Paul de Deux

The title of Michael Sorkin’s anomalous 1993 “Poem from New York” gives zero indication of its true purpose. In febrile free verse, Sorkin eulogizes Paul Rudolph—hero to me—four years before the architect’s death at seventy-eight. We all know the story, don’t we. / Of a compost of laurels / hailing a forbidden career… The stock scenario of Rudolph’s dégringolade sketches the Brutalist as a Randian antihero eventually demolished—like so many of his hulking creations—by grandiose ambition. But Brutalism is back—if only in name—and Rudolph’s drawings—eye-etching, tenacious, phosphorescent—recently received a solo treatment at the Met in Materialized Space, the first retrospective given there to an architect since the Nixon administration. So rarely does a designer grace the marquee of a major museum that NYRA chose to mark the occasion with a duplex of reviews. Side by side, they reveal Rudolph to be less a Roark than a Rorschach, his splendid autonomies of hand surfacing the heteronomous cult of genius, the vexed inheritance of urban renewal, the utopian lost highway o…