As America cooled on Paul Rudolph’s designs at the end of the 1970s, Asia gave the polarizing architect—responsible for such concrete masterworks as Yale’s Art & Architecture Building and the Orange County Government Center—new life. In the U.S., funding for large-scale, publicly funded projects had dried up, and patience had worn thin with Rudolph’s perceived arrogance in the face of construction problems, cost overruns, and related litigation. Meanwhile, architectural tastes were shifting away from his aggressive brand of Modernism. So Rudolph spent much of the ‘80s traveling across the Pacific for new work, collaborating with local firms and mentoring some of its younger architects. Now, one of those local architects has put together a new show dedicated to Rudolph’s work in Hong Kong.
“Paul Rudolph: The Hong Kong Journey,” on exhibit through March 9 at New York’s Center for Architecture, is curated by Nora Leung, who worked with Rudolph while she was employed by a large Hong Kong firm up until his death in 1997. The show features previously unseen drawings, sketches, and renderings by Rudolph for three projects: Bond (now Lippo) Centre, Harbor Road Tower, and residences for Plantation Road.
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In the final years of his life, Rudolph worked on a series of family dwellings on the hilly Victoria Peak. Originally proposed as three freestanding homes, the project had evolved into a single apartment block with dramatic cantilevers depicted in drawings that compare to distinctive “space diagrams” he made of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater, which are also on exhibit. But the developer gave up on the site and sold it off after Rudolph’s death. A new owner moved on from his proposal and gave Leung’s office the commission.
While the volume of work he did in Asia was much lower than in his American heyday, Rudolph completed new towers in Singapore and Jakarta as well as Hong Kong, which helped him realize unfulfilled ideas. Quite often, he’d serve as a consultant for local, developer-picked firms, quickly presenting and revising concepts before flying back to a New York office that shrank in size through the ‘80s. His ego was likely diminished, but he still found projects like Plantation Road to be reinvigorating.
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