A milestone celebrates an architect who have forgotten many

Good morning. It’s Wednesday. Today we look at the newest interior in the city. We will also find out more than 80 years ago about an overview of music that was written in a Nazi concentration camp more than 80 years ago.

Below the 124 interior sights of the city there are well -known places such as the lobby of the Empire State Building and the Rainbow Room on top of Rockefeller Center. The newest, added by the Landmarks Preservation Commission on Tuesday, is less 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, who takes up space. “He was a famous architect, and he gave all these students who later became famous architects, but when I was in school” – in the late 1980s and early nineties – “no one remembered who he was.”

The New York Times critic Jason Farago called Rudolph ‘one of the most praised – and confusing – architects’ of his time. His brutalist buildings were generally praised in the 1960s, and they were complicated, with mind-expanding layouts. The architectural writer Fred A. Bernstein wrote that the designs of Rudolph “concrete in forms in forms were so complicated that they sometimes resembled MC Escher drawings.” His seven-storey art and architecture building in Yale would have 37 levels. His own apartment, on Beekman Place, has at least a dozen.

Rudolph did not want to forget desperately and concluded a deal with the Library of Congress to turn the Beekman Place apartment into a study center. That would have kept his estate. But Dickinson said the library decided to sell the apartment after moving Rudolph’s papers and drawings to Washington. Rudolph heard about the plan of the library shortly before his death at the age of 78 in 1997 and wanted his partner to his partner, Ernst Wagner.

Rudolph had lived ups and downs. He was the chairman of the School of Architecture in Yale from 1957 to 1965. But by the 1970s he was professionally at a low point, Dickinson said.

“He thought he could create a lighting company that his staff could keep when he had no architectural work,” he said. That was the start of Modulightor.

Over time, Rudolph became popular in Asia and took the Modulightor room back in his office. Modulightor migrated to Soho and then to East 58th Street after Rudolph bought a brownstone that became ‘his most personal project’, Dickinson said. “He became his own architect, his own client, his own contractor and his own financier.”

“That was not good,” he added, “because I think he had no money three times.”

He replaced the original facade that he had designed.

The Landmarks Commission said that the first four floors in 1993 were “mostly completed”. Two more floors and a roof terrace were added between 2010 and 2016 by the architect Mark Squo, based on Rudolph’s drawings. The outside was referred to as a milestone in 2023.

Liz Waytkus, the executive director of Docomomo US, a rural organization that works to maintain modernist buildings, said that the newly designated interior monument was important “not only because of its spatially rich and light -filled modern design” but also because the presence of Rudolph can be felt when the Institute opens the space to the space for the public.

“They don’t treat Modulightor as a precious commercial,” she said. “You can sit on things. You can touch things. You can take pictures. I met the children of IM Pei there. I met Paul’s former employees. It is a fantastic tribute to Paul.”

Weather

Expect a usually sunny day, with the temperature of around 73 and a chance of showers in the afternoon. In the evening it will be partly cloudy with a dip in the high 1950s.

Alternative

In fact until 26 May (Memorial Day).

The last metro news

Most music that ends is written down and then remember.

Some of the music that will be performed Tonight on a recital on Hebrew Union College in Greenwich Village Was remembered first. It had to be. It is written for a secret choir in a Nazi concentration camp. There was no paper to write on.

So, as Janie Press, the president of a group called Holocaust Music Lost & Found, said: “This is about saving a history – and saving music.”

The person who took that as his mission was Aleksander Kulisiewicz, a Polish dissident and amateur musician who was sent to the Sachsenhausen concentration camp. Kulisiewicz is a main character in “Sing, memory: the remarkable story of the man who saved the music of the Nazi camps” By Makana Eyre, who will participate in a conversation for the Recital.

Kulisiewicz had a photographic memory, the result of a youth stove he had tamed by proposing words he heard as if they had been written out. He used that technique to remember songs from a colleague -prisoner in Sachsenhausen, Rosebery d’Arguto, a conductor who had collected the clandestine choir. Press said it was different from “official camp orchestras such as those at Auschwitz” because it was “not under the coercion of the SS”.

Nevertheless, the guards found out, broke out the choir and sent D’Aguto and most singers to the death camps.

But not Kulisiewicz, who was not Jewish.

He was sent to Sachsenhausen with Polish political prisoners. “His crime apparently wrote an article,” Eyre wrote in the Atavist magazine. He had “published pieces in local newspapers that deny Adolf Hitler and the rise of fascism.” SS Officers let him spit the teeth they broke when they hit him.

Kulisiewicz and d’Iguto became friendly, Eyre wrote, and Kulisiewicz “started building a catalog of music and poetry.” D’Arguto made Kulisiewicz “promises that it would be his life mission to bring this music to the world, and that’s what happened,” said Press.

When the Nazis evacuated Sachsenhausen in March 1945, Kulisiewicz returned to Poland and walked a lot off the road. He came down with Typhus and had to be admitted to the hospital. During his long recovery, Kulisiewicz began to dictate music – “The lyrics of songs written on the empty pages of his mind during his five years in Sachsenhausen,” Eyre wrote. “A nurse realized that there was a feeling of what he said, so she got a typewriter and started transcribe. She returned to his bed more than a few weeks.” The result was pages and pages of texts and poems, an archive that is now housed in the US Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington.

Best diary:

My first day as a trainee in the Guggenheim Museum was my third day in New York City. Fresh from a plane from Scotland, I had rented a room at the 92nd Street Y because I didn’t know any soul in the city.

My internship Supervisor took me to lunch to celebrate my first day, and while we stood in line to get our food, we met a long, shy man, a former intern. When I sat down at a table, the former trainee did that too.

My supervisor got up and went to another table to talk to some colleagues. The former trainee, Austin, and I asked for a conversation. In the end we became part of a gang of friends that summer.

After the internship was over, I was hired full -time and a year later Austin became my roommate. Two years later he asked me on a date, and three years later we were married.