Architecture in the age of alienation: Paul Rudolph's postwar academic buildings.

摘要

The American architect Paul Rudolph (1918–1997) was acclaimed in the early 1960s for creating monumental buildings like his Yale School of Art and Architecture (1958–1964). His work drew upon the architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright and Le Corbusier and reflected the cultural policies of American higher education during the Cold War period. Yet by the early 70s, he had ceased to develop as an architect, his work had fallen from critical favor and his buildings were derisively called “Brutalist.”; This dissertation draws upon my extensive primary research as the first scholar to look at the Rudolph papers now housed in the Library of Congress. It examines three college fine arts centers (Wellesley, Yale and Colgate) and one campus plan (the University of Massachusetts, South Dartmouth) by Rudolph to explain how his buildings were “citadels for the arts” designed to preserve the humanities from the alienating effects of mass culture. To combat alienation, Rudolph used richly textured surfaces, bright colors, cantilevered forms and complex processional routes to connect the viewer with his buildings.; Although Rudolph believed that he was “humanizing” modern architecture, many found his surfaces overly aggressive and his interiors confusingly labyrinthine. Paradoxically, his buildings often engendered the very alienation that they were designed to combat. This contradiction can be understood if the buildings are seen as a register of Rudolph's own alienation as he struggled to synthesize disparate elements of the modernist vocabulary while living as a homosexual man in the Cold War period. This study breaks new theoretical ground by analyzing Rudolph's so-called “Brutalism” as a form of hypermasculinity. It is a manifestation of camp—a homosexual sensibility that rose to the forefront of artistic practice in the early 60s and that was described by Susan Sontag in her well-known essay “Notes on ‘Camp’” of 1964.