A Rudolph Designed Home Goes to the Landfill

We are saddened to learn about the demolition of the Paul Rudolph designed home in westport, CT.

WESTPORT, Conn., Jan. 13 — A Modernist house designed by the renowned architect Paul Rudolph and at the center of a highly public dispute over its demolition was being torn down Saturday, despite a last-minute effort by the state attorney general to save it.
Crews arrived at the property on Minute Man Hill Road just after 8 a.m. When they began demolishing the house, the police ordered members of the news media out of the immediate area.

As the morning wore on, trash-hauling trucks carried away the remnants of the 4,200-square-foot home designed in 1972 by Mr. Rudolph, the chairman of Yale’s School of Architecture in the early 1960s. The house was an elongated series of interconnecting cubes, with the eastern end hovering over the ground. By the afternoon, little of it remained.

Morley Boyd, the chairman of the Westport Historic District Commission, said, “An irreplaceable piece of our town, indeed our state’s, architectural heritage has been consigned to a landfill. It’s hard to fathom.”

We hope that Sarasota's School Board and Superintendent show more concern, sensitivity a dn a sense of community history than was shown in Westport.