After You Left / They Took It Apart
Demolished Paul Rudolph Homes
Distributed for Columbia College Chicago Press
75 pages
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44 color plates
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10 x 8
While more conventional art can be tucked neatly away on gallery walls, houses have a much larger footprint. And when a home outlives its most basic function of providing shelter, a decision has to be made as to whether it is ultimately worth saving. Modernist homes like those designed by Paul Rudolph face an additional challenge as products of a stark, concrete-laden brutalist style now seen by many to be cold and uninviting.
Photographer Chris Mottalini visited three abandoned Rudolph homes awaiting demolition. His photos present these onetime symbols of opulence and power at their most vulnerable and defeated. Rich, full-color photos show sunlight playing across shattered windows, dusty stairs, and ruined living rooms, presenting a view of modernism that few have seen before. The photos speak to the ephemeral nature of contemporary taste, and its uneasy relationship with history, as well as the consequences of modernism on our visual lexicon. And in a final coda, the pictures themselves serve to preserve these masterpieces long after time and tastes move on.
Brook Hodge, New York Times Magazine and Wallpaper
“Chris Mottalini’s poignant photographs pay tribute to the now-vanished buildings they depict. . . . After You Left, They Took It Apart, the culmination of an obsessive seven-year-long photographic preservation project, restores dignity to these homes once again, even as they are ravaged by time and neglect and facing imminent demolition. Mottalini’s haunting images are a stark reminder that nothing is forever.”
Kelsey Keith | Dwell
"Through Mottalini's photographs, a new generation is getting to know Paul Rudolph's legacy while coming to terms with its endangerment. A certain kind of vintage American aesthetic is now fetishized, but the demolition of Rudolph's homes proves that we have a long way to go in preserving his brand of dominant, near-Brutalist, mid-century modernism."
Timothy M. Rohan, University of Massachusetts Amherst
"Poignant, but not nostalgic, Mottalini’s photographs of Rudolph’s ruined houses make us think about how we regard the recent past."
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Architecture:
Art: Photography
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