The crew-cut darling of Brutalism: Paul Rudolph exhibition

The crew-cut darling of Brutalism: Paul Rudolph exhibition

Architects’ Journal
David Brady - January 03, 2025

Exhibition installation (credit: Eileen Travell, courtesy of The Met)

For a young architect, it’s a pretty sweet gig to design a school of architecture, especially if you happen to be the head of that school. But it’s not so great if, just a few years later, the students attempt to burn the school down. That architect was Paul Rudolph, quintessential man of the south, born in rural Kentucky, raised in Alabama. He took his architecture BA at Alabama Polytechnic Institute before venturing north to Harvard to study at Walter Gropius’s Graduate School of Design.

Yale University appointed Rudolph as head of school and he subsequently designed its Arts and Architecture Building, 1958-1963. The 1969 blaze may have been the result of arson by students protesting against the Vietnam war; it may have been to do with departmental politics; it was possibly an outcry against Brutalism itself. Nevertheless, the tough concrete building survived the conflagration and, in 2007, it was named Rudolph Hall to honour its architect.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art does not often exhibit modern architecture – the last time was in 1974 – so this timely show is something of a milestone, riding a wave of renewed interest in Brutalism. Curated by Abraham Thomas, the excellent exhibition charts key points in Rudolph’s long career featuring many loans from the Library of Congress, to which Rudolph consigned his archive of more than 100,000 items just before his death.

Exhibits range from the humble – Rudolph’s coloured pencils, Rotring pens, drawing instruments, a fragment of rough wooden formwork for the ribbed concrete of the Yale Arts and Architecture building – to the sublime, in the form of many examples of his stupendous draughtsmanship and several models. The exhibition also includes work from Rudolph’s early career – beach houses in Florida which even outdo Mies in their airy minimalism, space-age Perspex furniture, and a collection of objects, camshafts, insulators, etc, the sensuous form of which pleased Rudolph.

When Brutalism was all the fashion, Rudolph was the crew-cut darling of the media; he and his work featured in magazines like Vogue and even the Daily Telegraph. It’s tempting to speculate that such close attention might have caused him a mental breakdown; he hinted at depression in remarks about his Beekman Place penthouse. Perhaps he wasn’t helped by the use of his buildings in Venturi and Scott Brown’s Learning from Las Vegas as illustrations of what not to do; or by Rudolph’s Harvard contemporary, Philip Johnson, bringing Postmodernism to the attention of the world by designing ‘the Chippendale skyscraper’, the AT&T building. It is more likely that Brutalism’s moment in the sun passed by and Rudolph began to be bypassed for commissions.

His most audacious scheme, initially devised in the 1940s by infamous New York planner Robert Moses, was the Lower Manhattan Expressway or LOMEX (see top image). The gigantic Y-shaped structure was intended to squat on southern Manhattan.

Like so many of Rudolph’s plans, it was too overwhelming ever to succeed, requiring the elimination of acres of vibrant but untidy districts. A loose coalition of artists, conservationists and residents quickly organised to oppose LOMEX, which was eventually dropped. The key drawing Rudolph prepared for LOMEX is well known to generations of architecture students as the cover image for Reyner Banham’s Megastructure: Urban Futures of the Recent Past, 1976. Thomas has selected some clips from films that used Rudolph’s buildings as locations, hinting at the actual experience of using Rudolph’s multilevel buildings.

Late in his career, Rudolph designed a number of projects in south-east Asia, which he hoped would boost his profile, but these were often completed by other architects. One example is the Bond Centre (1988) in Hong Kong, now called the Lippo Centre, which, as intended by Rudolph, was a pair of towers connected at several levels by aerial walkways. The initial scheme delighted the Japanese Metabolists but, as built, all the walkways are missing and the whole outline is simplified and softened.

Rudolph’s own penthouse on top of 22 Beekman Place, overlooking the East River and much altered since the architect’s death in 1997, is presently for sale for $18 million. If you make a trip to see the exhibition, try to also arrange a visit to Rudolph’s Modulightor showroom on East 58th Street, which is open just twice a month, allowing a real experience of a surviving Paul Rudolph interior.

Materialized Space: The Architecture of Paul Rudolph is at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, until 16 March 2025

David Brady is a freelance writer on art, architecture, design and graphics

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