The Milam Residence located in the coastal community of Ponte Verda Beach, Florida, by Paul Rudolph architect, was completed in 1962, and instantly became one of them paradigm image of what great American residential architecture could be.
The family of Arthur W. Milam, who originally commissioned the building, have been owner-residents since the building was finished, and have cared for it with pride. Now, they are making the building available - and they are hoping that the next owner will be struck by the building’s many beauties and virtues, as well as understanding its importance as a work of truly great Modern architecture.

The Milam Residence is on the National Register of Historic Places (USA) is the official list of the Nation’s historic places worthy of preservation. It achieved that status in 2016, and you can see their official page on the house here. Authorized by the National Historic Preservation Act of 1966, the National Park Service’s National Register of Historic Places is part of a national program to coordinate and support public and private efforts to identify, evaluate, and protect America’s historic and archaeological resources.
 
The Arthur Milam House is a Mid-Century Modern style, two-story plan residence located at 1033 Ponte Vedra Boulevard in Ponte Vedra, Florida, constructed in 1962, the last of the Florida houses designed by architect Paul Rudolph. 

Designed for attorney Arthur Milam, the design represent a major break with the Sarasota School designs which Rudolph founded in collaboration with Ralph Twitchell during the years 1946-1949.  The simplicity of the Sarasota School was replaced by a more volumetric sculptural approach.  

The building is constructed primarily of poured concrete and concrete blocks and has extensive window glazing, especially on the east facade. 

The main facade of the residence is oriented toward the Atlantic Ocean rather than State Highway A1A, where the elevation is hidden in a massive stand of woods.  While this glazing occupies most of the east facade, all other sides of the building contain minimal transparent surfaces. For the exterior envelope, Rudolph’s use of concrete block appears to allow for structural freedom while also taking into account the characteristics of the local subtropical climate. The modernist structure contains stylistic elements of the Sarasota School while also hinting at the more monolithic, monumentalist or brutalist style later developed by Rudolph. 

The building was designed with attention to energy conservation. On the west elevation the residence is air-conditioned and  the windows are inoperable.

It is always a good time to celebrate Paul Rudolph and news of the restored beachfront at the Milam Residence is a double-treat.

Rudolph commented on his design:
 
“A composition of considerable spatial variety with vertical and horizontal interpenetration of spaces clearly defined inside and out. Gone are the earlier notions of organization through regular structure with subdivisions of space freely spaced. Spatial organization has taken the place of purely structural organization. Floors and walls are extended in elaborated forms toward the views, thereby making of the facade a reflection of the interior space. The brises-soleil also serve as mullions for the glass, turning the exterior wall into a series of deep openings filled only with glass. The exceptional wild Florida site 60 ft. above the Atlantic Ocean is a counterfoil to the geometry of the structure.”
Paul Rudolph quoted in: The Architecture of Paul Rudolph. New York: Praeger, 1970

The Milam family has also been doing some site restoration: installing a new retaining wall along the beach. This stabilizes the beautiful terrain which ascends up to the house.
 
"A composition of considerable spatial variety with vertical and horizontal interpenetration of spaces clearly defined inside and out. Gone are the earlier notions of organization through regular structure with subdivisions of space freely spaced. Spatial organization has taken the place of purely structural organization. Floors and walls are extended in elaborated forms toward the views, thereby making of the facade a reflection of the interior space. The brises-soleil also serve as mullions for the glass, turning the exterior wall into a series of deep openings filled only with glass. The exceptional wild Florida site 60 ft. above the Atlantic Ocean is a counterfoil to the geometry of the structure."
Paul Rudolph in Moholy-Nagy, Sibyl, and Gerhard Schwab. The Architecture of Paul Rudolph. New York: Praeger, 1970. P. 68
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Architects
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Paul Rudolph
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Collaborators
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Associate Architect.- Robert Ernest. Landscape.- Structural: Herman D. J. Spiegel. MEP.- Frank B. Wilder & Associates.
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Client
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Arthur W. Milam
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Dates
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1959-1961
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Location
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1033 Ponte Vedra Boulevard. Ponte Vedra Beach - St. Johns. Florida 32082. USA. Google Maps Address.- 30.17384, -81.35936
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Paul Rudolph was born in 1918 in Elkton, Kentucky and passed away in 1997 aged 78. He was an American architect and the chair of Yale University's Department of Architecture for six years, known for his use of concrete and highly complex floor plans. His most famous work is the Yale Art and Architecture Building (A&A Building, completed in 1963), a spatially complex brutalist concrete structure. The building is one of the earliest known examples of Brutalist architecture in America.

Inspired by buildings at an early age, Rudolph studied architecture as an undergraduate at Alabama Polytechnic (now Auburn University). After a brief period in the Navy during WWII, he completed graduate studies at Harvard under Bauhaus founder Walter Gropius.

Rudolph began his career in Sarasota, Florida, where he became a key figure in the Sarasota School of Architecture – a group of local architects who gained international attention during the mid-century for designing modernist homes suited to Florida’s tropical climate. In 1958, Rudolph was appointed Dean of the Yale School of Architecture and began work on a large new building located on the university’s campus. Completed in 1963, the Yale Art & Architecture Building instantly became both a Modernist icon and a topic of controversy.

Rudolph left Yale in 1965 to practice in New York City. In the thirty years following his tenure at Yale, Rudolph created some of Modernism’s most unique and powerful designs. Although Rudolph’s popularity in America waned while postmodernism dominated design and architectural discourse in the late 70’s and 80’s, he received commissions during this period of his career to work in Southeast Asia, where he built towers in Hong Kong, Jakarta, and Singapore. Rudolph’s work and legacy have had a profound impact on contemporary architecture. As one of America’s most important Late Modernist architects, he was an inspirational mentor to those he had taught at Yale. His former students include some of today’s most renowned architects, such as Lord Norman Foster, Lord Richard Rogers, and Charles Gwathmey, among many others distinguished in the field.

THE 1940’s

Paul Rudolph began his career in 1941 as an apprentice, and later partner in Ralph Twitchell’s architectural practice in Sarasota, Florida. Together their work became known as part of the “Sarasota School” of architecture. Common characteristics of the Sarasota School of Architecture are a strict adherence to function, modular composition, articulation of individual building components and attention to local climate and terrain. Large sunshades, innovative ventilation systems, oversized sliding glass doors, floating staircases, and walls of jalousie windows dominate many of these buildings. Rudolph and Twitchell’s projects gained recognition in part due to the stylized ink renderings produced by Rudolph during this period.

THE 1950’s

In March of 1952, Rudolph left Twitchell’s office to open his own firm and began traveling between Florida and New York to lecture at various schools in the Northeast. Rudolph reexamined his early work in Florida and was not satisfied with its quality, concluding that it lacked sufficient psychological control of light and space. He started to question the fundamentals of the International Style and the rigid principles of the Sarasota School. In 1954 he was awarded the “Outstanding Young Architect Award” in an international competition and the resulting recognition led to larger projects around and outside of Florida. Paul Rudolph was offered in 1957 the Chairmanship of the School of Architecture at Yale University and opened another office in New Haven, Connecticut. Rudolph continued to build projects in Sarasota during this period, which are notable for their emphasis of mass and expression over the previous focus on light materials, modular bays and prefabricated components.

THE 1960’s

Up until his time at Yale, Rudolph’s work had been a progressive exploration of modularity and functionalism. Designs produced during the 1960’s began to focus more on expressive forms made of poured in place concrete, the control of light and shadow, the play with scale and composition of different types of space. The most notable difference in this work is the focus on flowing curving lines and sculptural masses, the articulation of the buildings resulting from exaggeration of the shapes of the functions within. In 1965, Rudolph moved his offices to New York and by the end of the decade focused on creating complex compositions using simple modular elements. Influenced by Moshe Safdie’s prefabricated housing at the Montreal World Fair in 1967, Rudolph predicted that mass-produced mobile homes would become the basic building element in the future. Scale at the human level, the building level and the city would dominate his work during the later half of the 1960’s.

THE 1970’s

A fire at Yale’s Art & Architecture Building in 1969 and the 1972 publication of ‘Learning from Las Vegas’ contributed to a questioning of Rudolph’s Modernist aesthetics during the 1970’s. The amount of work declined, with most of the projects being private residences and a few large commissions. Rudolph continued to explore themes of scale and modularity, with a special emphasis on the experience of scale with regard to highrise buildings.

THE 1980’s

By the 1980’s, Rudolph began to receive several large commissions in Asia. These projects were located in primarily dense urban settings, and his work of this period focused on developing a scale and complexity necessary to relate the building to its surrounding context. Rudolph developed a tripartite expression of scale in his larger commissions to distinguish between the individual’s perception of scale of the building’s base, the perception from the automobile of the middle of the tower, and the top of the building from far away. As more of Rudolph’s work shifted from the United States to Asia, he explored materials and building forms to relate his Modernist designs to the unique character of the regional architecture of the building’s location.

THE 1990’s

In the last decade of his life, Rudolph explored the application of traditional building forms with his modernist aesthetic in large scale projects in Singapore, Hong Kong and Indonesia. On August 8, 1997 Paul Rudolph passed away in New York City from mesothelioma, a cancer that usually results from exposure to asbestos. At the time of his death he was working on plans for a new town of 250,000 people in Indonesia, and a private residence, chapel and office complex in Singapore.
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Published on: May 27, 2019
Cite: "Milam Residence by Paul Rudolph, put back on the market" METALOCUS. Accessed
<http://www.metalocus.es/en/news/milam-residence-paul-rudolph-put-back-market> ISSN 1139-6415
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