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’…