The American architect Paul Rudolph (1918-1997) sought to integrate into modern architecture a spatial drama, a concern for urbanism, and an individuality which he found lacking in his training under Walter Gropius.

The son of a Methodist minister, Paul Marvin Rudolph was born on October 28, 1918, in Elkton, Kentucky. He attended the architecture school at the Alabama Polytechnic Institute in Auburn, and after graduating in 1940 he entered the Harvard Graduate School of Design, where he studied under Walter Gropius, the former head of the Bauhaus in Germany. Rudolph's graduate studies were interrupted by a period of service as an officer in the U.S. Navy (1943-1946). He supervised ship construction in the Brooklyn Navy Yard, which provided a valuable learning experience in executing large building tasks within a bureaucracy. After receiving his master's degree from Harvard in 1947, he spent the next year traveling in Europe (on a Wheelwright Scholarship...