Materialized Space: The Architecture of Paul Rudolph
The Metropolitan Museum of Art
New York
Through March 16, 2025
For the architecturally inclined, one of the best value outings in New York is the open house hosted on the first Friday of every month by the Paul Rudolph Institute for Modern Architecture at Rudolph’s Modulightor Building. During the evening, one can explore the floors of this intricate interior, with the hefty wine pours adding to the challenge of navigating the many ledges and layers to observe the space’s plants, books, and objects. Rudolph’s later architecture possessed a slippery quality that extended Frank Lloyd Wright’s terraced horizontality into more step-like expressions, from the scale of full master plans for new cities down to the details of a private residence.
Translating the spatial inventiveness of Rudolph’s architecture was one of the many challenges confronted by Materialized Space, a new show at The Met. We’re already a quarter of the way through the 21st century, but this is the museum’s first offering about a 20th-century architect in over 50 years. (To be fair, The Met did exhibit artworks by Santiago Calatrava in 2005–06, which is fitting, as he is a much better sculptor than architect.) What took so long? The Met commissions talented offices to create an immersive fashion exhibition every year and is working with leading talent to renovate its galleries, so the institution values architecture even if it wasn’t exhibited for decades.
Another hurdle is that the allotted room, lodged at the back of the modern and contemporary art galleries, is hard to find, though a new exterior banner about the Rudolph installation now ripples in the wind above 5th Avenue. Other difficulties are Rudolph’s breadth of imaginative work; his cherished status among architects set against relative public obscurity; and the threatened status of his built works, which owners (and hurricanes) love to demolish.
Materialized Space is the first show by Abraham Thomas, The Met’s Daniel Brodsky Curator of Modern Architecture, Design, and Decorative Arts, who joined in 2020 after a stint at the Smithsonian Institution and directing Sir John Soane’s Museum. Thomas’s subject matter is rich and apt: Jaw-droppingly, this show is the first major museum exhibition to examine Rudolph’s career, and its catalog is the first new title dedicated to his work in half a century.
The main pleasure of the show is the chance to ogle Rudolph’s immaculate linework up close. Many drawings are sourced from his archive at the Library of Congress and have never been on view or even photographed, Thomas said. Still, there are classics, like his section perspective of the Art and Architecture Building for Yale and drawings for the unbuilt Lower Manhattan Expressway. One ought to park in front of drawings like his section perspective of an unbuilt Fort Lincoln housing project or the isometric of his now-demolished Oriental Masonic Gardens and study the linework and cloudlike scale figures.
Given the richness of Rudolph’s spaces, it might have been interesting to pair the exquisite drawings with a taste of similarly immersive photography. Beyond one oversize photo of his parking garage in New Haven, viewers miss a sense of what these spaces feel like, instead encountering it through (admittedly gorgeous) drawings supplemented with models, newspapers, and magazines. Perhaps period photography or newly commissioned photos would have helped give a hint of the constructed reality of Rudolph’s work. He dreamed big, drew big, and built big, but this boldness wasn’t reflected in the exhibition design.
This beef raises a central difficulty with exhibiting architecture: Drawings, however beautiful, are often means to an end. The thing itself is absent, and curators are left to stage traces of its thingness to induce appreciation. The show includes ephemera like drawing implements, but the problem of construction is largely set aside, except for the encounter with a piece of formwork the size of a cricket bat. What if The Met recreated some of his corduroy-like beton brut walls so viewers could hug a building mockup? This would be one way to make the physical connection between the lines on the page and 1:1 arrangement of materials in space.
The show nicely sets Rudolph in a legible cultural milieu, thanks in part to resurfacing newspaper and magazine coverage about him. He appeared on the cover of the New York Times Magazine in March 1967 with an image of his megastructural proposal for a new town. In a final chapter on experimental interiors, two Andy Warhol pieces are set behind Rudolph’s Lucite and steel chairs to create a mod atmosphere. While his Brutalist visions are wild in their proposals for fully designed futures, these are equally wild in their spatial effects and appreciation for pop tchotchkes, an aesthetic that runs against our idea of streamlined, monastic, modernist interiors. How can one see his 1960s bedroom at Beekman Place—with a blanket that matched the carpet, a full-wall mirror, and a supergraphic of a hairy-chested man staring back at you, in reflection—and not think about sex? Another omission in the show and catalog is treatment of Rudolph as a person: His experience as a gay man in a straight profession and society goes unrecognized. In prioritizing drawings as artifacts, the show misses a chance to a more complete story about Rudolph’s life and work.
Still, the ambitious display is a much-needed act of retrieval. Michael Sorkin wrote that “in 1963, Paul Rudolph bestrode American architecture, a brush-cut colossus….By the early 70s, it was over.” Luckily, design taste comes back around in cycles, not unlike fashion or music. Rudolph’s work retains cultural relevance today, so perhaps now a new audience is learning to appreciate his oeuvre. In the gallery, a video reel that cycles through clips of Rudolph’s influence on film and television. Maybe making a connection between his work and a scene in The Royal Tenenbaums shot in Rudolph’s Beekman Place loft will prompt visitors to learn more about his work. I hope the show inspires a young person from Kentucky or in college in Alabama, like Rudolph was, to pick up a pencil and imagine how to change the world through architecture. A guy can dream.