Paul Rudolph

Paul Rudolph (1918 to 1997) was an American architect born in Elkton, Kentucky, the son of a minister. He studied architecture at Alabama Polytechnic, now Auburn University, and after a brief period in the Navy during the Second World War completed graduate studies at Harvard under Bauhaus founder Walter Gropius. He was a pioneering architect in Sarasota, Florida, and a major figure of the Sarasota School of Architecture, and he served as Dean of the Yale School of Architecture from 1958 to 1965, during which his best known work, the Yale Art and Architecture Building, was completed. That building became both a modernist icon and a topic of controversy. He is considered one of the great American late modernist architects, and his former students include Norman Foster, Richard Rogers and Robert A. M. Stern.