Paul Rudolph 101

The Paul Marvin Rudolph archive at the Library of Congress comprises approximately 100,000 drawings, photographs, models, manuscripts, and other artifacts from Rudolph's practice that moved from Sarasota, Florida, to New Haven, Connecticut, and finally to New York City. Born in Elkton, Kentucky, in 1918, Rudolph began transferring the objects to the library ahead of his death, in 1997, when he was still actively working on a few projects. If all of these holdings, which are clearly indicative of his prolific output, were shipped to The Metropolitan Museum of Art, it would take up a large portion of its massive two million-square-foot footprint. But, under its more realistic circumstances, Materialized Space consists of just over 80 pieces from the Library of Congress, accompanied by a few objects from other collections, all fitted into Gallery 913, aka the Helen and Milton A. Kimmelman Gallery, a roughly 3,000-sf space on the first floor of the Modern Art Lila Acheson Wallace Wing.

All of these numbers serve to say that, regardless of Met curator Abraham Thomas's intention to stage a “major museum exhibition” and companion catalog that together offer a “reassessment” of Rudolph's career, Materialized Space can only skim the surface on a famous yet misunderstood architect whose work is usually summed up in just one word: brutalist. Cognizant of the general audience that will walk through Gallery 913, the exhibition provides a solid introduction to Rudolph's career, moving from the houses he designed in Sarasota in the 1950s to the brutalist buildings and unbuilt megastructures in the following decade, the houses and interiors that occupied his time after moving to New York in 1965, and the towers he designed for Singapore and other Asian cities toward the end of his life. 

The display that most overtly caters to The Met's broad audience is a compilation of clips from films that were either shot inside Rudolph buildings or featured sets inspired by them. Projected on a wall near an entrance at one end of the long, narrow gallery (photo above), the clips are highlighted by Brainstorm, the 1983 sci-fi film starring Christopher Walken and Natalie Wood that was partly shot inside the Burroughs-Wellcome Company Headquarters in North Carolina, and Wes Anderson's The Royal Tenenbaums, which has a memorable scene inside Rudolph's own penthouse at 23 Beekman Place. Anderson's 2001 film was made not long after Rudolph's death, meaning the space was fairly intact and predated the modifications of subsequent owners. The building was eventually designated a NYC Historical Landmark, in 2010, protecting at least the steel and glass exterior from any dramatic changes, but the impressive brutalist Burroughs-Wellcome Company Headquarters, built in 1972, was not so lucky: it was demolished in 2021.

While the film clips help museum goers grasp Rudolph's skill as an architect and the complexity of the interiors he created, particularly 23 Beekman Place and Burroughs-Wellcome Company Headquarters also touch on two issues that are integral to Rudolph's life and legacy — two issues that are downplayed by Thomas to the point of being nonexistent in the exhibition and catalog. 

First is the fact that Rudolph was gay. The interiors he created for himself and other clients in the 1970s are celebrated in the “Experimental Interiors” section of the exhibition, but his sexual orientation goes unmentioned. Aaron Betsky, quoted in Rowan Moore's review of Materialized Space, reveals that, beneath the “severe modernist geometries on the exterior,” both Rudolph and other gay architects at the time “achieved a voluptuousness of interior spaces, which represented the complexities of their private lives.” Rudolsph shared the last 25 years of his life with Ernst Wagner, with whom he also started the Modulightor lighting company. While Wagner is mentioned in the catalog as a partner in Modulightor, their personal relationship is not discussed. Likewise, although a reference in the book about 23 Beekman Place points to a URL on the website of the NYC LGBT Historic Sites Project, nothing is explicitly stated about Rudolph being gay.

Thomas was certainly aware of this aspect of Rudolph's life. Many of the 122 notes at the back of the catalog point to Timothy M. Rohan's excellent The Architecture of Paul Rudolph, published in 2014. “For men of Rudolph's generation living in a homophobic society,” he writes early in the book, “exposure as a homosexual could be professionally and personally disastrous.” He picks up the subject later in the book, in a chapter about his years at Yale in New Haven, writing that Rudolph was “discreet about his homosexuality, which was known but never openly discussed.” That was more than a half century ago. Today, in a decade that also saw the publication of Wolfgang Voigt and Uwe Bresan's Gay Architects: Silent Biographies from 18th to 20th Century (the book has an essay devoted to Rudolph, it should be noted), an exhibition and catalog purporting to reassess Rudolph's career without exploring how his sexual orientation related to his architecture comes across as incomplete.

The second issue downplayed in the exhibition is the shocking number and frequency of Paul Rudolph buildings that have been demolished despite calls for their preservation. In addition to the former Burroughs-Wellcome Company Headquarters mentioned above, the most high-profile demolition in the last ten years has been the Orange County Government Center in Goshen, New York, which was partially demolished and then defaced with an unsympathetic addition. (Most recently, less than two weeks ago, his Sanderling Beach Club in Sarasota was destroyed, but that was caused by a hurricane rather than a myopic owner.) Thomas does not entirely ignore this aspect of Rudolph's legacy, but facts over the demolitions are limited to wall text and occasional mention of demolitions in the catalog. “Some of these buildings were later altered beyond recognition or demolished entirely,” reads the wall text about the compilation of films projected on the wall, “making the films important visual records of Rudolph’s work.” Elsewhere the wall text notes when a building has been demolished, but there is no visual evidence provided.

If Thomas had opted to draw attention to the way Rudolph's brutalist buildings, in particular, fell out of favor and therefore failed to be saved, the most obvious way of illustrating it would have been through photographs of the acts. Nothing could be more subtle than seeing the gut-wrenching photos of the former Burroughs-Wellcome Company Headquarters coming down in early 2021 alongside Rudolph's own perspective section drawing of the same: the demolition photos reveal the section Rudolph drew, but at the sake of the building being literally hit by wrecking balls. Instead, with its displays pulling drawings, models, and other artifacts from the Library of Congress archive, the exhibition focuses on design intent and expression over built reality and legacy.

Even with the two issues discussed above ignored or downplayed in the exhibition and companion catalog, is Materialized Space worth seeing? Yes, very much so; for two reasons. First of all, the exhibition does an excellent job of covering every stage of Rudolph's career, as evidenced by the six sections that organize it: “The Workshop” collects drawing implements and other artifacts from his studio; “Residential” features both early single-family houses and later urban renewal projects; “Civic/Campus” focuses on the famous Yale Art and Architecture Building (now Rudolph Hall) and other brutalist buildings; “Megastructures” explores his unsuccessful attempts to build large structures made with prefabricated modules; “Experimental Interiors” from the 1970s highlight his skill at creating complex interiors; and “Projects in Asia” covers a later period of his career that is often overlooked in favor of his brutalist buildings from decades before.

The second reason to visit Gallery 913 is to see Rudolph's drawings in person. “Given that a number of his buildings have been destroyed and some of his most well-known projects remain unbuilt,” Thomas writes in the catalog, “Rudolph’s work has become defined by the legacy of his drawings, in particular the large-scale, richly delineated renderings for which he became famous.” The drawings are not alone in the exhibition — they are alongside models, old magazines, furniture, and other artifacts — but they are in abundance, many of them are large, and all of them are beautiful. Unlike other architects, famous or not, Rudolph did not hand off perspectives and other presentation drawings to the architects working under him. As such, the drawings have a consistency of expression but they are also dripping with intent and vision. Thomas quotes critic Reyner Banham being impressed that the Yale building “was exactly like a drawing, with all the shading on the outside coming out as if it were ruled in with a very soft pencil.” It is in these drawings where Thomas finds the “materialized space” that Rudolph envisioned — drawings that, in the unfortunate case of Burroughs-Wellcome and too many other Rudolph buildings, have outlasted the buildings they depict.