“Unfortunately, the institutions couldn’t get it together.” This is surely the lament that precedes any rallying cry for our times. Institutions of every description—marriage, journalism, lending, curatorship, criticism, education, political party, and above all governance—have recently bent and been broken so very readily to and by the powers of personalities and their cults. For this reason, Rudolph’s critical and radical American journey in and out of institutions and establishments—from outsider to insider to outsider; from queer country son of a preacher man to cosmopolitan princeling; from concrete architect to paper architect, all presumably achieved by power of personality—remains a perpetually current text for our times. Thank you, dear sir, for sharing ever more context for this text.
When NYRA and MoMA achieve their inevitable merger (MoNYRA? NYMA? MoRA?), we’ll try for another Rudolph retrospective. I imagine it very much inspired by the most brilliant architecture show I’ve ever attended—the 2018–19 exhibition The Sea Ranch: Architecture, Environment, and Idealism extraordinarily curated by Jennifer Dunlop Fletcher and others at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, which achieved instant karma with a canny-valley life-size immersive reconstruction of Condominium 1 (1965) by Charles W. Moore (Rudolph’s equal and opposite in gay majesty and administrative successor in New Haven institutional get-togethers), surrounded by an oceanic cyclorama, itself populated with glass tables full of intricate working drawings. Imagine MoMA’s otherwise uselessly vast atrium filled with a life-size immersion into, say, the many mezzanines and cantilevers of the long-demolished 1972 Micheels House, formerly of Westport, Connecticut, with various original inky renderings nearby. The sublime and the picturesque, together at last.