Paul Rudolph wrote in 1952: ‘One doubts that a poem was ever written to a flat-roofed building silhouetted against the setting sun.' Then 34 years old, the Kentucky native had only just established his architectural practice but had already identified what he would devote his life not merely to avoiding but to avenging: the obvious and the empty, visual stasis, that which provokes nothing but indifference. He charted his own course: modernist architecture, but with feeling.
