Good morning. It’s Wednesday. Today we’ll look at the city’s newest interior landmark. We’ll also find out about a recital of music that was written in a Nazi concentration camp more than 80 years ago.
Credit…New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission
Among the city’s 124 interior landmarks, there are well-known places like the lobby of the Empire State Building and the Rainbow Room atop Rockefeller Center. The newest, added by the Landmarks Preservation Commission on Tuesday, is less well known: the Modulightor Building on East 58th Street, a creation of the Modernist architect Paul Rudolph.
Who?
“He was the Frank Lloyd Wright” of the late 1950s and 1960s, said Kelvin Dickinson, president of the Paul Rudolph Institute for Modern Architecture, which occupies the space. “He was a famous architect, and he taught all of these students who later became famous architects, but when I was in school” — in the late 1980s and early 1990s — “no one remembered who he was.”
The New York Times critic Jason Farago called Rudolph “one of the most acclaimed — and confounding — architects” of his time. His Brutalist buildings were widely praised in the 1960s, and they were complicated, with mind-bending layouts. The architecture writer Fred A. Bernstein wrote that Rudolph’s designs involved “molding concrete into shapes so intricate that they sometimes resembled M.C. Escher drawings.” His seven-story Art and Architecture Building at Yale is said to have 37 levels. His own apartment, on Beekman Place, has at least a dozen.
Rudolph desperately wanted not to be forgotten and struck a deal with the Library of Congress to turn the Beekman Place apartment into a study center. That would have preserved his legacy. But Dickinson said that the library decided to sell the apartment after moving Rudolph’s papers and drawings to Washington. Rudolph learned of the library’s plan shortly before his death at age 78 in 1997 and willed his half of the Modulightor Building to his partner, Ernst Wagner.
