The arc of an architect’s career tends to be long and slow to rise. Paul Rudolph’s was different. In the 1950s, when he was in his early 30s, he designed a series of inventive modern houses on the west coast of Florida that led to prestigious commissions up north and launched what would later be known as the “Sarasota School.” By the time Rudolph was 40, he was chairman of the department of architecture at Yale, which commissioned him to design a new building for the university’s art and architecture programs. When it opened, in 1963, the building was received with the kind of attention that our time lavished on Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim in Bilbao. It was the work of architecture that everyone was talking about, the building that seemed to sum up the aspirations and the potential of its age.
The Yale building was, and is, a complex but magnificent composition of ribbed concrete that somehow synthesizes the ideas of Frank Lloyd Wright and Le Corbusier; it evokes Wright’s Larkin Building and Le Corbusier’s La Tourette monastery in equal measure. But it is also harsh and arrogant, the very embodiment of the style that would soon become known as brutalism.
Not many years after Rudolph’s departure from Yale—he would relocate to New York in 1965—the tide of architectural fashion turned firmly away from the kind of heroic modernism that his work seemed to represent and that Rudolph never abandoned.
By the late 1970s, Rudolph, who in the previous decade had been arguably the most acclaimed architect in the country, began to seem passé. When he died, in 1997, his once large practice was a shadow of what it had been. He had slipped off the radar, and an unusually high number of his buildings, seen as embodiments of a modernist rigidity that had passed its sell-by date, had been demolished.
Rudolph’s story has an element of the tragic. He believed deeply in the ability of architecture to promote the social good and was much more than the inflexible maker of inflexible shapes that he could appear to be. His story is even more poignant, I think, because in recent years there has been a resurgence of interest in his work, far too late to save his many lost buildings or for him to take any satisfaction in it, but significant, nonetheless. (Not the least of the signs of the renewal of Rudolph’s reputation was Tom Ford’s recent purchase and restoration of one of the architect’s most celebrated and likable projects, the Hirsch Residence, on New York’s East 63rd Street, for years owned by the designer Halston.)
The Rudolph revival, if we can call it that, has now been validated by no less an institution than the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which this week opened an ambitious exhibition, “Materialized Space: The Architecture of Paul Rudolph.” It is the first full retrospective of Rudolph’s work that has been mounted in any major museum.
Not the least of the signs of the renewal of Rudolph’s reputation was Tom Ford’s recent purchase of the Hirsch Residence, for years owned by the designer Halston.
Rudolph’s career was multifaceted—he designed everything from furniture to mega-structures, from elegant houses to futuristic skyscrapers—and both the strength and the weakness of the exhibition is that its curator, Abraham Thomas, the Daniel Brodsky Curator of Modern Architecture, Design, and Decorative Arts, casts the net as wide as his title.
Every aspect of Rudolph’s career is touched upon: modern houses, civic buildings, interiors, urban-renewal plans, and a final chapter, building in Asia when few clients in the United States would hire him. This breadth is essential to understanding Rudolph, but no phase gets as much attention as you would want it to, and many important buildings aren’t included at all. The problem is not that this show is crammed into a too-tiny space; it’s got plenty of room, but Rudolph was so prolific and his career so wide-ranging that the Met could have given Thomas the Temple of Dendur wing and there still wouldn’t have been space for everything.
The curator had to make choices, and most of them are good ones. Thomas was wise to focus on Rudolph’s drawings and models, which are spectacular. An ardent modernist, he drew with the precision and perfection of a 19th-century master at the École des Beaux-Arts, and often at the same monumental scale. Some of the drawings in this show are the size of small murals, and to see exquisite modern buildings presented this way is breathtaking. So, too, with Rudolph’s delicate, handmade models: almost everything about this show is a triumph of traditional means of architectural expression, even though the buildings that are the subject of that expression are strikingly modern, and often radical.
Take, for example, Rudolph’s headquarters in North Carolina for Burroughs Wellcome, the pharmaceutical company, completed in 1972. A concrete structure of compelling angles that, like everything Rudolph designed, make a beautiful but not entirely practical composition, it was at once brutalist and lyrical. The architect’s enormous hand-drawn cross section of the building sitting astride its rural landscape is one of the most enthralling, not to say beautiful, architectural drawings of the 20th century. Many drawings in this exhibit could be described in similar terms.
Rudolph loved to slice through his buildings and use drawing to take us inside the intricate arrangement of spaces, often on multiple half-levels and quarter-levels, that his mind had devised. More than anything, this exhibition is an inquiry into an architect’s restless, almost relentless, mind. He arrayed spaces, you could say, the way other architects arrayed objects; he made spaces into compositions, and then he arranged objects within them. Everything Rudolph designed was complex, and yet it was always an exercise in balance, a harmony of planes and solids, of rough and smooth, of hard and soft, of light and dark, of closed and open.
Almost everything about this show is a triumph of traditional means of architectural expression, even though the buildings that are the subject of that expression are strikingly modern, and often radical.
Rudolph donated his architectural archive to the Library of Congress, and many of the drawings and models in this exhibition have been sitting in the library’s storage vaults until now. For that reason alone, this show is important. But there is another reason, too: since so many of Rudolph’s buildings have been torn down, it can serve as a wake-up call.
Burroughs Wellcome was destroyed in 2021 because it was “unsafe, not environmentally sound, and functionally obsolete,” according to United Therapeutics Corporation, which purchased it in 2012. The building nevertheless functioned well enough to house the laboratory in which AZT, a drug used in the treatment of AIDS, was developed, giving it a significant role in the history of science. It was also the setting for the 1983 science-fiction film Brainstorm, starring Christopher Walken and Natalie Wood, a momentary excerpt of which is shown in the exhibition. (There is also a short take from The Royal Tenenbaums, filmed in the extraordinary glass penthouse Rudolph built for himself at 23 Beekman Place, which is currently for sale.)
Much more has disappeared, including Rudolph’s Riverview High School; his Shoreline Apartments housing project, in Buffalo; his innovative Oriental Masonic Gardens, in New Haven, a public-housing complex that envisioned a future of pre-fabrication; a portion of the Orange County Government Center, in upstate New York; and far too many private houses replaced by McMansions. And just last month, Hurricane Helene leveled the pristine, elegant Sanderling Beach Club, in Venice, Florida. Thomas could have added a further section of the exhibition entitled “Lost Rudolph.”
Rudolph’s architecture is insistent, demanding, and powerful, which has not always made it easy to live with. But it is also, at its best, provocative and astonishingly beautiful, the work of a difficult genius. Who else could have conceived of something as mad, as terrifying, and as magnificent as the linear city Rudolph envisioned to run all the way along Robert Moses’s Lower Manhattan Expressway?
If this exhibition brings Paul Rudolph back to the forefront of 20th-century architects, it will have served its purpose.
Paul Goldberger, a Pulitzer Prize–winning architecture critic, is the author of several books, including Building Art: The Life and Work of Frank Gehry and Why Architecture Matters
