Paul Rudolph was born in 1918 in Elkton, Kentucky—a small town with a small church, a town hall, and a population of just over 2,000. Because his father was an itinerant Methodist preacher, Rudolph’s family moved often and he became familiar with the architecture of the American South. In 1940, Rudolph graduated with an architecture degree from Auburn University; he then entered Harvard’s Graduate School of Design. Gaining prominence in the 1950s and 60s, Rudolph is considered a second-generation Modernist. He was chairman of the Yale School of Architecture from 1957 to 1965, designed mixed-use skyscrapers in New York, experimental houses on the Florida coast, and became the talk of the town when Halston, in 1974, bought the Upper East Side carriage house he’d modernized in 1966—minimalism with a maximal impact. At the Met, in a variety of scales, 80 artifacts from Rudolph’s practice are on view. —Elena Clavarino