented, as a means to bring physical and mental health to the human kind, and to strengthen the feeling of community. Therefore, it is not only conceived for the improvement of individual welfare, but also as a factor with a positive impact on social and environmental dynamics.

Rudolph’s drawing is a field for experimentation and an objetive in itself, a place to expand the interrelation of architecture with the natural environment and its benefits for the inhabitant.

DOI: https://doi.org/10.20365/disegnarecon.33.2024.8