BRIGHT NEW ARRIVAL

Most bright new comets in the architectural sky soon settle into orbit around such suns as the late Frank Lloyd Wright, Chicago's Mies van der Rohe or France's Le Corbusier. It is a rare one that grows to be a force in his own right. For architectural stargazers, the most exciting new arrival is crew-cut Paul Rudolph, 41, who two years ago was appointed chairman of Yale's department of architecture, and is already beginning to collect a few satellites of his own.

A prizewinner from the age of 22, Rudolph has already collected such awards as Sao Paulo's Outstanding Young Architects Award (1954) and the Brunner Memorial Prize of the National Institute of Arts and Letters (for the "man who shows promise of widening the horizons of architecture as an art"). Rudolph first made his mark by designing houses mostly in Florida (TIME, July 2, 1956 et seq.) Only recently has he been given the opportunity to prove his class with major structures (see color pages). He has long been one of the most articulate spokesmen for the younger generation ("Modern architecture's range of expression is today from A to B"), but he has proved he can practice as well as preach.

Impatient for Fame. Rudolph got his training at Harvard from one of the fathers of modern architecture, Bauhaus Founder Walter Gropius, but he now casts a baleful eye on the master's own early work. "I doubt," says Rudolph, "that an ode ever got written to a flat-topped building in the sunset." Graduating with top honors from Harvard after a tour in the U.S. Navy (officer-in-charge, ship construction, Brooklyn Navy Yard), Rudolph was impatient for fame, admits he became a "structural exhibitionist." For instance, he put a fancy catenary roof on a 20-ft. Florida guesthouse: "It should have been used on a building with a 300-ft. span, but I just couldn't wait."

Rudolph's first major building was the $3,000,000 arts center for Wellesley College, completed in 1958. Trying to harmonize his building with the existing collegiate Gothic of the campus, Rudolph adapted the 15-ft. bay spaces and red brick of the older buildings, used an enameled sun screen to provide a functional equivalent to the richness of neo-Gothic stone tracery.

Express the Uplift. Rudolph last year completed his second major building, Yale's Greeley Forestry Laboratory. To dramatize the strength of precast concrete, Rudolph opened up the capitals until they became widespread Ys. He winced when his building was promptly dubbed the "concrete orchard," but insisted stubbornly: "A column is really holding something up. It should express this uplift."

The building with which Rudolph feels he really hit his stride is the new $1,100,000 Sarasota (Fla.) High School. "A school should be a real expression of what the community thinks," he says, "not an overgrown cottage or a motel.

This building is meant to stand up and be counted." By paying strict attention to such functional problems as ventilation (the building "breathes" through the overlapping roof slabs), sun protection (provided by massive, hanging concrete sunbreakers), and mechanical equipment space (placed in concrete coffers atop the columns), he feels he has achieved a vigorous, new look that expresses both structure and function.

Game of Creation. Growing success has almost swamped Rudolph with commissions. With Anderson, Beckwith & Haible (also associates for the Wellesley arts center), Rudolph has designed Boston's new twelve-story Blue Cross-Blue Shield Building, in which air-conditioning ducts swarm over the facades like great vines. ("Mechanical equipment eats up 35% to 40% of the budget, and this is an area architects have simply not exploited.'') On his own, Rudolph has just had his design accepted for Yale's new Art and Architecture building ("All hell breaks loose on the roof"), is hard at work on a three-block-long parking garage for New Haven's Church Street Project that looks like a Roman aqueduct. ("Automobiles should have their own architecture").

Rudolph's projects have made him the hero of the self-styled "compositional rigorists," even win nods of approval from the "new brutalists." For his part, Rudolph warns that the enthusiasm for new structures may obscure what he considers the real essence of architecture, "this serious and beautiful game of space." Says Rudolph: "This game has nothing to do with the allotment of so many square feet for this or that function, but with the creation of living, breathing, dynamic spaces of infinite variety, capable of helping man forget something of his troubles."

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