The Met in New York retraces the career of this American modernist architect, affiliated with Brutalism, with the first major exhibition of 20th-century architecture in over fifty years.

He was one of the most important architects of the 20th century, but also one of the most misunderstood. Paul Marvin Rudolph (1918-1997) is considered one of the earliest practitioners of the Sarasota School of Architecture. He enjoyed a meteoric rise in the 1950s and 1960s, alongside such fellow architects as Finnish-American Eero Saarinen and Chinese-American I.M. Pei, before suffering a reversal of fortune. This fervent advocate of brutalism cut his teeth at the Alabama Polytechnic Institute and at Harvard with Walter Gropius. His designs include seaside homes in Florida, the Halston residence of fashion designer Tom Ford, the Tracey Towers in New York, the Boston Government Service Center, and the Yale University School of Art and Architecture, which he directed from 1957 to 1965.

DRAWING VIRTUOSO

The Met's exhibition invites us to (re)discover him. This is the first exhibition devoted to his astonishing and muscular work, curated by British curator Abraham Thomas. "Materialized Space" examines the work of the man who continues to inspire "ideas of urban renewal and redevelopment in cities around the world". Most of Paul Rudolph's archive, containing over 100,000 disparate items, was bequeathed to the Library of Congress during his lifetime.

Here, over 80 works invade the spaces of the New York institution, bringing together objects, drawings, models, furniture, material samples and photographs. The exhibition, divided into thematic sections, follows the different stages of his practice, focusing on housing, civic projects, megastructures, interiors and his commissions in Asia. These highlight "his radical thinking in the modernist era" and "his complex artistic process of architectural development".

Particular emphasis is placed on his rigorous drawings, which also established his reputation. Richly detailed floor plans and conceptual schemes bring to life his utopian visions of urban megastructures and immersive interiors. All these perspective renderings remain today "essential teaching tools in architecture schools", while preserving his original approach to many of the forward-looking projects that have been destroyed over the past two decades.

BRUTALIST CONTROVERSY

The tour continues the curatorial analysis through his unrealized works in New York, notably Robert Moses' Lower Manhattan Expressway. This proposal aimed to link New Jersey to Brooklyn, Queens and Long Island via the Holland Tunnel and the Manhattan and Williamsburg bridges. His idea of a Y-shaped corridor envisioned transportation networks as a means of uniting communities rather than dividing them. But it was met with disapproval, "arguing that the project would destroy a vibrant urban neighborhood".

The Met concludes with the decline in popularity of this architectural star in the 1970s, through several of his brutalist buildings, which suffered aesthetic discredit. The exhibition explains why this post-war architectural style of the 1950s, with which he was closely associated, became "out of sync with the growing postmodernist critiques and counter-cultural attitudes of the time". Brutalism, like concrete architecture, remains controversial and divisive to this day.

Paul Rudolph withdrew from the major architectural scene to focus on experimental interior design, making a comeback the following decade with commercial projects in East Asia. A phoenix now rising from the ashes.

" MATERIALIZED SPACE: THE ARCHITECTURE OF PAUL RUDOLPH"
METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART (MET)
1000 FIFTH AVENUE, NEW YORK (USA)
UNTIL MARCH 16, 2025
METMUSEUM.ORG