The Brutalist

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.

Vasari took the vulgar word ingegno, which then might have connoted a meaning closer to our use of the word ingenuity—inventiveness, craftiness, talent honed by experience—and shaded it, especially in his biography of the Tuscan multihyphenate Leonardo da Vinci, toward a more divine creativity, toward genesis. Significantly, this actual genius was less a neurological distinction than a device invented for the traversal of social class—inflected in sixteenth-century Italy by the residues of feudal servitude and the emerging money hierarchies of trade, mercantilism, and something new and interesting that would come to be called the bourgeoisie. And so, the art of social climbing. Genius, especially, was good for that—explaining how the bastard son of a provincial accountant and a servant girl such as Leonardo could wind up an intimate acquaintance, though still nominally a servant, of the king of France. “Men of genius,” Vasari observed of Leonardo, “sometimes accomplish most when they work the least, for they are thinking out inventions and forming in their minds the perfect idea that they subsequently express with their hands.”

The vanishingly uncommon—but tragic—problem is that, on the very rare occasions when the modern architectural profession encounters an actual genius, it doesn’t much know what to do with them. This is the case with Paul Rudolph, the mid-to-late twentieth century phenom who rose so far, so fast, and—at least as the received wisdom goes—fell famously into oblivion. It’s a narrative that was recapitulated incuriously in Materialized Space: The Architecture of Paul Rudolph, the small and dreary retrospective—apparently the first, long after the man’s death in 1997—staged in a far corner of the Metropolitan Museum of Art this past winter. Notably, the show was not thirty blocks downtown at the more architecturally fashionable Museum of Modern Art, whose resident poltergeist, Philip Johnson, cannily leveraged his provincial aluminum fortune into a king-making curatorship. (Rudolph, for all his success and indeed perhaps because of it, was never quite Johnson’s creature.) Metropolitan director Max Hollein—the son of Hans, a postmodern architect whose collages are said to have inspired Johnson’s one good building, the Chippendale skyscraper just east of MoMA—noted in his introduction to the catalogue that Materialized Space “reflect[ed] the Museum’s recent renewed commitment to showcasing modern and contemporary architecture and design.” For all the drear of the actual show, there is a reassuring elán in the Metropolitan’s choice to renew this commitment with a look at Rudolph rather than an anodyne crowd-pleaser and accessible nongenius. Possibly the world now knows enough about Frank Gehry.

Rudolph’s meteoric career followed, to almost perfect genre conformity, the profile of a Vasari biographical sketch. His origins were unpromising: born—to an itinerant Methodist preacher and a mother described as artistic—in the southwest Kentucky town of Elkton, named for a landmark salt lick favored by the ungulates in 1820, population 1,000 around the time of Rudolph’s birth a century later and only about double that today. Notably, he shared a childhood virtuosity at the piano and pipe organ with his exact professional contemporary Louis Kahn (who, because a late bloomer, was a generation older). In an episode that could be straight out of 1568, at the age of ten, forbidden to play the pipe organ by his strict minister father, he broke into a nearby church and performed perfectly, as marveling townsfolk spontaneously assembled to hear the young maestro. Rudolph rose, American Dream–style, through military service—he worked in logistics and shipbuilding at the Brooklyn Navy Yard—and a public land-grant college—Alabama Polytechnic, later Auburn University—leading to the imprimatur of a graduate degree in architecture from Harvard. His fellow students included I. M. Pei, Edward Larrabee Barnes, and one Philip Johnson. As with Leonardo, Rudolph’s ingenious and subtle and thrifty early work—in collaboration with architect Ralph Twitchell, all those sly and swanky beach houses elevating unfashionable Sarasota, Florida—had earned him reprieves from certain types of labor. “Lieutenant Rudolph,” Walter Gropius wrote the draft board on behalf of his mentee, in a successful bid for deferment by the latter from Korean War military service, “[is] one of the outstanding brilliant American architects of the younger generation … well on the way to becoming international known.”

A dozen short years after graduating from Harvard, Rudolph was elevated to the chair of architecture at Yale University. And thanks to his patronage by university president Alfred Whitney Griswold and New Haven Redevelopment Agency head Edward Logue, he set about designing his signature masterwork, that storied three-dimensional maze of a thousand orange-carpeted plateaus, the Art and Architecture Building at Yale, which opened in 1963, as well as various unbuilt and built public projects that fell under what was then politely called “urban renewal,” such as the Temple Street parking garage (1959) and the Crawford Towers senior housing complex (designed in 1962 and completed four years later). As a teacher, Rudolph seems to have been a meanie—cultivating the non–béton brut kind of Brutalism that by the American midtwentieth century was part of the performance of power in creative fields and remains to this day architecture’s greatest shame as a profession: its culture of cruelty. “He would brutalize people,” Rudolph’s student Stanley Tigerman would later recall, conceivably with something of that strange but common Stockholm Syndrome that has architecture students mistaking destruction for creation. “Paul was a miserable, mean bastard [but also] simply the best teacher I ever had by far.… He was fabulous, he was a killer. Yale, but Paul Rudolph, specifically, invented me out of whole cloth. He fabricated me.”

WHAT, THEN, WAS THE NATURE OF Rudolph’s genuine genius? The Radiograph ink-on-mylar renderings that are the stunning highlight of the Metropolitan’s show suggest, surprisingly, it may have been first and foremost a physical genius. When my father was in architecture school—half a world away from Rudolph’s Yale but coincident with those times—there was a required class in which students drew, freehand, straight horizontal lines a meter wide and a centimeter apart, over and over again, for hours. With your dominant hand, you’d mark out the lines, and with the other hand, you’d chain-smoke and tap ash onto the floorboards. It was training in the dexterity and persistence that such drafting requires. One can imagine the fine muscle strength and stamina of that ten-year-old pipe organ player, pushing the keys and spanning the chords, twice over with his feet on the pedals. So thrilling are these illustrations that the subject of Materialized Space might have been better served by dispatching back to the Library of Congress, to which Rudolph bequeathed his archives, all the dusty models, muddy blowup photos, old copies of Life magazine, and forlorn personal effects that also featured in the show and focusing exclusively on architecture’s defining practice of drawing and drafting. And yet it’s spiriting that such works should have appeared not at MoMA but under the same vast Metropolitan roof as work by the northern Renaissance engraver Albrecht Dürer. Which they resemble in their methodical generation, hatch by hatch, of a measure of miracles. For Rudolph, as he recalled in a 1972 interview with Architectural Digest, it was about making the finished structures look like the drawings, not the other way around: His signature texturing, bush hammering, corrugated cement blocking, and wood-grain casting “started simultaneously with [a] concept of the rendering and how to make the buildings conform more exactly to the image as depicted.” A critic no less than Reyner Banham—the very inventor of New Brutalism—remarked in 1964 of the Art and Architecture Building that “it is one of the very few buildings I know which, when photographed, was exactly like a drawing, with all the shading on the outside going out as if it were ruled in with a very soft pencil.”

The most charming detail in all of Materialized Space might have been the panorama of nib-testing squiggles and scratches along the bottom margin of the quintessential Rudolph drawing: his 1972 deepest one-point perspective of the Lower Manhattan Expressway/City Corridor HUB project. This was a Coruscant-meets-Corbusier linear city, a two-mile megastructure of housing, parking decks, monorails and more, commissioned in 1967 by the Ford Foundation to notionally dignify and redensify the unbuilt stupidity that was Robert Moses’s proposal for an interstate that would have plowed across SoHo between the Holland Tunnel and the Williamsburg and Manhattan Bridges. Officially outside and below the frame of the drawing but critically a commentary on it, these scratchy markings accumulate—in the eye of a willing beholder—into a Dutch or Venetian scene, all picturesque townscapes and landscapes under a sublime sky—worthy of Van Ruisdael or Canaletto. The relationship between built and natural landscape suggested by that ink blot of a panorama connotes a horizontal land use, perhaps even a nonhierarchical social structure, undermining those entrapped or enraptured by the technocratic spectacle above.

The most tediously enduring incarnation of the would-be genius architect is that old crank Howard Roark, “a man who is so true to himself that no others on Earth … can affect him and his work.” That’s how the author of The Fountainhead described the protagonist of her 1943 novel in a 1937 fan letter to the volubly self-imagined genius on whom he was so credulously based: Frank Lloyd Wright. A moral hazard presented by such a fantasy figure—true not to others but to himself—is that it misrepresents the profession of architecture not as an act of service but at best, as an art. It’s easy, with this notion of architect as auteur, to blur the vices and virtues of the clients with those of the mere designer. We can’t indict Leonardo for all the evils of the Borgias and Medicis, though perhaps they found his war machines encouraging. To be sure, many of Rudolph’s works can be said to have been as complicit with the cruelties of mid-twentieth century urban renewal (thanks especially to Logue, who after accepting the position of Boston Redevelopment Authority director provided the architect similar opportunities for massive public projects in that city). And it’s true that many big, cheap, and immiserating buildings, made in cynical photocopy-of-a-photocopy imitation of Rudolph’s much-published-and-pedigreed aesthetic, populated the promotional renderings of many contemporary urban renewal projects that (unlike so many of Rudolph’s) did get built. In this way, Rudolph’s aura may have been appropriated to support whatever claim such projects made to a lineage of probity and idealism dating back to Radiant City and Garden City and to provide a fig leaf of taste and duty to conceal their actual expression of wealth and power and systemic violence by a morally bankrupt elite. But Rudolph was no Roark: To study the actual plans and cross-sections of his buildings (rather poorly served in the Metropolitan’s show) is to apprehend that all those muscular shapes were not the gratuitous and grandiose formal expressions of a monomaniacal artiste but the consequence of, in the modern ethos, diligently designing from the inside-out, humanely and humanistically around the experience of the architectural subject—in today’s parlance, for user experience. Perhaps he cared not wisely but too well.

Crawford Manor, Rudolph’s senior housing project in New Haven, was called out by his Yale colleagues Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown—first in a 1968 seminar within the Art and Architecture Building itself and later perpetually in print in Learning from Las Vegas (1972)—as the rhetorical setup for the famous “Duck” libel: a building driven outside in by a willfully signifying plastic formal desire rather than by the kind of straightforward usefulness one assumes is to be found in sheds. But to look even briefly at the plans of the ground, typical, and penthouse floors of Crawford Manor is to understand that its intricate exterior topology—even the little balconies that sort of look like duck bills—was driven by the modern movement’s inside-out functional ethos, by a Brutalist humanism in which, for often-housebound and disabled residents, Rudolph sought to allow the greatest possible variety of experience—spatial, visual, atmospheric, and of the very act of choosing among that variety itself—within their homes and to establish an intimate and expansive circulation that might encourage incidental social encounter and lingering communing. This is humane. Quite different from what Venturi cynically wrought in his own despicable senior housing project, 1963’s Guild House in Philadelphia, with its monumental and nonfunctional television antenna deprecating its residents for watching so much television.

The actual problem with actual genius, architecturally considered, is that it’s inimitable. Even Venturi himself tried and failed at imitating Rudolph before he instead fashioned an entirely new subculture in which the talents of the elder were not only unnecessary but embarrassing. A handy side effect of playacting at patricide is that—though Venturi was only seven years younger than his aspiring Laius—you get to fulfill every architect’s dream of seeming younger than you are.

Rudolph’s singular version of the vast obscenity that was the Lower Manhattan Expressway—and only Rudolph’s—would have been not merely great (a decreasingly interesting aesthetical and critical category) but credibly good: humane, livable, and simultaneously realistic and fantastic in a way that one might hope urban life at its finest to be. Every inch of it, just as at Crawford Manor, credibly choreographed around human experience. It wouldn’t have saved Robert Moses from the miasmic slums of the Dantean City of Dis where he now must reside, but sometimes I think downtown would be far better—all that housing! all that public transport!—if that thing were there. “A conventional urban expressway might very well be more abusive to the city,” Rudolph stated of the project, “On the other hand, building a new type of urban corridor designed in relation to the city districts through which it passes and engineered in such a way as to be capable of dissolving traffic and diminishing noise, exhaust, environmental and surface-street problems that have plagued the corridor area for decades might just be the most desirable approach.”

To his visualizations of this urban corridor, Rudolph brought not only his physical dexterity but what were the other two components of his genius: first, a prodigious spatial imagination—he must have had a cortex like the hippocampi of those storied London taxi drivers with their memorized spatial way-finding knowledge—that enabled him to compose intricately and accurately, with self-sustaining recursive complexity, in three dimensions long before Frank Gehry found someone to scan his crumpled paper into aerospace design software. The disposition of the HUB drawings—however visually striking they were made to be—is not graphic but spatiotemporal. The persistent, homeostatic logic—and one that gives the proposal its strange credibility—is the viewer’s visual apprehension of a hypercompetent operational intelligence simultaneous to the visual intricacy. Here is Rudolph the shipbuilder, Rudolph the schmoozer and social climber, Rudolph the operator of networks. In the 1970s he would recall “seeing how 75,000 workers were organized” in the Brooklyn Navy Yard: “I discovered red tape and learnt how to circumvent it. The game of deflecting existing forces started early.” And in a related passage that “too many specialists and bureaucrats with overlapping authority created a vacuum which left the way open for an idea.” This unsettling combination of the unworldly and the worldly may be precisely where architectural genius lies.

A NEW WORLD IS BORN. But in its inimitability, it leaves no legacy. (Frank Lloyd Wright, a lesser draftsman and a less original designer than Paul Rudolph, but someone who achieved the enduring tea-towel-souvenir fame and—O Barnumesque genius!—the late-in-life renaissance that Rudolph unsuccessfully sought, left a legacy through some nominal followers—sometimes responsible for what many took to be his own art—from Marion Mahony Griffin to John Lautner. But the actual 1960s and 1970s work by the Taliesin collective is embarrassing.) Rudolph’s decline and fall is usually depicted, in self-soothing American Puritan allegory, as a kind of rake’s progress ending in dissipation and chastened old age: The heady heroism and muscular mania, plus the overstated urban-renewal devil-dealing, is reliably punished with humbling obscurity. Rudolph quits academia in the mid-1960s, but—with recession and oil shock on their way, and with Venturi coming for him in the style wars with a would-be Oedipal blade and all the cheap tricks of postmodernism—the phone stops ringing.

Even today, the received wisdoms of that long-ago postmodern age are often accepted unquestioningly. The ruinously poor maintenance and 1969 fire at the Art and Architecture Building—maybe the work of students participating in the political activism and violent play of their era—are often taken as some kind of instant karma visited upon its designer. “My buildings are like children,” Rudolph once said, “And when the Art and Architecture Building at Yale was burned, it felt that somebody had died.” The Materialized Space catalogue text blithely offers this inane sentence: “After a much-admired renovation in 2008 restored Rudolph’s original vision, today the Art and Architecture Building is considered one of the clearest examples of his architectural philosophy.” But that intervention—despite the gratifying return of the snazzy paprika-orange carpets after a forty-year absence—was more or less a soul-stealing operation, its clumsy annex revealing even Rudolph’s former student Charles Gwathmey to have been out of his depth. Gwathmey’s greatest triumph was a similar and even more difficult assignment: the 1992 addition to and rehabilitation of Wright’s Guggenheim Museum. But in New Haven, his project bowdlerized not only Rudolph’s original formal work, but also a more ineffable quality that emerged from the informal accumulation of patinations and modifications and appropriations undertaken by generations of architecture students that turned it all into the thrilling, terrifying, shabby, and transgression-inviting building that it had by the turn of the millennium become. He may have been mustering fewer resources than he had on Fifth Avenue—the latter annex is visibly cheap and so presumably necessarily off the shelf in much of its detailing. But that even Gwathmey—who as a student had labored on working drawings of Rudolph’s original Yale building and was a far more talented designer than, say, Robert Venturi—would falter so is further testament to the inimitability of Rudolph’s particular genius. Today’s incarnation of what is now called Rudolph Hall is fine, I guess? (And the carpets are great.) But it is not to my knowledge admired.

Sometimes I wonder whether what Denise Scott Brown and Venturi performed and weaponized against Rudolph, and any legacy the older man might have left, was not only Scott Brown’s genuine genius—her generational rhetorical talent—but also the couple’s presenting heteronormative nuclear domesticity: wife and husband, mother and father, helpmeet and mate, all anticipating the Back to the Future retro-1950s social order regressively valorized in the AIDS-era 1980s, when their brand of architecture became the establishment style. Looking at Rudolph’s signature butch buzz cut, at how his work gets described as muscular, and at why it seems such a common wisdom that his should be the up-and-down progress of some rake, I think about how Rudolph was gay. As, it seems, for Philip Johnson, Paul Rudolph’s sexuality was during his lifetime apparently some kind of open secret in which, as Wright apocryphally said of Johnson’s Glass House (1948), one doesn’t quite know whether one is in or out. Queerness didn’t too much come into Materialized Space. But I wish, in the year of our Lord 2025, that it had. There is a moral hazard, to be sure, in being too reductive or essentialist in mapping the art of an artist against many or any of their possible sexualities and other biologically or socially constructed identities. And yet. Remember Rudolph characterizing his navy work as “the game of deflecting existing forces.” Hear Rudolph describe his 1967 East 63rd Street Hirsch House as “a world of its own, inward looking and secretive … created in a relatively small volume of space in the middle of New York City,” that metropolis of longing and of the freedom of crowds. Listen to him recall of his approach to the chairpersonship of Yale that “it was up to me to hold everything together … although I had brought the most diverse representatives together at one time or another. I tried to be two different people—one unopinionated, interested in others’ ideas, helpful to their work, trying to relate everything to the general forces at play—but knowing all the time that this is the opposite of the life of a creative architect.” Note that how, for the better part of the 1970s, Rudolph practiced essentially, when that occupation was a province of feminine women and queer men, as an interior decorator. Wonder whether, in his glamorous and ingenious inventions of that era, as at his own famous Soane-esque town house on Beekman Place, there was arguably something of the transformative triumph of drag in all those abject Canal Street found-object improvisations: Christmas lights, plaster castings, fishing line, clear acrylic, miniature mirrors, chromed light bulbs, curtains of plastic beads.

RUDOLPH DIED in August of 1997. March of that same year saw the publication of the innovative and now canonical study by Aaron Betsky, Queer Space: Architecture and Same-Sex Desire. And although the pure poetry of its index yields “Radiators, 100; Ramble, Central Park, 144; Regency movement, 66; representation, 60; Restoration, 66; Richardson, Henry Hobson, 95; Robbins, Mark, 184, 184, 185; rococo, 112; role-playing, gay bars and, 161,” there is, alas, no “Rudolph, Paul.” Betsky begins his critical project with his memory of Studio 54:

A new world without issue; a spectacular liberation yet ultimately in service of existing elites; and so, and yet, a pure act: Strangely, you could apply those very words, seemingly so far from their context, to Rudolph’s vision for Lower Manhattan Expressway. In 1974, two years after Rudolph finished his famous renderings for that totalizing work of art, the fashion designer Halston acquired Rudolph’s Hirsch House and brought back the architect to fine-tune it as a venue for, among other things, the celebrated Studio 54 afterparties dubbed Halston Happenings. “At first you want to change everything when you move into a house like this,” Halston said at the time, “But the house is such a work of art you end up giving in to it.”

A critical insight in Queer Space is that, just as “genius” for architects was less a diagnosis of individual psyche than an artifice of social construction to enable their social mobility, so was what came to be thought of as modern “queerness” as much or more an artifact of class consciousness as it was any other expression of inner life. “Queerness,” Betsky suggests

If you were looking for tragedy in Rudolph’s story it’s not in muscularity or rigidity but in the curse of a genius who, perhaps alone in his generation, could perfectly plan a world that in its complexity and utility was almost the equal of the real thing that folks, empowered and left to their own devices, make marvelously on their own. And so, even inadvertently from within, his work would resist and deconstruct into something liberated, joyous, and sensual the top-down condescension and totalizing vision of the urban renewal era in which he was also sometimes complicit. You wish you understood this better. You wish Materialized Space had helped you with that. For now you just look at that 1972 drawing of the Lower Manhattan Expressway and you know that it is such a work of art you end up giving in to it.