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Barbara Flanagan/The New York Times
Ralph Rapson is best known as the designer of the
Gutherie, Minneapolis’s landmark of theater design, but because he
worked, taught and competed with most of the world’s first modernists
– Wright, Mies, Corbusier, Saarinen – his elder son and biographer
calls him “the Forest Gump of architecture.”
Ralph Rapson: Sixty Years of Modern Design,
by Rip Rapson, Jane King Hession and Bruce N. Wright, documents the
architect’s vast career and uncanny associations.
Rapson believed design should be reflect the moment
– furniture, houses, cities – but his take on modernism was never
pompous. He perpetuated
endless ideas – still fresh – vibrant drawings and youthful pranks.
(He had his students hoist famous visitors upside down, including the
stocky Buckminister Fuller, and footprint the ceiling with their bare
soles.) The book shows how
one can be talented, influential and happy, all the while remaining
internationally obscure. It
also tells, discreetly how one man can achieve all this single –
handedly: with his right forearm amputated at birth, Ralph Rapson with
his left hand.
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