History will be on view at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art this September. And history will also be made. The first major museum retrospective indebted to Brutalist architect Paul Rudolph opens at the Met on September 30. It marks the first major exhibition of 20th-century architecture at the art institution in over fifty years.
Materialized Space: The Architecture of Paul Rudolph will feature more than 80 artifacts that Rudolph bequeathed to the Library of Congress before his death in 1997. Bespoke furniture, drawings, photographs, and other ephemera will be on view.
Representations of Rudolph’s (unbuilt) Lower Manhattan Expressway, Yale’s Art and Architecture Building, and other projects will display in the Helen and Milton A. Kimmelman Gallery inside the first floor’s Lila Acheson Wallace Wing.
Curators of the exhibition will place emphasis on Rudolph’s craft, namely his penchant for hand drawings, perspectival sections, and renderings that made him famous. The show will be divided into sections that demonstrate Rudolph’s expansive oeuvre including his housing, civic, megastructures, and interiors projects, as well his commissions in Asia.
Philosophically speaking, the show will ask questions about why Brutalism fell out of favor with the general public as the 20th century transpired. How and why did a progressive, utilitarian building style that was in vogue after World War II fall from grace during postmodernism?
“Paul Rudolph was a pioneer and an iconic figure among the architectural community, and this long-overdue presentation analyzes the immense impact that his trailblazing work continues to have on contemporary architects and the development of our urban spaces,” said Max Hollein, the Met’s Marina Kellen French Director and CEO. “Materialized Space not only underscores the radical thinking that Rudolph imparted to the Modernist era, but also invites viewers into the complex artistic process of architectural development, illuminating the ways in which the spaces we occupy come to life.”
“The refusal to be categorized makes Paul Rudolph a challenging architect to summarize, but this same quality also makes him a fascinating topic for research, driving new audiences to discover, or rediscover, his work every day,” added Abraham Thomas, the Met’s Daniel Brodsky Curator of Modern Architecture, Design, and Decorative Arts. “Rudolph’s intricate, visionary drawings and dramatic completed buildings represent a singular voice within the crowded, variable terrain of architectural late Modernism—one that will continue to prove both spellbinding and confounding for many years to come.”
Materialized Space: The Architecture of Paul Rudolph will be on view September 30, 2024 through March 16, 2025.
