Ralph Rapson, a modernist architect who designed the Greenbelt House for the 1940s Case Study House program in Los Angeles and the landmark 1963 Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis, has died. He was 93.
Rapson died of a heart attack Saturday at his home in Minneapolis, his son Toby, also an architect, said Tuesday.
Also known for his postwar designs of U.S. embassies in Sweden and Denmark and innovative houses, churches and university buildings mostly in the Upper Midwest, Rapson spent 30 years as dean of the architecture school at the University of Minnesota.
"Ralph's passing represents the end of an era, not just for Minnesota's design community, but also for American architecture," Thomas Fisher, dean of the University of Minnesota's College of Design, said in a statement. "One of our last living links to the first generation of modernists, such as the famous Finnish architect Alvar Aalto, is now gone."
Rapson's most enduring design might be one that he drew in 1945 but which remained in ink-and-paper limbo until decades later. Case Study House No. 4, or the Greenbelt House, was commissioned by Arts and Architecture magazine and its editor, John Entenza, who put architects to work designing modern homes that could be mass-produced and, theoretically, be within the means of middle-class families.
Many of the houses became architectural icons in Los Angeles, immortalized by photographer Julius Shulman. The homes include Charles Eames' Case Study House No. 8 in Pacific Palisades and Pierre Koenig's No. 22 in the Hollywood Hills.
Then age 30, Rapson envisioned his prototype as "urban infill," his son Toby said, a small dwelling composed of two modules separated by a greenbelt, "a place where a family could relax, a green space that the house would be centered around."
Glass walls and skylights helped blur the indoor-outdoor line, and accordion-pleated doors were all that divided private from public living spaces inside.
"He drew it beautifully," Toby Rapson said, "with a liveliness that showed how houses were used for inhabitants. He brought a spirit to the design that captured imaginations for 60 years."
Although a client was not found to build the house in the '40s, a version was constructed in 1989 for an exhibit sponsored by Los Angeles' Museum of Contemporary Art.
