Echo Chamber, 2025-02-01

To escape the relentless horizontality of my home country, I spent much of my teenage summers in the Swiss Alps. In corduroy hiking shorts, I traversed gravel paths—schist, gneiss, limestone—wandering for weeks at a time. During moments of pause, I’d recharge on Toblerone and water, hurling rocks down ravines. The crisp crack of their abrupt stop would echo, blooming into chaotic symphonies that ricocheted across canyon walls before dissolving into stillness.

Concrete—a slurry of gravel, cement, sand, and water—is the most ubiquitous material in our built world. In construction, the concrete pour—a complex choreography of labor, machinery, and material—marks the finale of a long journey from quarry to site. Unlike stone, which reveals its form through carving, concrete emerges from its negative. It requires formwork—molds built with precision and craft—before it can assume its positive state. Once cured and stripped of its casing, the exposed structure stands as a silent monument, holding its elements in a gravity-defying embrace.

Le Corbusier recognized concrete’s sculptural possibilities, propelling it into the modernist imagination. For him, this “liquid rock” embodied modernity itself, its malleability and strength symbolizing architecture's potential to reshape the world. His board-formed concrete, etched with the grain of wooden molds, became a hallmark of béton brut, known in the US as Brutalism. Paul Rudolph, one of modernism’s most daring practitioners, extended this legacy. Unlike Le Corbusier, whose concrete bore the memory of wood, Rudolph allowed the material to speak for itself. He designed custom formwork with trapezoidal fins nailed onto plywood backings. Once cast, the fins were broken away to reveal rhythmic patterns and luminous textures. The result was a tactile, golden-hued surface that celebrated the material’s raw beauty.

Currently on display at the Met Museum, Materialized Space: The Architecture of Paul Rudolph highlights this interplay between material and craft. The exhibition, a rare showcase of architecture, is a feast of Rudolph’s intricate drawings and models. Amongst the splendor, one object stands apart: a preserved section of the formwork used to cast Yale’s Art and Architecture Building (1963). Framed in a custom case, this shard feels like a relic from a bygone era, its encasement amplifying its estrangement from the craft it once served. What was once a tool now reads as an artifact of an alien, almost mythical process—a faint echo of a time when complex formwork and skilled carpentry were the norm. It’s no surprise that Rudolph’s architecture frequently appears in science-fiction films, evoking a world of untamed experimentation and ambition—qualities often smoothed away in today’s culture of optimization and efficiency.

At SO–IL, we have revisited the vertically corrugated concrete façade in several projects. At the Manetti Shrem Museum at UC Davis, we employed precast panels instead of casting in situ. The seismic demands of the nearby San Andreas Fault required wide silicon joints between panels, which we integrated into a vertical corrugated pattern to create the illusion of a continuous surface. At Amant, an arts campus in Brooklyn, we used corrugation to break up the vastness of the façades and absorb imperfections inherent in concrete. Depth allows these surfaces to come alive, their expression shaped by the shifting interplay of light and shadow rather than raw materiality. At 144 Vanderbilt, a pink residential building in Fort Greene, we expanded concrete’s tactile and aesthetic potential. Red dye tinted the mix, aggregates were carefully selected, and scalloped form liners added rhythmic depth. Bead blasting and acid etching imbued the surface with texture and nuance, creating a façade that balances expressive massing with an embrace of its panelization.

Unlike Rudolph’s relentless discipline, these projects reinterpret and transform his grooves, resonating with his legacy while forging new echoes for our time.