Hansjörg Göritz  Studio

April 2015

Back to Alabama -

Tuskegee and Paul Rudolph

A second invitation to guest critique and lecture at Auburn University is a return to inspiring southern climate, culture, and classic vernacular expressions. Once again Paul Rudolph adds a gem to this context. His expressive late sixties sculpture for a chapel at Tuskegee University is a statement, working with spacial expansion within the campus' topography, and conducting light for its dramaturgy. As impressive Rudolph responded to associations of the public with it being an expression of sorrow and suffer of Afro-American people and a small southern university, that it is rather routed in universal essences of Christianity, and hence as well being true for a chapel at Harvard. Beyond, its mastery sublimely contrasts with Tuskegee's and Opelika's plain conventions in the word's best sense.