Ralph Rapson, at 93; was noted modernist architect
LOS ANGELES - Ralph Rapson, a modernist architect who designed the landmark 1963 Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis, has died. He was 93.
Mr. Rapson died of a heart attack Saturday at his home in Minneapolis, his son Toby, also an architect, said.
Known for his postwar designs of US embassies in Sweden and Denmark and of innovative houses, churches, and university buildings, mostly in the Upper Midwest, Mr. Rapson spent 30 years as dean of the architecture school at the University of Minnesota.
"One of our last living links to the first generation of modernists, such as the famous Finnish architect Alvar Aalto, is now gone," Thomas Fisher, dean of the University of Minnesota's College of Design, said in a statement.
Mr. Rapson's most enduring design might be one that he drew in 1945 but which remained in ink-and-paper limbo until decades later. Case Study House No. 4, or the Greenbelt House, was commissioned by Arts and Architecture magazine and its editor, John Entenza, who put architects to work designing modern homes that could be mass produced and, theoretically, be within the means of middle-class families.
Then 30, Mr. Rapson envisioned his prototype as "urban infill," a small dwelling composed of two modules separated by a greenbelt, "a place where a family could relax, a green space that the house would be centered around," his son Toby said.
Glass walls and skylights helped blur the indoor-outdoor line, and accordion-pleated doors were all that divided private from public living spaces inside.
"He drew it beautifully," Toby Rapson said, "with a liveliness that showed how houses were used for inhabitants. He brought a spirit to the design that captured imaginations for 60 years."
A client was not found to build the house in the 1940s. Then, in 2003, the editors of Dwell magazine staged a design competition for an affordable modern house. Mr. Rapson and his firm submitted plans based on the Greenbelt House. They didn't win the contest, but North Carolina entrepreneur Nathan Wieler liked the architect and his ideas so much that he started a company that builds modular houses using the Greenbelt design.
Other Rapson creations have been swept up in the recent resurgence of interest in midcentury modern design. The Rapid Rocker, his curvy, maple-and-fabric take on the traditional rocking chair that was part of the Knoll Furniture line in the 1940s, was reintroduced a few years ago, and other furniture and housewares designs also are being produced.
While Mr. Rapson found renewed success in recent years with some designs, he saw part of his legacy destroyed.
To the dismay of preservationists, some of his most celebrated buildings have been razed in the name of progress, most notably the Guthrie, which opened in 1963 and quickly became an outstanding venue for regional repertory theater. The asymmetrical auditorium, with its unique thrust stage and confetti-colored seats, was demolished in December 2006, five months after the acting company moved into a new, larger theater designed by French architect Jean Nouvel and built on the banks of the Mississippi River. (On Sunday, Nouvel was awarded the Pritzker Prize, architecture's highest honor.)
The Guthrie began as the brainchild of director Tyrone Guthrie, who dreamed of presenting Broadway-quality productions for Middle America.
Because Guthrie wanted intimacy between the actors on stage and the audience in the seats, Mr. Rapson conceived a steeply raked slope of seats on one side of the house and a sharp overhang on the other side. The result was no seat more than 58 feet from the thrust stage.
Although the entire structure was torn down, the interior design of the theater was recreated in the new building.
Mr. Rapson was born in Alma, Mich., with a deformed right arm that was later amputated, but he learned to draw expertly with his left hand. He earned architecture degrees from the University of Michigan and the Cranbrook Academy of Art in Michigan, where he studied with Finnish architects Eliel and Eero Saarinen and Charles Eames.
He taught at what is now the Illinois Institute of Technology from 1942 to 1946 and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology from 1946 to 1954 while also maintaining an architecture practice. Head of the University of Minnesota's school of architecture starting in 1954, he retired from teaching in 1984 but continued working until his death.
"I just love to draw. And to work," Mr. Rapson told interviewer Cathy Madison last summer. "I expect to be carried out of here. They should pile me up with a bunch of my models and dump me in Lake Minnetonka, ship me out like the Vikings did, on one of my 6-foot paintings."
