The Endo Pharmaceuticals Building, also known as “Endo Laboratories”, is a pharmaceutical plant designed by architect Paul Rudolph in 1962 in Garden City, New York, in the receding farmlands of Long Island. The “castle-like structure” was built to house the Endo Pharmaceuticals research, manufacturing and administration facilities. It still stands today as an example of post World War II American architecture in the Brutalist style.
History
The construction of the Endo Laboratories building began in 1962, and was completed in 1964. At the time, the fortress like appearance of this building was the cause of great controversy in local government of Garden City and public opinion. The Long Island State Parks Commission was even accused of trying to conceal it. Despite all this debate, architects from all over the world looked at this building and a 1964 article in The New York Times hailed it as one of the best commercial buildings in the New York Area.
Originally known as Endo Chemicals, Endo Pharmaceuticals Inc. was founded by the five Ushkow brothers in 1920. The family owned business grew and was in the business of manufacturing such well known medications as Percocet and Acetaminophen. Paul Rudolph received the Endo pharmaceuticals commission as a result of his widely popularized success with the Yale School of architecture. The marketing benefits of hiring a well known architect and using an iconic building to establish a corporate identity was not something that was lost on Joseph Ushkow and the executive staff of Endo Pharmaceuticals. They were very pleased with Rudolph’s design and seem to be quite confident of its architectural significance.
Once construction was complete in 1964, the company relocated from its facility in Richmond Hill, Queens to its state-of-the-art facility located in Garden City, Long Island. Later that year, the Concrete Industry Board awarded it the “conventional honor” of “Concrete Building of the year” on Nov. 16, 1964.
In 1969, Endo Pharmaceuticals was acquired by DuPont and the family-run business became a wholly owned subsidiary of DuPont but still under the name of Endo Pharmaceuticals until 1984. In 1997, DuPont sold certain pharmaceutical products, related rights, and assets and the new owners started business again under the Endo name.
Metropolitan Reality Associated LLC bought the deteriorating Endo Pharmaceuticals building in 2005, and completed an award-winning renovation in 2007. Unlike some of Paul Rudolph's works struggling for existence, his creation at 1000 Endo Boulevard is now fully occupied with new clients and houses the headquarters for Lifetime Brands.
Architect
Paul Rudolph is recognized as one of the preeminent American modernists after World War II, yet he was not a mere torch-bearer of the European modernist movement. Ironically, despite fond memories of his instructor at Harvard Walter Gropius, Rudolph was not very fond of all glass buildings, the curtain wall, or box like architecture that was so indicative of the influences of the German émigré modernist architects on postwar American architecture. During the mid-fifties when the so-called “International Style” buildings were dotting the architectural landscape of America, Rudolph resisted this application.
For him, such an approach to architecture addressed the needs of functionality but failed to satisfy the senses. Rudolph’s work seemed much more influenced by the work of Le Corbusier and Frank Lloyd Wright than anyone else. Rudolph was fascinated by the “New Brutalism”, especially Chandigarh; there are many elements in his buildings that can be traced back to the moves that Le Corbusier’s used at Chandigarh. Rudolph felt that in time people would regard it as highly as the Piazza San Marco in Venice, Italy. He was very taken by how the forms expressed in Chandigarh opposed the natural shapes of the surrounding landscape. He wrote, “In every way it opposes the mountains; the angled stair way, the ramp on the roof; . . . all these angles are obviously and carefully conceived to oppose the receding angles of the land masses.”
This way of directing the eye is a key sensual strategy adopted from Le Corbusier; it is clearly visible in the strong verticality created by the cylinders undulating on the exterior of the Endo Pharmaceuticals building.