I was introduced to the American art collector and curator Robert M. Rubin by the art collector and dealer Daniel Wolf, and I met Wolf through the art collector and photographer Jean Pigozzi. I must say, I am deeply thankful to all of them for these wonderful, inestimable experiences.
Even though the term “a Renaissance man” has become somewhat clichéd, it seems the most precise description in the case of Rubin. A former Wall Street commodities and currency trader (over the course of his 25-year-long career on Wall Street he served on the Federal Reserve Bank of New York’s Foreign Exchange Committee and President Clinton’s Commission on Capital Budgeting), Rubin has advanced degrees in European history and theory and history of architecture from Columbia University. He is a passionate collector with encyclopaedic knowledge in many different areas: as a youth he collected postage stamps, coins and comic books; as an adult he turned to automobiles; and now, later in life, his interests include Hollywood screenplays, contemporary art, design and architecture.
Rubin is associated with three icons of modernist architecture. The first is the Tropical House, designed by Jean Prouvé after the Second World War for France’s colonies in Africa. Even though these prefabricated, easily transportable buildings were intended to be mass produced, only three prototypes were ever built and delivered to their colonial destinations. In 1999 Rubin arranged to have them moved from Niamey and Brazzaville to France. He restored one and donated it to the Centre Pompidou ten years ago.
The second architectural icon is the Fly’s Eye Dome by the American visionary Richard Buckminster Fuller, created in 1965 as a prototype for low-cost, portable housing of the future. Rubin owns the largest of these buildings (architect Norman Foster, who worked on the project with Fuller, owns another prototype). Rubin bought the house in 2013, restored it and first exhibited it at the Toulouse Contemporary Art Festival. From the very beginning, his plan has been to make the futuristic construction with 61 glass “eyes” as an object of inspiration and study for students of architecture and design.
And, since 2005, Rubin and his wife, Stéphane, have owned the Maison de Verre in Paris. The 1932 masterpiece by French architect Pierre Chareau was originally built as a combined home and office space for a well-known Parisian gynaecologist. Some might invoke Le Corbusier’s famous phrase, “machine for living”, to describe it, but Rubin prefers to describe it as a vivid example of “poetic functionalism” (the term was first used by Swiss architectural historian Bruno Reichlin to describe the work of Prouvé, Chareau, and, later, Piano). As one can imagine, preparing and learning to live in it has been one of the biggest (and most time-consuming) projects in Rubin's life.
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Mr. Rubin has been an SAH member since 2003.
