Good morning. It’s Wednesday. Today we’ll look at the city’s newest interior landmark. We’ll also find out about a recital of music that was written in a Nazi concentration camp more than 80 years ago.
Among the city’s 124 interior landmarks, there are well-known places like the lobby of the Empire State Building and the Rainbow Room atop Rockefeller Center. The newest, added by the Landmarks Preservation Commission on Tuesday, is less well known: the Modulightor Building on East 58th Street, a creation of the Modernist architect Paul Rudolph. Who? “He was the Frank Lloyd Wright” of the late 1950s and 1960s, said Kelvin Dickinson, president of the Paul Rudolph Institute for Modern Architecture, which occupies the space. “He was a famous architect, and he taught all of these students who later became famous architects, but when I was in school” — in the late 1980s and early 1990s — “no one remembered who he was.” The New York Times critic Jason Farago called Rudolph “one of the most acclaimed — and confounding — architects” of his time. His Brutalist buildings were widely praised in the 1960s, and they were complicated, with mind-bending layouts. The architecture writer Fred A. Bernstein wrote that Rudolph’s designs involved “molding concrete into shapes so intricate that they sometimes resembled M.C. Escher drawings.” His seven-story Art and Architecture Building at Yale is said to have 37 levels. His own apartment, on Beekman Place, has at least a dozen. Rudolph desperately wanted not to be forgotten and struck a deal with the Library of Congress to turn the Beekman Place apartment into a study center. That would have preserved his legacy. But Dickinson said that the library decided to sell the apartment after moving Rudolph’s papers and drawings to Washington. Rudolph learned of the library’s plan shortly before his death at age 78 in 1997 and willed his half of the Modulightor Building to his partner, Ernst Wagner. Rudolph had lived through ups and downs. He had been the chairman of the School of Architecture at Yale from 1957 to 1965. But by the 1970s, he was at a low point professionally, Dickinson said. “He thought he could create a lighting company that could keep his staff busy when he didn’t have any architectural work,” he said. That was the beginning of Modulightor. In time Rudolph became popular in Asia and took back the Modulightor space in his office. Modulightor migrated to SoHo and then to East 58th Street after Rudolph bought a brownstone that became “his most personal project,” Dickinson said. “He became his own architect, his own client, his own contractor and his own financier.” “Which was not good,” he added, “because I think he ran out of money three times.” He replaced the original facade with one he had designed. The landmarks commission said the first four floors were “mostly complete” by 1993. Two more floors and a roof deck were added between 2010 and 2016 by the architect Mark Squeo, based on Rudolph’s drawings. The exterior was designated a landmark in 2023. Liz Waytkus, the executive director of Docomomo US, a nationwide organization that works to preserve Modernist buildings, said the newly designated interior landmark was important “not only for its spatially rich and light-filled Modern design” but also because Rudolph’s presence can be felt when the institute opens the space to the public twice a month. “They don’t treat Modulightor like a precious commodity,” she said. “You can sit on things. You can touch things. You can take pictures. I’ve met I.M. Pei’s children there. I’ve met former employees of Paul’s. It’s a fantastic tribute to Paul.” WEATHER Expect a mostly sunny day, with the temperature reaching about 73, and a chance of showers in the afternoon. In the evening, it will be partly cloudy with a dip into the high 50s. ALTERNATE-SIDE PARKING In effect until May 26 (Memorial Day). The latest Metro news
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Most music that endures is written down and then memorized. Some of the music that will be performed tonight at a recital at Hebrew Union College in Greenwich Village was memorized first. It had to be. It was written for a secret choir in a Nazi concentration camp. There was no paper to write on. So, as Janie Press, the president of a group called Holocaust Music Lost & Found, put it, “this is about saving a history — and saving music.” The person who took that as his mission was Aleksander Kulisiewicz, a Polish dissident and amateur musician who had been sent to the Sachsenhausen concentration camp. Kulisiewicz is a principal figure in “Sing, Memory: The Remarkable Story of the Man Who Saved the Music of the Nazi Camps” by Makana Eyre, who will take part in a conversation before the recital. Kulisiewicz had a photographic memory, the result of a childhood stutter he had tamed by picturing words he heard as if they had been written out. He used that technique to remember songs by a fellow prisoner at Sachsenhausen, Rosebery d’Arguto, a conductor who had assembled the clandestine choir. Press said that it was different from “official camp orchestras like those at Auschwitz” because it was “not under the duress of the SS.” Still, the guards eventually found out, broke up the choir and sent d’Arguto and most of the singers to death camps. But not Kulisiewicz, who was not Jewish. He had been sent to Sachsenhausen with Polish political prisoners. “His crime, ostensibly, was writing an article,” Eyre wrote in The Atavist Magazine. He had “published pieces in local newspapers decrying Adolf Hitler and the rise of fascism.” SS officers made him spit out the teeth they broke when they beat him. Kulisiewicz and d’Arguto became friendly, Eyre wrote, and Kulisiewicz “began to build a catalog of music and poetry.” D’Arguto made Kulisiewicz “promise that it would be his life’s mission to bring this music to the world, and that’s what happened,” Press said. When the Nazis evacuated Sachsenhausen in March 1945, Kulisiewicz went back to Poland, walking much of the way. He came down with typhus and had to be hospitalized. During his long recovery, Kulisiewicz began dictating music — “the lyrics of songs written on the blank pages of his mind during his five years at Sachsenhausen,” Eyre wrote. “A nurse realized that there was sense to what he was saying, so she got a typewriter and started to transcribe. She returned again and again to his bedside over several weeks.” The result was pages and pages of lyrics and poems, an archive that is now housed in the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington. METROPOLITAN DIARY The Guggenheim
Dear Diary: My first day as an intern at the Guggenheim Museum was my third day in New York City. Fresh off a plane from Scotland, I had rented a room at the 92nd Street Y because I didn’t know a soul in town. My internship supervisor took me to lunch to celebrate my first day, and while we were in line getting our food we met a tall, shy man, a former intern. When I sat down at a table, the former intern did too. My supervisor got up and went to another table to talk to some colleagues. The former intern, Austin, and I struck up a conversation. Eventually, we became part of a gang of friends that summer. After the internship ended, I was hired full time, and a year later Austin became my roommate. Two years after that, he asked me out on a date, and three years later, we were married. The group of friends I met that first summer came to our wedding and have remained our New York family ever since. These friendships are now two decades strong. I think of them every time I am in the Guggenheim’s rotunda. — Michelle Millar Fisher Illustrated by Agnes Lee. Send submissions here and read more Metropolitan Diary here. Glad we could get together here. See you tomorrow. — J.B. P.S. Here’s today’s Mini Crossword and Spelling Bee. You can find all our puzzles here. Stefano Montali and Ed Shanahan contributed to New York Today. You can reach the team at nytoday@nytimes.com. Sign up here to get this newsletter in your inbox.
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