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V5: Was your family supportive of your education?
LS: Yes, but frankly, my parents really didn't know what to do. They were supportive about going to college, but had no idea what you do to get accepted to college. I wasn't the most stellar high school student, although I knew what I wanted to do at an early age. So I went to the local college my first year and took the only class that the college offered that resembled architecture, I think it was a drafting class. I was lucky enough that the guy who taught it asked me what I was doing there. I said I was going to be an architect, to which he replied, "You are in the wrong place". (laughs) He was the one who told me what I needed to do in order to go to architecture school and educated me of the process of becoming an architect. I didn't really wake up until my first year of college. I wound up transferring very quickly to Florida and upon graduation, I moved to New York and worked for Paul Rudolph. He was the guy who was a very big influence on me while I was in school.
V5: That's quite of jump. Did someone help you in college to get into the Rudolph office?
LS: No, but I worked summers with an architect, who I sort of forced myself upon until he acquiesced.
V5: Did you sleep on his doorstep?
LS: When I played high school baseball, our playing field was up against a residential area, and balls were hit over the fence, which I would have to go get. I remember seeing these incredible houses and they were made out of pre-stressed concrete and I used to look at them and go, "Wow". I then found out who the architect was and I said this is the guy I'm going to work for. He wound up hiring me, his name was Gene Leedy. I ended up working for him in the summers and to this day we are still very good friends. He was Paul Rudolph's first employee in Florida, so there was that connection there as well and he put in a good word for me.
V5: What was that like being in Paul Rudolph's office?
LS: I pulled more all nighters in the two years that I was there than in my four years in school. It was hard work, but extremely gratifying. There were
certain things in his office that I learned such as how to develop a method of design. One of the great experiences was a house in Jacksonville, Florida that he did called the Biome House, incredible concrete block house, and I always loved that house. So one of the first things I did when I started work there was I went to the basement in the shop in SoHo and found
the drawings for the house. I pulled out all the drawings and when I opened them up, I was in complete shock. He kept very good records, so when I looked at the very first sketches of the house and it was the most god-awful design I had ever seen. (laughs) But then when you look through it, you can see the evolution and at that point I realized there might be hope for me. I had thought his talent was god given and, with a stroke of genius had just come with the design. It was a lot of hard work and evolution; at that point I said there might be a chance for me. At that point I became convinced that if you worked hard, you could better yourself
significantly.
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A 30 story office building in Jakarta, Indonesia, design by Paul Rudolph. This detail ink rendering shows at view the building’s main entry. This project was on the boards when Lawrence was in the Rudolph studio.
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V5: There is always a kind of honesty and presence about Paul Rudolph's work.
LS: That was the way his lifestyle was and the way his office worked.
V5: Did everyone work together?
LS: His office was a big studio, when you got off the elevator you were in the middle of the office. I had always been under the impression before I
went to work there, that it would be a corporate place like I.M. Pei's studio or SOM. It was completely opposite, it was like going into a SCI-Arc studio, and it looked just like that. You got off the elevator on Fifty-seventh Street; you opened the elevator, and were in the middle of a bunch of desks. There was nothing pretentious about it; it was a studio, not really an office.
V5: Where there hierarchies within the studio?
LS: No, there were only about eight people there while I was there and one guy had been there for about twenty years, another person ten years. There was really no hierarchy, he gave everyone as much experience and opportunity as you would take. He was a tough guy to work for but fortunately I got along with him very well.
V5: Was he fairly quiet? The only personal view I have of him is from the book “Conversations with Architects” that I read when I was a student.
LS: Yes, he was very quiet, but he could also be very volatile.
V5: How did he deal with the changes that happened in architecture, as styles and preferences moved away from the modern idiom and into "Postmodern"?
LS: He stayed with what he believed in. In fact, the AIA tried to give him the gold medal and he refused to join the AIA. Even the people who had
worked for him, past employees and so forth, many who were very close to him, especially during the early years of his career, said, "We will do all the paperwork, all you have to do is agree to sign up." He wouldn't do it. In some ways he really practiced as an outsider and stuck to what he believed and that was it.
V5: Is it personally difficult for him to see major commissions go to other architects?
LS: No, he was busier later in his life than he was early in his life. He had tremendous projects overseas in Southeast Asia, spending a couple of months there each year. At least to me it never was an issue for him. He never seemed frustrated about recognition. I had been to all his projects
from the 1940s, ones he did with Ralph Twitchel, the Cocoon House, which was almost destroyed and I would show him pictures. He was heartbroken; it would crush him to see them in such disrepair. It really bothered him because he truly bled architecture. He was a very interesting guy.
After I worked for Paul, I went to graduate school at the University of Florida. Then moved to Vicenza, Italy and was there for about two years teaching and doing research on Carlos Scarpa.
V5: Is there a family relationship there?
LS: No, the name Scarpa comes from a small fishing town just south of Venice, and if you look in the phone book there, Scarpa is the equivalent of Rodriquez in Miami. (laughs) It's not an uncommon name, but I actually did my graduate thesis project on Carlos Scarpa. It happened strictly out of coincidence.
The interesting thing was that most everything that was written about Scarpa at the time, even in Italian, was all bits and pieces, nothing that talked about his body of work, and that is what I focused on for my thesis.
V5: There is a strong sence of material quality and detail development that is supportive of the design ideas in both your work. Thank you Larry.
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