Issue link: http://papercitymagazine.uberflip.com/i/1162040
114 died in 1997). Two of the architect's most famous residences — the Halston house and the Umbrella house in Sarasota — have recently been listed on the National Register of Historic Places. The Halston house, which struggled for so long to find a buyer, sold in January 2019 for $18 million — this time to another celebrated fashion designer, Tom Ford, who is restoring it. F ort Worth's power- ful and philanthropic Bass family was one of Rudolph's most impor- tant patrons during the '60s and '70s. A Yale graduate and heir to his uncle Sid Richardson's ranching and oil fortunes, Perry Richardson Bass gave Rudolph his first Texas commission. Com- pleted in 1966, the Sid Richardson Physical Sciences Building at Texas Christian University is Rudolph at his Brutalist best: a concrete and cantilevered monolith conceived as an addition to the older, Art Deco–inspired Science Building on University Drive. As the 1970s brought cultural change and a distaste for the Brutalist aesthetic, Rudolph flirted with using glass in lieu of concrete. His first glass skyscrapers, Fort Worth's City Center twin towers, were built for Sid Bass and the Bass Brothers Enterprises in 1979. During this decade, Rudolph created a number of remarkable residences, including his own Manhattan penthouse on Beekman Place. A tour de force of light and space, it served as the architect's laboratory of ideas, with 27 terraced levels, treacherous bannister-free catwalks, and a steel skeleton clad in mirror-finish Formica. The building became a New York City Landmark in 2012. But nothing comes close to the sheer beauty and complexity of Rudolph's Bass house in Fort Worth's Westover Hills. Anne Bass and her former husband, Sid Bass, commissioned the house in 1970, while they were still in their 20s and just a few years out of college. Both were admirers of Rudolph's work: Sid had been at Yale during the architect's heyday, and while at Vassar, Anne had attended Yale lectures taught by the great architecture critic and historian Vincent Scully, according to a 1991 House & Garden story about the house. The Bass house had been off limits to the media until the House & Garden article ran 28 years ago, and very little of it has been seen publicly since — until now. Framed in steel and enclosed by glass and aluminum, the all- white house is light and trans- parent, recalling the work of two of Rudolph's biggest influences, Frank Lloyd Wright and Mies van der Rohe. The architecture also reflects Anne's own mini- malist aesthetic and preference for straight lines — there's not a single curve in the house. Essen- tially made up of rectangular planes that hover over the hilly terrain, the house has three main stories that are subdivided into 12 levels with 14 different ceiling heights, and a small penthouse. Dramatic canti- levers jut above the ground and include A double-height room in the Bass house, with Morris Louis and Frank Stella artworks and Mies van der Rohe furniture, 1970. Paul Rudolph's offices in Manhattan, circa 1965