Rudolph’s 1961 Temple Street Parking Garage in New Haven, Connecticut. Photography by Ezra Stoller/Esto, Yossi Milo Gallery.
His Harvard GSD classmates included I.M. Pei. He taught Norman Foster at Yale University. And, with a portfolio encompassing residential and commercial projects stateside and abroad, his clients ranged from Halston to Tuskegee University to the Niagara Falls Public Library. This history and more are explored in “Materialized Space: The Architecture of Paul Rudolph,” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the institution’s first such exhibition since its 1972 Marcel Breuer survey, and particularly meaningful, as Rudolph’s 1952 Sanderling Beach Club in Sarasota, Florida, was destroyed by Hurrican Helene four days before the exhibit’s opening.
It features over 80 works in various scales, from small objects that Kentucky-born Rudolph collected throughout his life to work-related models, furniture, material samples, and colored pencils used for his “intricate, visionary drawings,” curator Abraham Thomas notes. Photographs are included too, spanning the architect’s 1950’s Sarasota Modern houses to his later, brutalist works, such as Yale’s Art and Architecture Building (now Rudolph Hall) and Temple Street Parking Garage, both in Connecticut and completed while he chaired the school’s architecture department. Of the latter, famous for its organic, poured-in-place concrete form, its sodium lights recently replaced with LEDs, he said: “I wanted to make a building which said it dealt with cars and movement. I wanted there to be no doubt that this is a parking garage.”
This circa 1960 colored pencil over sepia print of the nondenominational Tuskegee Institute Chapel, now Tuskegee University, an HBCU in Alabama, is one of 80 works in “Materialized Space: The Architecture of Paul Rudolph,” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York through March 16. Photography courtesy of the Prints and Photographs Division, Library Of Congress.
A 1989 balsa wood and plastic model for the proposed yet unbuilt Sino Tower in Hong Kong by Rudolph, who passed in 1997. Photography by Eileen Travell/Courtesy of the Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress.
Rudolph’s 1961 Temple Street Parking Garage in New Haven, Connecticut. Photography by Ezra Stoller/Esto, Yossi Milo Gallery.
A 1972 section drawing in ink and graphite of the Lower Manhattan Expressway/City Corridor, also unbuilt. Photography courtesy of the Museum of Modern art, New York, gift of the Howard Gilman Foundation (1290.2000).