Paul Marvin Rudolph (October 23, 1918 – August 8, 1997) was an American architect and the chair of Yale University's Department of Architecture for six years, known for his use of reinforced concrete and highly complex floor plans.

His father, Keener L. Rudolph, was an itinerant Methodist preacher, and through their travels the son was exposed to the architecture of the American South.

[2]: 26 Rudolph earned his bachelor's degree in architecture at Auburn University (then known as Alabama Polytechnic Institute) in 1940, and then moved to the Harvard Graduate School of Design to study with Bauhaus founder Walter Gropius.

[3][4] Following his studies at Harvard, Rudolph moved to Sarasota, Florida, and partnered with Ralph Twitchell for four years, until he started his own practice in 1952.

The roof was concave and was constructed using a built-up spray-on process that Rudolph had seen used to cocoon disused ships during his time in the US Navy (hence, the house's nickname).

His first independent work, post Twitchell, was the Walker Guest House, a sparse exoskeleton structure built in the sand dunes and scrub of Sanibel Island in 1953.

In 2006, there was a great deal of controversy in Sarasota when many members of the community appealed for the retention of the historic building after the decision reached by the county school board to demolish the structure.

While chair of the Department of Architecture at Yale, Rudolph taught Muzharul Islam, Norman Foster, and Richard Rogers, all attending the Master's course as scholarship students.

[citation needed] In the late 1950s, Paul Rudolph's Florida houses began to attract attention outside of the architectural community and he started receiving commissions for larger works such as the Jewett Arts Center (1955) at Wellesley College and the Blue Cross Building (1956) in Boston.

[16] His Shoreline apartments in Buffalo were completed in 1974 and were promoted as pioneering low income housing designed as part of a larger masterplan for the city's waterfront.

The Lippo Centre, completed in 1987, is located near Admiralty station of MTR in Hong Kong, and is a culmination of Rudolph's ideas in reflective glass.

Over the years, he built an idiosyncratic exterior addition, and modified the interior with multiple levels and his own flair for decoration and display of art.

[1] He died on August 8, 1997, at the age of seventy-eight in New York City from peritoneal mesothelioma, a disease primarily associated with asbestos.

[20] It is believed that during his work at the Brooklyn Navy Yard during WWII, he and many other workers were exposed to high levels of asbestos contamination.

[24] In 1972’s Learning from Las Vegas, Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown use Rudolph's Crawford Manor (1962) as an exemplar of “establishment architecture now,” particularly to illustrate the tendency of high modernism to allow the program of a building to distort its form.