Paul Rudolph?s ?poor man?s? version of the legendary Farnsworth House is an icon in its own right This article was originally published on November 5, 2015.
Celebrated in its time, Paul Rudolph's Walker Guest House (Sanibel Island, Florida, 1952-53) is a magical modernist box essential for understanding Rudolph and midcentury modernism. When I was researching The Architecture of Paul Rudolph (Yale University Press, 2014), finding this small house amidst the beachside scrub of Sanibel Island, Florida, was a tricky, if pleasurable, treasure hunt. But now you can see it more easily. To make this important early Rudolph work accessible, a replica has been built for display at the Ringling Art Museum in Sarasota this fall.
Most remembered for his controversial, large-scale Brutalist buildings of the 1960s, Rudolph (1918-97) first achieved international acclaim in the late 1940s and early 1950s for a series of widely published, structurally expressive beach houses he designed in Sarasota, Florida, with Ralph Twitchell (1890-1978). The houses were experimental, using new materials, such as plastics and plywoods, that Rudolph had encountered when he served in the Brooklyn Navy Yard during World War II. Educated at Harvard's Graduate School of Design under Walter Gropius, Rudolph saw the houses as opportunities to explore and question the rules of modern architecture in order to find his own unique means of expression. The Walker Guest House was Rudolph's breakthrough. The co...