Credit New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art for achieving something nearly impossible, or at least exceedingly difficult: making an exhibition on the work of architect Paul Rudolph a disappointing snoozer. One could hardly ask for a more fertile subject. Rudolph’s career spanned six decades, during which time he produced a string of visually dramatic, highly influential buildings that reshaped both the direction of modernism and the American city. He was also a magnet for controversy, the most prominent and inventive practitioner of the oft-maligned brutalist movement.
Born in Kentucky in 1918, Rudolph began his professional career after service in World War II, building a series of light-and-breezy houses in and around Sarasota, Fla., that would help define the “mid-century modern” aesthetic. In the 1960s, he turned to a more forceful, plastic architecture that explored the possibilities of construction with concrete. Dallas has one of these projects, Brookhollow Plaza (now Pegasus Villas), a stack of concrete beams assembled like a child’s toy. (Alas, it is not included in the show.)
Among his most notable (or notorious) buildings was his Yale Art & Architecture Building — he served as the architecture school’s dean from 1958 to 1965 — a concrete castle of intricate and interlocking spaces. In 1969, its interior was ravaged by a fire of suspicious origin often posited as a student reaction against its forceful design. (It probably wasn’t, but the narrative was plausible enough to stick.)
Beginning in the 1970s, with the downturn of the American economy and the rise of postmodernism, Rudolph’s practice shifted largely to Asia. He died in 1997.
Given that history, there are any number of themes that might have animated “Materialized Space: The Architecture of Paul Rudolph,” which runs through March 16 at the Met. It could have, for instance, used Rudolph to examine the complex legacy of brutalist architecture or delved into the challenges of preserving that work. Several of Rudolph’s most significant works have been demolished, including his headquarters for the Burroughs Wellcome Co. (included in the show), which was razed in 2021. More recently, his Sanderling Beach Club outside Sarasota was destroyed by Hurricane Helene.
The show might also have investigated how Rudolph’s homosexuality informed his work and its reception or the role of the architect as a civic planner (Rudolph had a taste for grandiose mega-projects). Abraham Thomas, the show’s curator, dips a toe into these waters, but like a timid swimmer seems content to stand safely on the pool deck.
The result is a dutiful summary of Rudolph’s career, not the “major exhibition” advertised by the museum. It relies almost entirely on Rudolph’s (extraordinary) large-format drawings, many borrowed from the Library of Congress, custodian of the Rudolph archive. These are supplemented by a small number of models (none new, or of his most significant works), pieces of Rudolph-designed furniture and ephemera. The slim exhibition catalog promises, but does not deliver, a “long-overdue reassessment” of his career.
The installation itself borrows lightly from Rudolph’s aesthetic (especially his taste for orange accents), but provides little in the way of surprise. There is no new photography, which is a lost opportunity given the Instagram-friendly nature of Rudolph’s work. What better way to attract a new generation of visitors?
Another design cavil: Reflected glare on tilted displays makes them a challenge to read for anyone with less than perfect eyesight.
Notwithstanding these issues, the show is still worth a visit, because Rudolph’s work, in any context, is so utterly compelling. North Texans will particularly enjoy a presentation drawing of Rudolph’s 1970 house for Sid and Anne Bass in Fort Worth, described as “a poetic exploration of free-flowing interior and exterior space” that is one of America’s most spectacular modern residences.
There are other charms, among them a sectional drawing of Rudolph’s penthouse on New York’s Beekman Place, a jigsaw puzzle of an apartment that takes the horizontal planes that defined the Bass house and organizes them vertically.
The show’s greatest strength lies in the material on the architect’s lesser-known late works, including a model and perspective drawing of the unbuilt Sino Tower, a 1989 proposal for a modular structure with a series of terraces and an open base — a brazen alternative to the conventional glass tower and the kitschy postmodernism proliferating around the globe.
In the future, Thomas might take a lesson from Philip Johnson, who began his career as the founding curator of the Museum of Modern Art’s architecture department. “I believe every show should have a point,” he wrote in 1931, when the museum was still in its infancy. That is, it should make an argument.
There was a way for this show to do that, satisfying both those familiar with Rudolph’s work and those confronting it for the first time. Instead, it offers a conservatively packaged gloss of a radical architect.
