Paul Rudolph, the US’s greatest brutalist, had a career in four overlapping acts. First, starting in the 1950s, he designed private houses, delightful Florida getaways where modernist glassiness was tempered by screens and shutters. In the next decade he designed monumental concrete fortresses, majestic and sometimes monstrous, for universities, corporations and gigantic urban renewal programmes. Then came inward and intricate homes in Manhattan such as the Hirsch house, eventually owned by the fashion designer Halston, where the likes of Andy Warhol, Liza Minnelli and Bianca Jagger would go to Studio 54 afterparties, later again bought by Tom Ford for $18m (£13.55m). In the 80s he returned to building at scale, with big-budget commissions for skyscrapers and malls in Singapore, Hong Kong and Jakarta.
His creative journey was quite a switchback, running gamuts of delicacy and force, of interior intimacy and exterior bravura, and of celebrity and condemnation. If you don’t directly know his work, you’ll have experienced his influence. If you see a building of a certain age with roughed-up ribs of concrete, or compositions of exaggerated horizontals and verticals and top-heavy oversailing volumes, a bit of Rudolph likely lies behind them. As chair of the Department of Architecture at Yale, he guided a generation of leading architects, including Norman Foster and Richard Rogers. The expressive projections and recessions of the latter’s Lloyd’s building owe much to his former teacher.
Last week, an exhibition of Rudolph’s work, Materialized Space, opened in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. For those who might not cross the Atlantic to see an architecture show, there’s an accompanying book of the same name by Abraham Thomas, formerly director of Sir John Soane’s Museum in London, who curated the Met’s exhibition.
If two works sum up Rudolph’s seeming polarities and contradictions, they are the Art and Architecture Building at Yale, completed in 1963, and the apartment he created for himself in Beekman Place, on the east side of Manhattan, from the early 60s and into the 70s. The first is a work of high-minded institutional brutalism, part-castle, part-refinery, with mighty piers and cantilevers in textured and smooth concrete, and a dramatic multi-level interior. The second was a private world, shimmering with mirrors and curtains of plastic beads, energised by blasts of pop art – a kitchen lined with a Gulf Oil billboard canvas, a coffee table made of a nickel-plated subway grating. In the bedroom, behind the low-lying fur-covered bed that rose from a fur-covered floor, facing an all-mirror wall, with a classical nude torso to one side, there was a deodorant ad featuring a handsome rug-chested model clasped by adoring women.
The Yale project embodied the style and attitude that Rudolph also applied to rebuilding large parts of the waterfront in Buffalo, New York, to an unbuilt city-sized development for Stafford Harbor in Virginia, and the Tracey Towers co-operative housing project in the Bronx. Also to the Temple Street parking garage in New Haven, which, despite being a third of its originally intended size, still fills two city blocks with a heroic work of pachydermic concrete that, as he put it, “celebrates the automobile as the Roman stadium celebrated the chariot”. For, along with other attitudes that fell drastically from fashion, the Jaguar-owning Rudolph loved both cars and their potential for transforming cities.
At his most hubristic, he proposed in the late 60s the Lower Manhattan Expressway, a multi-deck megastructure of road, rail and building transecting the island from east to west. But by then he was falling from grace. He was too much aligned with corporate and state power, a man of The Man, for the gathering counter-culture. His grandiose urban projects were rightly attacked for their insouciant obliteration of thriving urban districts. His Yale building was criticised as dysfunctional, and when it caught fire in 1969, there were never-proved rumours that it was a case of arson by rebellious students.
So he retreated into the interiors that defined his next decade. These, says the critic and historian Aaron Betsky, whose 1997 classic Queer Space explored the relationship of architecture and sexuality, had a lot to do with the fact that Rudolph was gay. He created environments for himself and his friends that beneath “severe modernist geometries on the exterior achieved a voluptuousness of interior spaces, which represented the complexities of their private lives”. His own house embodied his persona as an outwardly “very gruff, crewcut, tightly-wound person” – the son, as he was, of a southern Methodist preacher – “who enjoyed a different way of living in private”.
For Betsky, who in 1979 chose to study architecture in Yale because he loved the “incredible complexity and diversity and inventiveness” of Rudolph’s then-unfashionable building, there is a “combination of sensuality and muscularity” that runs through all the twists and turns of his career. Even his most monumental architecture “deviated from the norms of bureaucratic modernism in ways that one can speculate came from the queer culture of which he was part”.
One could also say that he had an instinct for the exquisite manifest in both his three-dimensional projects and his meticulous but vibrant drawings, even of his most massive designs, in which showers of cross-hatching gleam with reflected light. There is throughout his work a fascination with layers and transparency, with the dissolution of the apparent bulk of a building into shadows and reflections, with interactions of external and inner life. Rudolph, like other architects of his generation, proclaimed social, technological and artistic aims, but it was the last that really motivated him, sometimes at a cost to the first.
His achievements have proved fragile, with even those that seem built for eternity proving vulnerable to demolition. Some of the Beekman Place interiors have gone and, only two weeks ago, Hurricane Helene swept away his beautiful 1952 Sanderling beach club in Sarasota. So it’s good that the Met is celebrating his architecture. He could create “such a work of art”, as Halston said of the Hirsch house, that “you end up giving into it”.
• Materialized Space: The Architecture of Paul Rudolph is at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, until 16 March 2025. Materialized Space by Abraham Thomas is published by Metropolitan Museum of Art (£25). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
