Antonin Raymond - Practice With Ladislav Rado

Practice With Ladislav Rado

After the war, Raymond's practice with Tuttle, Seelye and Place was dissolved. He formed a new company with Slovak architect, Ladislav Leland Rado (1909–1993), and named it Raymond & Rado. Although this company lasted until Raymond's death in 1976, they practised apart, with Rado in the New York office and Raymond in Tokyo. Whilst Raymond explored pottery and sculpture (making friends with Tarō Okamoto and Ade Bethune), Rado pursued an orthogonal rationalism that Raymond would eventually distance himself from.

Projects in the United States during the late 1940s allowed Raymond to gain a foothold in occupied Japan. This helped to restart the building boom in occupied Japan after the war. This was mainly achieved through contacts made in his previous practice and those that he and Rado made in New York.

Their single story Great River Station on the Long Island Railroad, expressed Raymond's fondness for inexpensive, simple materials. It had fieldstone retaining walls and a flat roof supported in each corner with a redwood post. The wide expanse of glazing created a modernist pavilion.

In the Chapel of Saint Joseph the Worker on Negros Island in the Philippines, Raymond worked with liturgical artist Ade Bethune, to produce mosaic murals and a lacquerware tabernacle inside the reinforced concrete church. The interior was adorned with colourful frescoes by Alfonso Ossorio. The church acted as a social centre for employees of the Ossorio sugar cane refinery.

The practice were also responsible for a number of parks and recreation buildings across the United States in the late 1940s, built largely to commemorate victory in the war.