American architecture’s bright, shining light of the Kennedy era, Paul Rudolph was scrounging for commissions less than a decade later. He may now be best remembered — to the extent his name rings bells — for the heroic, bush-hammered concrete Camelot he designed during the early 1960s to house the architecture school at Yale.
When it opened, it prompted rapturous reviews akin to what, many years later, greeted Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim Bilbao. But the building soon became a piñata for everything wrong with modern architecture.
And Rudolph, who died at 78 in 1997, dropped down the memory chute.
He’s now the subject of a modest but riveting retrospective at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in Manhattan, organized by Abraham Thomas, called “Materialized Space: The Architecture of Paul Rudolph,” whose first order of business is obviously to answer a question people outside architecture circles will ask, namely:
Who was he?
He was the jet age version of Ayn Rand’s Howard Roark. An epic bundle of contradictions, he cooked up phenomenal, visionary drawings and flamboyant, muscular buildings for occupants he made miserable by caring too little about how the buildings actually functioned.
He scolded other architects for being insensitive to context, and perhaps his most uplifting work is a nondenominational brick chapel for Tuskegee University, the historically Black college in Alabama, whose layout pays homage to African-American churches.
Though mindful of context there, he repurposed Robert Moses’s lunatic plan to demolish a whole swath of downtown Manhattan and drive an elevated expressway through it. Commissioned in 1967 by the Ford Foundation, Rudolph’s conceptual drawings of the Lower Manhattan Expressway project plowed through the Lower East Side and SoHo to make room for a megastructure two miles long — an eye-popping concrete mountain range, stacking apartment pods, trains, people movers, garages and lanes of traffic between the Holland Tunnel and the Williamsburg and Manhattan Bridges.
That plan, amazing and appalling, never came to pass, thankfully, but in 1970 Rudolph took on a federally funded urban renewal project in New Haven, Conn., called Oriental Masonic Gardens. If America could land Apollo 11 on the moon, housing officials in the Nixon administration claimed, it could also solve the country’s housing crisis.
Rudolph’s fix involved plywood and prefab units, akin to shipping containers, organized across a 12-acre site in L-shaped configurations around shared courtyards. Vaulted roofs suggested the rippling silhouette of a hillside village.
The project looked pleasing on paper. Residents found it no better than a trailer park. Buildings leaked. Oriental Masonic Gardens closed a decade after it opened.
I don’t think it will come as a big surprise that Hollywood has staged various dystopian sci-fi films and scenes of family dysfunction in Rudolph buildings. The exhibition includes clips from “Brainstorm,” the ’80s horror-fantasy, showing Christopher Walken roaming Rudolph’s headquarters for Burroughs Wellcome, the pharmaceutical company in North Carolina.
From Wes Anderson’s movie “The Royal Tenenbaums,” we get the scene in Rudolph’s Beekman Place apartment where Ben Stiller’s anxious character stages a late-night fire drill to see how quickly his sleeping children can leap from their beds and navigate all of the apartment’s treacherous Escher-like Plexiglas and Mylar levels and stairs.
Not quickly enough, it turns out.
Rudolph was born in 1918 in Kentucky and, like Frank Lloyd Wright, was the son of an itinerant preacher. After studying architecture at what was then Alabama Polytechnic Institute, now Auburn, he repaired ships during World War II at the Brooklyn Navy Yard, an experience that kindled his fascination with novel materials and building systems. Afterward he enrolled at Harvard, where Walter Gropius was spreading the gospel of the International Style.
But Rudolph wasn’t buying the glass box idea. The Swiss critic Sigfried Giedion was talking about “a new monumentality.” Architecture, Louis I. Kahn was reminding his students and colleagues, should convey “the feelings of its eternity.”
For Rudolph, “the age-old human needs” for “monumentality, symbolism, decoration and so on,” he wrote, “are among the architectural challenges that modern theory has brushed aside.”
He moved to Florida. Home then to a number of gifted architects, Sarasota during the late 1940s and early ’50s became for Rudolph what Oak Park, Ill., was to the young Wright during the late 1880s and ’90s. Rudolph designed private houses — airy, linear, crisply engineered — which are now classics of midcentury modernism. He bent thin sheets of plywood to shape delicate arches and sprayed a malleable plastic that he had seen used by the Navy to waterproof ships.
As Thomas, the show’s curator, notes, the Florida houses distanced themselves from “the one-size-fits-all doctrine of the International Style,” by abstracting elements of classical temples and nodding toward the American South’s vernacular of screened porches.
They won Rudolph commissions for bigger projects, and he returned north.
By the mid-60s, he was on the covers of Progressive Architecture and The New York Times Magazine, and posing for Vogue atop his behemoth Temple Street Parking Garage in New Haven. With its carved concrete vaults, stretching across two city blocks, the garage did for the automobile, Rudolph boasted, what the Roman Colosseum had done for chariots. Architects made pilgrimages to New Haven to see the future.
And of course to see Rudolph’s Art and Architecture Building at Yale, where he had become chairman of the architecture school. The building’s corduroy facade arranged shadows and planes, solids and voids in a composition as dynamic as a Boccioni and as poised as a Mondrian. Inside was an atrium, with 37 levels subdividing seven stories.
“You couldn’t go to the men’s room without having a spatial experience,” was how the architect Joseph Esherick described the layout. Students found it impractical to the point of seeming sadistic. They protested. The building became a totem of ’60s unrest. Walls were defaced by graffiti. A fire, whose cause remains uncertain, ruined parts of the interior.
Renamed Rudolph Hall, the building was finally restored in 2008, with some modifications and a clunky annex. I have always loved the building, its heft and sculptural presence, the orchestration of light inside it, its textured concrete. Rudolph talked a lot about caves. Parts of it remind me of a cave; others, a cathedral.
But Rudolph catered to a niche audience, above all himself, and a wide public has never come around to his Brutalist aesthetics. A number of his buildings have suffered the wrecking ball in recent years, the Burroughs Wellcome headquarters among them. Also, his striking civic complex in Orange County, N.Y., a housing development in Buffalo and a high school in Florida.
These losses have rightly alarmed preservationists. Buildings are not sculptures; they need to function for the people who use them. But the most ambitious of these buildings, over time, become society’s heritage and responsibility. It’s worth remembering that the bulk of Rudolph’s work is now as old as McKim, Mead & White’s Penn Station was when it was destroyed, giving rise to our modern landmark laws.
Vietnam, the failures of urban renewal and other upheavals of the ’60s precipitated Rudolph’s reversal of fortunes. His Great White Man vision of architecture came to represent The Establishment. Figures like Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown were touting the virtues of billboards, suburbia and the Las Vegas Strip. A new generation, looking to rebrand architecture, was devising winking historical pastiches. Rudolph’s super-serious megastructures seemed like dinosaurs.
At the Met, drawings and models — and a selection of colored pencils, Japanese toy robots, cigar molds and other oddments he collected — make clear Rudolph’s tactile and Piranesian imagination. In a drawing of a pair of feet on tiptoe in his Beekman Place apartment, we catch a glimpse of the louche and sensual Rudolph whose mirrored bedroom, with its furry white bedspread, white shag carpet and billboard-size reproduction of a cologne ad, was famously photographed by Ezra Stoller.
I’m sorry the show doesn’t include works by designers from Rudolph’s time who were also exploring concrete and modularity, like Alison and Peter Smithson, Moshe Safdie and Kenzo Tange, along with the Japanese Metabolists whose work clearly inspired Rudolph’s Lower Manhattan idea. It was an era of change and sweeping ambition. We need movers and thinkers today to rekindle architecture’s imagination and tackle big crises.
We need figures like the young Moses, perhaps, the one who built all those parks and public beaches, but a young Moses who won’t morph into the old Moses. Rudolph reminds me a little of Moses, with his early promise and sour end, his grand plans and recklessness, his truculence and tragic arc.
Ultimately, fame yields to fickle taste and a limited heart. In The New York Review of Books, the critic Martin Filler observed several years ago that Rudolph, for all his gifts, lacked Kahn’s ability to endow concrete with “nobility and humanity.”
That sounds about right.
Thomas ends up calling him “a singular voice” who will “continue to prove spellbinding and confounding for many years to come.”
In sum, a cautionary tale.
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