Drawing. The first construction of Paul Rudolph’s architecture

Abstract

The American architect Paul Rudolph (1918-1997) conceded drawing a fundamental role in his creative process, which corresponded to a highly emotional conception of architecture. During his training and first years of work, he acquired a type of representation that allowed him to convey his personal vision of each project. His relentless will to overcome the International Style was based on six determinants: environment, natural conditions, materials, function, psychological demands of the space and spirit of times, which guided him in the search for answers and marked his work until the end of the sixties, when he achieved his creative maturity. Taking the drawing as the axis of the investigation, we analyse how these factors intervene in his residential projects in Florida, whose tectonics he conceived based on the spatial unit; in his collective housing projects, whose social facet he channelled towards urban modular groups; and in his projects of a monumental scale, whose materiality he imagined and defined accurately. In all of them spatial and constructive decisions relate intimately to his method of representation, establishing a continuous parallelism between drawing and building.