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 of the megastructure. Concrete kindness. Disciplinary brutality. Queer Brut. We all know the story, don’t we? Lucky for us, some stories aren’t just so. —THE EDITORS
Thomas de Monchaux
THE PROBLEM WITH ARCHITECTURE TODAY is genius. There’s far too much of it about. By this I mean, of course, not actual genius—as exalted by the self-aware nongenius painter, architect, courtier, and biographer Giorgio Vasari in his 1568 Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects. But the cosplay kind—wizened boyish otherworldliness, or dad-bod tech-bro swagger, or the old-fashioned shouty sadism masquerading as Romantic fury—with which today’s architects leverage archetypes of genius to beguile clients and bamboozle the public. It helps to be very tall. Or very short. Or to have an accent—even if only the cultivated singsong of the PhD lounge. It all puts me in mind of the “Real Men of Genius” series of television commercials for Bud Light, which was a ubiquitous feature of my adolescence. “Today we salute you, Mr. Really, Really, Really Bad Dancer.” “Today we salute you, Mr. Giant Taco Salad Inventor.” It was late Gen X slacker contempt—for sweaty hustle, for worldly ambition, and for visible effort—at its best. It won every advertising industry award, baffled the human mind, and sold record amounts of beer: genius indeed.
Mark Krotov
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.