The New York Times, August 9, 1997, p. 50. Paul Rudolph Is Dead at 78; Modernist Architect of the 60's By Herbert Muschamp Paul Rudolph, an architect whose career epitomized the turbulence that engulfed American modernism in the 1960's, died yesterday at New York Hospital. He was 78 and lived in Manhattan. The cause was mesothelioma, or asbestos cancer, according to Ernst Wagner, a close friend. Mr. Rudolph leaves behind a perplexing legacy that will take many years to untangle. With the exception of Louis I. Kahn, no American architect of his generation enjoyed higher esteem in the 1960's. As chairman of the School of Architecture at Yale University from 1957 to 1965, Mr. Rudolph wielded enormous influence over the direction of American architecture at mid-century. His buildings, often executed in concrete with a textured finish that resembled corduroy, were widely studied and imitated. At the same time, and partly in reaction to his influence, the school became a hothouse for younger architects who wanted to break out of the modernist mold Mr. Rudolph had helped to form. In recent years, his practice was largely concentrated in Southeast Asia, where respect for his strict modernist ideals endured. Two projects, both built in New Haven, helped crystallize Mr. Rudolph's reputation in the 60's. The Temple Street Parking Garage, completed in 1962, was a powerful horizontal design that recalled the dynamic forms of the German Expressionist architect Erich Mendelssohn. Like Eero Saarinen's terminal for T.W.A. at Kennedy Airport in New York, the garage created a monumental form for modern transportation. Mr. Rudolph's Art and Architecture Building at Yale, completed the following year, bore the influence of Le Corbusier's design for the Monastery of La Tourette. In place of monks' cells, Mr. Rudolph filled the top floor of his building with painters' studios. But Mr. Rudolph was never a pale imitator of European modernism. In a 1970 monograph on his work, the historian Sybil Maholy-Nagy hailed Mr. Rudolph as one of a handful of American architects who "broke the Atlantic sound barrier, creating designs that were more than the sum of their European influences." The result, in Maholy-Nagy's view, was "architecture that is experimental, contradictory, competitive, and bigger than life." Paul Rudolph was born in 1918 in Elkton, Ky. He received a bachelor's degree in architecture from Alabama Polytechnic Institute in 1940. After serving from 1943 to 1946 in the Navy, where he supervised shipbuilding at the Brooklyn Navy Yard, Mr. Rudolph completed his education at Harvard, where he received his master's degree in architecture in 1947. Mr. Rudolph began his professional practice in Florida in 1948 in association with Ralph Twitchell. By the time he opened his own office in Sarasota in 1952, Mr. Rudolph had already established himself as a designer of private houses, many of them built in Siesta Key. Those houses are small gems of postwar architecture, structures that use slim columns and airy canopies to create oases of light and shade. In his mature career, by contrast, Mr. Rudolph would become known as an apostle of the megastructure, large buildings combining offices, apartments, shopping, transportation and public space. Mr. Rudolph was invited to become chairman of Yale's architecture school in 1957, largely as a result of the reputation he had gained with his Florida work. While at Yale, he tried to place the study of architectural design in a broader urban framework. "He started the first real dialogue about architecture in the context of the city," observed Ulrich Franzen, the Manhattan architect, who served as a visiting critic at Yale in those years. The Art and Architecture Building, a landmark of Mr. Rudolph's years at Yale, remains perhaps his best-known building. Unfortunately, its reputation is not solely due to the strength of its design. In 1969, the building became a casualty of the 60's when a group of students set fire to it, regarding the building's severe concrete design as a symbol of the university's antipathy toward creative life. The building was restored. Though Mr. Rudolph had already left New Haven by then--in 1965, he moved his office to a spectacular multilevel space on Beekman Place in New York--the fire nonetheless called into question the values his building represented. Mr. Rudolph's work also found disfavor in another quarter: the young architects and scholars who would shortly emerge as leaders of the post-modern movement. Architects like Charles Moore and Robert A. M. Stern, and such historians as Vincent Scully, turned away from abstract modernist esthetics toward historical mixtures. After 1970, Mr. Rudolph never fully regained the reputation he had enjoyed in the previous decade. Rather, the loss of prestige came to represent the collapse of the liberal consensus culture under assault from left and right. Mr. Rudolph's conviction in his architectural values never wavered however, and his practice remained active, though his most important commissions came from outside the United States. As Mildred F. Schmertz, the architectural writer, observed in Architectural Record in 1989, "Paul Rudolph does most of his work these days in places where post-modernism has yet to penetrate, namely, Hong Kong, Singapore, and Jakarta." In these Southeast Asian projects, such as the Bond Center, a faceted glass office tower in Hong Kong, Mr. Rudolph was able to pursue his passion for megastructures on a scale that surpassed even his most important American commissions. If his place in mid-century American modernism is assured, his role in the expanded culture of globalization remains to be assessed. In recent years, American architecture students too young to remember the 60's have rediscovered Mr. Rudolph as a model of rare integrity. In 1993, at a lecture at the Cooper-Hewitt Museum in New York, he drew a standing-room- only crowd composed mostly of the young and held the audience spellbound, as if he were a visitor from a long- vanished golden age. He is survived by two sisters, Marie Beadle of Decatur, Ga., and Mildred Harrison of Tucker, Ga. [Photos of Yale's A&A, Rudolph] [End]