PRF Volume 1: Endo Laboratories Sean Khorsandi and Dan Webre (Crucible Press, 2024)

At a time when much of our contact with architecture, new and old, has come to be dominated by distracted glances at cascading images on our phones, a book that creates an extended and deep engagement with a single building comes as a welcome respite. Slowing down and spending a few hours with Endo Laboratories, guided by Sean Khorsandi (MArch ’06) and Dan Webre, feels in some ways like therapy: with concentration, Endo unfolds slowly as the reader is rewarded with insights about the building and its designer, Paul Rudolph, through images and text. The authors are excellent chaperones, and the intensity of their engagement with, and care for, Rudolph’s work emerges through the book.

PRF Volume 1: Endo Laboratories is the first publication in a planned series of monographs that will focus on individual buildings and themes from Rudolph’s oeuvre. A collaboration between Crucible Press and the Paul Rudolph Foundation, of which Khorsandi and Webre are board members, the series complements events and advocacy efforts conducted by the foundation since its founding in 2002 and contributes to its ongoing mission of preserving Rudolph’s legacy and making it accessible to a wide audience. According to Khorsandi, the idea for the series emerged out of a separate project for a comprehensive volume—an oeuvre complet to include all of Rudolph’s works—that he and Webre have been working on for some years. They felt a parallel series of publications that delved deep into individual buildings and themes could offer architects and scholars a complementary, more intimate perspective on the architect’s work.

To that end, the book comprises two parts—an illustrated essay on Endo written by Khorsandi and Webre and an extensive collection of drawings, sketches, historical photographs, and ephemera drawn from the Paul Rudolph archive, held at the Library of Congress. As Khorsandi pointed out in a recent conversation, a book like this might not have been possible if the materials had been owned by a private institution. Rudolph’s choice to donate his papers to the Library of Congress means that access and reproduction rights are open to the public without restriction. The Rudolph Foundation recently settled a lawsuit against a group that was trying to assert control over rights to the architect’s drawings at the Library of Congress, ultimately ensuring their accessibility. Endo Laboratories reproduces more than 100 images of the building from the archive.

In some ways thumbing through Endo Laboratories invokes a sense of discovery like that of pulling out a long-forgotten flat file in the office of an old friend and discovering a project you didn’t know about but should have. For those who spent time in Yale’s A&A Building—or Paul Rudolph Hall to those who came to the school after Robert A.M. Stern (MArch ’65) rechristened the building in 2008—aspects of the Endo Building will feel very familiar as reflections of Rudolph’s vocabulary, most obviously the bushhammered concrete set against the now iconic (at least among YSoA graduates) orange broadloom carpet, as well as the sequencing of spaces, sculptural stairs, and mannerist plasticity in the use of concrete.

Construction of the Endo Pharmaceuticals Building was completed in 1964, a year before Rudolph ended his tenure as chairman of the Yale Department of Architecture, which he had joined in 1958, and the year after the A&A Building opened its doors. There is no doubt that they belong to the same period of Rudolph’s work. But as the authors point out in the essay, whereas the A&A was put in “modern dialogue with the academic Gothic character present in the many extant towers of the surrounding urban campus,” Endo finds itself in a completely different kind of landscape: suburban Long Island adjacent to Meadowbrook State Parkway, completed just eight years earlier after decades of delay, by another New Haven figure—Robert Moses —to link New York City with Jones Beach. In the essay the authors suggest that Rudolph had to reach “deep into architectural history to inform his language … and happily embraces more obscure and ancient archetypes.” They make a strong argument that Rudolph was shooting for an alternative kind of functionalism that sets up Endo’s specificity of form—derived from detailed analysis of use and deeply influenced by architectural history—against the supposed flexibility of the generic and universal spaces (and ahistorical styles) of earlier Modernist factory buildings such as AEG and Fagus.

In the book, images follow one another in a loose yet logical structure, giving the sense of drifting around and through the building as well as through Rudolph’s own process. Interspersed between faded archival chromes of the finished project are Rudolph’s drawings in various stages of development—partial plans, elevation studies, and furniture details. Construction lines, eraser marks, and annotations, including reminders to resolve some detail later, allow the reader to enter a space between the design process and realized construction. Construction photos further expand that in-between space. One spread juxtaposes two nearly identical perspectives of a concrete pier, rebar extending skyward, before and after the bushhammering process.

Unlike the current exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Materialized Space: The Architecture of Paul Rudolph, which presents mainly the architect’s most familiar, canonical drawings, Endo Laboratories provides a study of a less familiar building in a portable archive of sorts, allowing one to understand how themes in his more known projects carried forward in a very different context. At a time when so many of Rudolph’s buildings from this period are under threat or have been demolished, as owners claim they lack the flexibility to take on new uses (such as the Chorley School, built in 1964 –69, demolished in 2012 to make way for a parking lot), the Endo Building’s new life as offices and a showroom for Lifetime Brands offers a model for Rudolph’s legacy to be preserved and retain its vitality. Endo Laboratories is available online from Crucible Press and at select architectural booksellers. The next book in the PRF series will be published in October 2025, on what would have been Rudolph’s 107th birthday.

—Andrei Harwell (MArch ’06) is a senior critic and director of the Urban Design Workshop at the Yale School of Architecture.