THE WORDS UNBUILT, DEMOLISHED, AND PARTIALLY DEMOLISHED appeared thirty-eight times throughout the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s recent Paul Rudolph exhibition. Days before the show opened, Hurricane Helene moved another of Rudolph’s buildings—Sarasota’s Sanderling Beach Club (1952)—into the demolished column. His headquarters for the biomedical nonprofit Burroughs-Wellcome (1972; expanded in 1982) crossed over in 2021. And whatever was done between 2011 and 2017 to the Orange County Government Center (1970) in Goshen, New York, certainly qualifies it as partially demolished, if not newly unbuilt.
All this is just the most recent chapter in Rudolph’s unmaking. Already by 1986, Michael Sorkin could write factually about “the scandal of Rudolph’s invisibility throughout virtually every stratum of American architecture’s institutional life,” even as Rudolph was building and planning new work in the US and Southeast Asia. Both things could be true. Sorkin cited “three events in New Haven” that effectuated Rudolph’s marginalization: his replacement as dean of Yale’s architecture school by the impish Charles Moore, Robert Venturi’s victory in a 1970 competition for an ultimately unrealized math building on campus, and a fire “of undetermined but suspicious origin” at the Art and Architecture Building (1963). As Timothy Rohan points out in his outstanding Architecture of Paul Rudolph (2014), New Haven fire marshal Thomas Lyons determined that the fire was an accident, which I think qualifies it as non-suspicious—but never mind: Both the literal conflagration (construed as a stand-in for generalized rebellions of the late midcentury) and its figurative counterpart (postmodernist ascendance) are key ingredients of the back half of every rise-and-fall-of-Rudolph story. In a press preview, curator Abraham Thomas likened the arc of the architect’s career to a “tragic fall off a cliff.” Or as the opening wall text put it, a little more vaporously, “by the end of the decade … he experienced a rapid decline in reputation as Brutalism, the muscular and monumental architectural movement with which he was most closely associated, fell out of sync with the rising postmodernist critiques and countercultural attitudes of the era.”
Materialized Space: The Architecture of Paul Rudolph, the Met’s first exhibition devoted to a single architect since 1972, played to its strengths in emphasizing its subject’s magnificent drawings, which reward sustained attention and close proximity, the kind that compels museum guards to tense up and begin to consider opening their mouths to loudly discourage you from standing too close to the art. But for all its rigorous verve, and despite its not entirely convincing attempt at modularity—purely thematic organization in lieu of any defined sense of the man and the work evolving over time, two entrances that longed for at least a little bit of symbolic hierarchy—the show was ultimately a straightforward morality play. Rudolph was Icarus, punished for his and his discipline’s overreach with expulsion from the upper ranks. He was, in so many words, asking for it.
The chain of imperfect conflations that shapes the collective understanding of the Brutalist moment—if that’s what it even was—disfavors the architect at every turn.
The Met’s parable wasn’t especially more over-the-top than others that have appeared over the decades—“Paul Rudolph Was an Architectural Star. Now He’s a Cautionary Tale,” is how the Times headline for Michael Kimmelman’s tense review put it, contorting the word Now into unprecedented new anachronisms—but it had its share of oddities. Architects tend to take the blame for all kinds of social ills, but Materialized Space was the first instance I’ve encountered of one being blamed for pharmaceutical greed:
AZT, the world’s first antiretroviral treatment for HIV/AIDS, was developed here. The drug’s extortionate prices were highly controversial, and in 1989 the AIDS activist group ACT UP barricaded themselves inside Rudolph’s building, demanding equitable access to the lifesaving medication.
This comprised a little less than half the wall text appended to a monumental drawing of Burroughs-Wellcome—a building that, especially in its afterlife, deserves more ekphrasis and less weirdly pointed prolepsis. Less fraught—and funnier—was the following, about Rudolph’s architectural office on West 58th Street (1964; demolished): “Although described by visitors as ‘confusing, disconcerting … and vertigo-producing …” Tell us what you really think! The barrage of insults from the esteemed editors of Progressive Architecture reminded me of a line from The Royal Tenenbaums (2001): “Why would a reviewer make the point of saying someone’s not a genius?”
As it happens, The Royal Tenenbaums had a surprise turn in Materialized Space: The scene of Ben Stiller and his matching sons running middle-of-the-night fire drills across the many levels and staircases of 23 Beekman Place (built in 1977 and “on the market right now,” as Thomas pointed out during the walk-through) played on a loop alongside a few other clips—most notably Douglas Trumbull’s Brainstorm (1983), which made excellent use of the honeycombed pyramid of Burroughs-Wellcome, the Giza of the Research Triangle. In an exhibition almost entirely free of architectural photography, these fragments provided evidence that Rudolph’s work exists (or, in the case of Burroughs-Welcome, existed) in the real world, that he was a practitioner of more than just the hypothetical.
“Given that a number of his buildings have been destroyed and some of his most well-known projects remain unbuilt,” Thomas writes in the introduction to the catalogue, “Rudolph’s work has become defined by the legacy of his drawings, in particular the large-scale, richly delineated renderings for which he became famous.” But that can’t be right. The Healy Guest House (1950) in Sarasota; the Jewett Art Center (1958) at Wellesley; the Art and Architecture Building, the Temple Street Garage (1959), and Crawford Manor (1962) in New Haven; Endo Laboratories (1964) on Long Island; UMass Dartmouth (1966–71); Tuskegee Chapel (1967); the Bass Residence and City Center (1970 and 1983, respectively) in Fort Worth; the Boston Government Service Center (1971); Tracey Towers (1972) in the Bronx; the Tuttle House (1984) in coastal Maryland; the Lippo Centre (1988) in Hong Kong; Wisma Dharmala (1990) in Jakarta—if Rudolph’s legacy isn’t defined by these buildings (none of them unbuilt, demolished, or partially demolished), then surely it is the first-order task of any Rudolph retrospective to correct the record.
Novelty alone wasn’t enough to overcome my initial grumpiness about the absence of proof of architectural life.
Thomas opened his walk-through by noting that most of the drawings in the show had never been exhibited before—many of the contents of Rudolph’s archive, including the drawings, are held by the Library of Congress—but novelty alone wasn’t enough to overcome my initial grumpiness about the absence of proof of architectural life. I was feeling starved for more along the lines of the film footage and magazine articles and ads from the ’60s that occupied a couple of cases toward the middle of the gallery, displays that at least made explicit Rudolph’s architectural celebrity and the controversy he generated. How, I wondered, would a visitor without much preexisting knowledge of this history interpret Materialized Space? Would they come away thinking of Rudolph as an entirely theoretical architect? A proto-starchitect whose greatest skill was posing thoughtfully with his (very good) architectural models? A virtuosic draftsperson and designer of mediocre Lucite chairs?
Within half an hour, however, Thomas’s emphasis on drawings had justified itself via a diptych in the corner of the “Projects in Asia” module, located either near the beginning or the end of the show, depending on one’s predilections. To the left: a perspective drawing of an early design for the Concourse (1994), a Singapore skyscraper with fifteen segments of inverted floors and gradually unsheathed exposed columns at the base, a dazzling hybrid of 1980s high tech and late-period Frank Lloyd Wright, especially his now-beleaguered Price Tower (1956). To the right: the lobby interior of the Concourse, a vast, canted atrium whose vertiginous escalators elevate it above John Portman’s Embarcadero Hyatt (1973) interior, to which it otherwise bears a kind of baseline resemblance. This project in its two iterations was new to me, but what stood out over and above the architecture was—yes—the extraordinary beauty of the drawings themselves.
In the image on the left, Rudolph underscores and maybe even overstates the tower’s dramatic height with a simple perspectival trick, narrowing the horizontal lines that adumbrate the sky from wide-ruled at the bottom to a dense, gray thatch at the top—perfectly straight lines that exude the strong-willed and artful vision of the man who drew them. If this drawing derives its power from its simplicity, the depiction of the atrium is almost overwhelming in its multitude of surfaces and effects: the hatch marks on the bottom left to illustrate the shadows beyond the ambit of the glass roof; the sheer thrum of oblique verticals to indicate the very opposite, as cascades of light fall down from said roof at various, unexpected angles; strategically deployed white space to capture the literal cascades of a waterfall that precisely matches the rake of the escalator; the narrowing trick of the first rendering apportioned out into seventeen louvers hung just under the roof, the strokes tight in the front and barely perceptible toward the back. “Rudolph had plenty of time to draw,” Rohan writes, “because a recession delayed construction of the Concourse for a decade.” This is a little mean, but it is clarifying in its materialism—what we’re dealing with here is more than abstracted virtuosity. Materialized Space wasn’t—or shouldn’t have been—primarily a show about virtuosity, but neither viewer nor curator can be blamed for getting lost in Rudolph’s unbelievable, perhaps unparalleled skill as a draftsperson.
Rudolph’s self-conscious structuralism somehow still registers as an underrated trick.
Rudolph surely didn’t have plenty of time to draw in 1958, when he completed a perspective rendering of the Art and Architecture Building so good that I started to ponder how I could exploit the inevitable defunding of the Library of Congress to my benefit and orchestrate a late-night heist. The neighboring perspective section drawing of the Art and Architecture Building of the same vintage is the more famous of the two (the Met’s pompous façade has never been more inviting than it was this fall and winter, when a giant poster of the section hung to the right of the main entrance), but it was the external perspective that I kept returning to. Every surface, every transparency, every accent—layer upon layer of clear but palpable glass, vines swaying below the soffits, trees etched like woodcuts on the far side of the building—receives its own attentive, individualized treatment. Yet for all its carefully engraved detail, the drawing is equally a work of high drama, a clear match for the “palace in bush hammered beton” (per Sorkin’s odd 1993 poem-tribute to Rudolph) it depicts with ferocious self-assurance. Rudolph’s audacious spatial sequence uses every spandrel, mullion, and tabletop at its disposal to guide the viewer into the heart of the inexplicably top-lit fifth-floor architecture studio. In his poem, Sorkin juxtaposes Rudolph’s “transparency and thickness, texture and chill smoothness, light bright and gloomy, rippling modulations of space,” all of which proliferate here. What I found most moving were the wavy horizontal lines indicating construction joints: texture that interrupts and clarifies the chill smoothness, a bit of the twitchy unease of a blood pressure monitor in a sea of otherwise total architectural predetermination.
Those wavy lines, of course, index the shape of the corrugated concrete pours. “It is a building for draftsmanship and a building conceived in terms of draftsmanship,” Reyner Banham wrote of the Art and Architecture Building. I don’t really share Banham’s distaste for Rudolph’s brilliant and occasionally labored building, but I understand what he means. There is something presumptuous about those wavy lines. It is as if Rudolph were getting ahead of himself—as if his building’s innovations exist above all to prove that, with enough effort, two dimensions can be transformed into material space.
Vanity? For sure, but there’s so much more going on. In his essay “Rendering the Surface: Paul Rudolph’s Art and Architecture Building at Yale,” published in the first issue of Grey Room, Rohan writes that
the surface of the Yale building can be interpreted as a form of ornament that has been literally pressed (or repressed) into the concrete. Moreover, in a broader sense, this method of concealing ornament seems to parallel Rudolph’s situation as a closeted, homosexual man during the Cold War period. Indeed, for the homosexual Rudolph, the so-called “brutalism” of his surfaces can be interpreted as a hypermasculinity perhaps unconsciously designed to combat any aspersions cast on the possible effeminacy of ornament.
I buy it. Even if it hadn’t become a key signifier of what Thomas de Monchaux has called vernacular modernism, a style or practice dispersed across the US in the late midcentury, Rudolph’s cast concrete seems permanently destined to invite strong reactions, metaphorical and otherwise. (Rohan quotes Vincent Scully: “one of the most inhospitable, indeed physically dangerous, [surfaces] ever devised by man. Brushing against it can induce injuries roughly comparable, one supposes, to those suffered in keelhauling.” Ouch!) Abraham Thomas called the plywood formwork mold used in the Art and Architecture Building’s construction, one of the handful of objects on display in the exhibition, the “closest we get to an archaeological object,” which feels if anything like an understatement. It is an archaeological object, but also a holy one. If the Yale School of Architecture had managed to dig up one of the club hammers used to smash the corrugated edges, it would have been too much—like stumbling upon God themself hanging out in the Siena show upstairs.
IT’S HARD TO SAY HOW I developed my complicated attachment to corduroy concrete. I suppose I would have first encountered it underground, inside the large handful of exquisite late-Brutalist stations that constitute about half of Atlanta’s mixed-bag MARTA subway system. (These stations also introduced me to the splendor of board-formed concrete, which had—unbeknownst to me at the time—reached its apotheosis decades earlier, at Rudolph’s Temple Street Garage.) But I associate it more with the suburban recreational buildings where I tried and failed to achieve baseline competence in basketball and tae kwon do. The MARTA stations were lavish enough to have perhaps been shaped by hand, but the rec centers were prefab to the extreme—not dangerous, like Scully took the Art and Architecture Building to be, but decidedly unfriendly. I loved them all anyway, and I still do.
But obviously not everyone does. The matter of hostility looms large over Rudolph’s work and over Brutalism as a whole. The chain of imperfect conflations that shapes the collective understanding of the Brutalist moment—if that’s what it even was—disfavors the architect at every turn, which is how Paul Rudolph ends up responsible for the highway age, urban renewal, poor maintenance, and the excesses and graft of federal bureaucracy (and the AIDS crisis). Rudolph really was devoted to cars to an extent that was at once consistent with his era and nonetheless wrongheaded, and he seemed to register little hesitation in aligning himself with builders and developers who blew up densely packed blocks and turned them into blank canvases, leaving residents and history out of the story. His innovative methods sometimes led to cold and leaky buildings, rendering the quick destruction of New Haven’s Oriental Masonic Gardens (1970) something less than a tragedy: Rudolph experimented with prefab modular units (“twentieth century brick,” he called them) for the housing project, which was partly funded with federal aid, but residents hated his untested material innovation—and they weren’t wrong.
Rise-and-fall stories have a hard time accommodating these facts alongside the limits of their metaphorical implications. I went to see Cheyenne Julien’s show 41 Floors at Chapter NY this past February, and her lovely paintings of childhood, adolescence, and dreamlife at Rudolph’s Tracey Towers in the Bronx, where she grew up (hence the forty-one floors), present a useful corrective to the extravagant accusations placed at Rudolph’s and the Brutalists’ feet. Built as part of the Mitchell-Lama Program, the Tracey Towers don’t have the reputation of an Art and Architecture (restored by Gwathmey Siegel in 2008 and renamed Rudolph Hall in belated commemoration), but they are as creative a triumph of prefabrication as the New Haven building is of hand-shaped intricacy. (Sorkin in 1986: “At a time when, for better or for worse, the theme of factory-built housing dominated the discourse of architectural responsibility, Rudolph attempted to make a real architecture out of his problematic technology with unrivaled commitment.”) Julien doesn’t try to obscure the occasional grimness of her childhood home, but neither does she ignore its elegance, as in her painting Twin Revival (2024), which gives a stairwell and two oval windows the Oskar Schlemmer treatment and suggests a spiritual connection with the stairwell of Marcel Breuer’s building for the Whitney Museum. (It’s hard to know what to do with the fact that the Met’s last major architecture exhibition, the one that took place in 1972, was devoted to Breuer. Here, unlike with Rudolph’s career, it seems irresponsible not to engage in all kinds of paranoid extrapolation: Did architecture stall out five decades ago? Did mainstream curatorial awareness do the same? Is the Brutalist moment a psyop? And on and on.)
Rudolph was Icarus, punished for his and his discipline’s overreach with expulsion from the upper ranks. He was, in so many words, asking for it.
The more times I went back to see the Rudolph show, the more hostile I grew to the conflations between man and era. The hippies turned against the modernist consensus … and so Rudolph started designing chintzy apartment interiors? I’m not sure that inspiration works that way. What killed the architect’s career—to the extent that it was killed, which it wasn’t—was the rapid dissipation of federal funding that had made some of his most ambitious projects possible, or close to possible. Shouldn’t a story about sudden shifts in federal priorities be especially legible to us today? Postmodernism may have made Rudolph’s architecture unfashionable, and a fire may have damaged it, but it’s simply the case that under neoliberalism the economic conditions were no longer there for him to pursue the work he was, at that moment, best equipped to undertake.
Which brings us to LOMEX, Rudolph’s scheme for a megastructure straddling Robert Moses’s Lower Manhattan Expressway. Delicate synthesis like Julien’s is always the responsible move, but having spent hours staring at Rudolph’s transfixing drawings of the Lower Manhattan Expressway/City Corridor project, I felt myself becoming irresponsible, as well as annoyed. Oh, the LOMEX drawings “horrified many of Rudolph’s peers when they were published and conveyed the sense that he was out of touch with society’s needs and values surrounding architecture”? Well, too bad! Like the counterpoint of The Onion’s perennially relevant headline about the Iraq War (“This War Will Destabilize The Entire Mideast Region And Set off A Global Shockwave Of Anti-Americanism vs. No It Won’t”), I became dead set on pure, X-ray negation.
But in the end, that disposition proved unnecessary. Gracing the cover of Banham’s Megastructure (1976), on display alongside a photocollage of LOMEX’s proposed route across Broome and Delancey and down Chrystie, Rudolph’s design didn’t strike me as the least bit misconceived. Dutifully glued to the drawings, I was struck by the overwhelming formal and spatial sophistication on display, with Rudolph devoting the same degree of conscientious attention to the play of shadows in a sunken garden as to an emergency stairwell connecting the people mover to the highway. In a perspective that appears on the back of the catalogue, Rudolph presents ten stories of parking at the base of three buildings as an urban form that’s surprisingly porous, the auto-oriented megastructure a testament to light, space, and air (polluted air, but air nonetheless). In another, high-rises on either side of the Williamsburg Bridge chart a sawtooth course through the sky, eventually giving way to purely phantom units—perhaps the closest I’ve ever seen architecture come to pure sculpture. Rudolph’s self-conscious structuralism somehow still registers as an underrated trick, and here, as with the columns at the bottom of the Concourse and the Lippo Centre, we get to see a building and its inner life in a single, unwavering gaze, a more effective gesture than the soothing consolations of transparent glass in, say, Rudolph’s student Norman Foster’s Carré d’Art (1993) in Nîmes, or the somewhat effortful inversions of the Pompidou Center (1977).
In The Evolving City (1974), cowritten with Ulrich Franzen, Rudolph delivers his case for LOMEX with the confidence of someone unaware that his career has sustained a tragic fall off a cliff. He is precise, thoughtful, and lucid in his presentation, as when he discusses the HUB—all caps but not an abbreviation—the transit center at the heart of the project:
A view from below the upper plaza level reveals the volumetric, suspended quality of the various levels of the HUB. In these spaces are revealed the subway, highway, surface-street and people-mover networks. Pedestrian bridges cross the open, multilevel spaces to the transportation building plaza. The subway emerges from its subterranean tunnel and is exposed at grade where its present station platform is located. Each is visible to travelers and pedestrians who are themselves suspended at different use and activity levels in the HUB. Thus, a deep, multimodal sinew of transportation ways and systems is revealed to the spectator, to the person in the city.
In its intense, modernist commitment to expressing the subterranean workings of an urban environment to anyone who wishes to see it, that final sentence is as beautiful as any of the drawings in Materialized Space.
To linger on those drawings a bit more, I suspect that what might have caused Rudolph’s peers to be “horrified” was, paradoxically, the quality of the schematics. In a drawing of the Broome Street segment—not featured in the show—Rudolph wisely leaves the parts of Manhattan to the north and south barely sketched in, an underdeveloped mass compared with the confident, heavily shaded, fantastically delineated density of City Corridor. Rudolph is so good at bringing his buildings to life that he is equally able to let us forget about the buildings already there. I wonder if, more than the demolition LOMEX would have entailed, the true terror these illustrations induce is the (false!) sense that the rest of the city would be demolished, too.
Highrises on either side of the Williamsburg Bridge chart a sawtooth course through the sky, eventually giving way to purely phantom units—perhaps the closest I’ve ever seen architecture come to pure sculpture.
The self-evident premise of the LOMEX project—what made it controversial and “appalling” (Kimmelman’s word) in addition to its size and bluster and destruction—was that it would bestride Moses’s highway. By 1969, that highway was dead and demapped, never to return. Rudolph began work on City Corridor in 1967, which means that for most of its existence his project was, as Rohan puts it in his book, “a purely academic venture.” To wish that LOMEX had been built is to wish, in turn, that Moses’s expressway had been built—and I would never go that far. My longing for LOMEX thus occupies a kind of double counterfactual—what if, but what if not in that way—not wholly dissimilar from Rudolph’s own. Like the architect, who kept on scheming long after the conditions were no longer there, I’m committed to the dream. In today’s New York City, the most meaningless history is turned into inarguable fetish, and the meaningful history we have left has been captured by the super-elite. New York will never be static—it is too busy and churning for that—but for all the new construction it is, more than it’s ever been, an architecturally stagnant zone, the last true period of spatial upheaval seventy years or more in the past. Imagination must be catalyzed, and futuristic thinking needs a provocation. Imagine walking down Wooster Street, or Second Avenue, and coming upon a deep, multimodal sinew of transportation ways and systems revealed to you, the spectator, the person in the city. Maybe you’d hate it. And maybe you’d think that a city that could build this could do anything.