In Pursuit of Diversity

Modern industry in recent years has housed itself in structures that look as assembly-line produced as the products it makes. But for a growing number of young architects, the art of architecture is more than mere packaging.

One such designer is Yale's retiring chairman of the architecture department, Paul Rudolph, 46, who has declared "war on the all-glass wall." With his recent pharmaceutical factory for the Endo Laboratories, Rudolph has built a small Carcassonne, a bastion of corduroy-textured concrete, a fortress of suspended turrets and slender windowed embrasures (see opposite). "The building says I'm going to be here awhile," says the architect.

Hanging Gardens. Though basically a rectangle, Rudolph's $4,000,000 factory presents a procession of profiles as the viewer walks around it. By externalizing what most architects bury within a building--staircases, heating pipes and air ducts--the architect has both opened the interior to freer use and the exterior to a greater play of light. A vast entrance stairway openly sweeps up to a mezzanine in baroque splendor, inviting visitors from a nearby parkway.

Awaiting them are roof gardens of white pebbles; hard coal and geraniums surround a penthouse cafeteria atop the pile. "They are a little like the hanging gardens of Babylon," says Rudolph. "Basically it is a village on top of a huge box." Function is served by the multilevel construction, since pharmaceuticals are manufactured by gravity-flow pipes and chutes that blend drugs, liquids or tablets. "It may seem too pretentious," says Rudolph, "but the building does not attempt to bury the flaws in a box."

Textured Platoons. Victor Lundy's IBM building in Cranford, N.J. (see over page), also goes all out for adornment. "I want my buildings to be exuberant," says the 42-year-old architect, who also is an abstract painter. His industrial structure too is a box, 200 ft. by 200 ft. square. But with its elaborate zigzag carapace of sand-pink precast concrete blocks, Lundy's building proclaims the architect's belief in sculptural architecture. "The building is sassy, square and solid," says Lundy. "It says IBM."

Blocky Mayan pyramids are only one of the images evoked by Lundy's broken wall that advances and retreats in disciplined platoons of texture. They also "express the complexity of an IBM machine," says the architect. Between and above, the gaps yield clerestories that make the building, says Lundy, "a jewel box that lets light in during the day and light out at night." Inside are multiple concrete trees that break up the interior into a garden, which is accentuated by the sunken atrium in the middle.

Both Lundy and Rudolph are Harvard-educated and Gropius-trained architects. Both have rebelled against Gropius' group architecture, which stresses teamwork over individual ex pression. Both depart from a trim, easily reproduced machine esthetic, and both are influenced by that archromantic, Frank Lloyd Wright, who never would put up with it. Although each is different, they search for individual freedom to make spatial poetry, however flamboyant, that endures. Their concrete lessons may make boxy boredom obsolete.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.