At Rudolph’s old house, frat puts function over form
A 1960s Vogue magazine photo shoot of a cocktail party in Paul Rudolph’s former New Haven house depicts women wearing pearls and men in tuxedos sipping martinis next to Rudolph’s trademark cantilevered staircase — steps that appear to be floating in the air. Parties are still hosted in that space today, but the current residents of Rudolph’s house on 31 High Street, the Yale chapter of the Sigma Phi Epsilon fraternity, have permanently altered, among other things, the signature Rudolph staircase.
Last fall, SigEp completed a $25,000 renovation project because the house — which was...
#2
By House Picutres
12:55p.m. on February 16, 2009
http://prudolph.lib.umassd.edu/node/14122
http://www.flickr.com/photos/73172555@N00/sets/72157602098008095/
#3
By PoMo
11:27a.m. on February 19, 2009
Thanks for the links to those photos. Fabulous!
Thanks very much to YDN for raising awareness about this issue. It definitely is sad to see another great work of late-modernist architecture get renovated to the point of non-existence. I guess a fraternity cannot be expected to be stewards of architecture that would have been expensive to maintain properly. This article would have been much better if YDN had included photos from the original house.