His Sarasota School works are amazing. Amazing enough that they are the only American "architectural school". The way in which he was able to translate that same understanding of human habitation into massive buildings is a remarkable feat.
It hit me when I visited the Massachusetts State Building in Boston - his corduroy concrete's ribs are sized to the human grasp and hit us in our subconscious in a way that makes the scale at which we experience the building change.
You've hit on the key point: human scale. Although Rudolph was quite good at human scale in his buildings unlike so many current architects, the absolute master of human scale in architecture was Frank Lloyd Wright.
It hit me when I visited the Massachusetts State Building in Boston - his corduroy concrete's ribs are sized to the human grasp and hit us in our subconscious in a way that makes the scale at which we experience the building change.