Paul Rudolph and the Psychology of Space:The Tuskegee and Emory University Chapels

The chapels at Tuskegee University and Emory University are among the most inventive—and least known—works of the American modernist architect Paul Rudolph (1918–97). In Paul Rudolph and the Psychology of Space: The Tuskegee and Emory University Chapels, Karla Cavarra Britton and Daniel Ledford analyze these buildings as significant exemplars of the postwar American university chapel, finding them subject to three seminal influences in Rudolph's life: his childhood experience of Southern Methodism, his encounters with the architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright, and his admiration for Le Corbusier's religious works. The chapels evoke powerful aesthetic and emotive experiences in their audiences, reflecting Rudolph's ambition that architecture should be grounded in a “psychology of space.” The Tuskegee Chapel, designed at the apex of Rudolph's career (1960–69), engages the university's African American musical and educational legacy. The Cannon Chapel at Emory, meanwhile, built late in Rudolph's professional life (1975–81) as a multiuse space for the university's school of theology, exhibits a contrasting pattern of complexity and intransigence.