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The Burroughs-Wellcome building in RTP is another Modernist design under threat of being significantly changed by a new owner. It was featured in the 1980's movie "Brainstorm", starring Natalie Wood and Christopher Walken.

http://paulrudolph.blogspot.com/2013/03/burroughs-wellcome-u...



The building plan is kind of neat, but the carpet has got to be a little sketch by now. Better to go with marble, wood, brick or tile floors for the main thoroughfares.


If you don't care about achieving a particular set of acoustic properties, that might be a reasonable solution.


I worked for Rudolph in New York and can say without hesitation that he was very passionate about design and human perception of the spaces he designed.


His Sarasota School works are amazing. Amazing enough that they are the only American "architectural school". The way in which he was able to translate that same understanding of human habitation into massive buildings is a remarkable feat.

It hit me when I visited the Massachusetts State Building in Boston - his corduroy concrete's ribs are sized to the human grasp and hit us in our subconscious in a way that makes the scale at which we experience the building change.


You've hit on the key point: human scale. Although Rudolph was quite good at human scale in his buildings unlike so many current architects, the absolute master of human scale in architecture was Frank Lloyd Wright.


Interesting, I just watched brainstorm and noted how interesting all of the locations were architecturally. There seemed to be a real sense when making the movie that the locations should look futuristic and interesting.




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