History The Lonely Modernist

Maligned and forgotten for a generation, Paul Rudolph pursued the Modernist project even as it fell out of favor.

- A.J.P. Artemel

There was a time when Paul Rudolph was the most famous architect, if not in the world, then at least in the United States. As the leading emissary of “heroic” Modernism, he was responsible for some of the most innovative and audacious concrete buildings of the 1960s. Current stars Richard Rogers and Norman Foster went to Yale to learn from him. But after the devastating, epoch-ending fire at Rudolph’s Art and Architecture Building at Yale and multiple broadsides penned by Postmodern critics, Rudolph’s stream of projects, as well as his American following, seemed to evaporate overnight. Though much of Rudolph’s work from his early period in Sarasota, Florida, and from the height of his career in the ’60s has been rehabilitated and rediscovered by new audiences, his later buildings —roughly defined, those completed between 1970 and his death in 1997—remain relatively unknown.

Two exhibitions organized by the Paul Rudolph Heritage Foundation to mark the architect’s centenary aim to address this blind spot. The first, Paul Rudolph: The Personal Laboratory (October 4–November 18, 2018), displays plans, sketches, and models for two of Rudolph’s own living spaces, both in New York: his four-story apartment on Beekman Place and the Modulightor Building, completed after his death. The second,