His career of several distinct phases spanned the second half of the 20th century, since his graduation from Harvard in 1947 to his death in 1997. Along the line he found time to run Yale’s architecture school from 1959-65, where his students and colleagues included Robert A M Stern, Charles Moore, Charles Gwathmey, M J Long, Vincent Scully and notably the Britons Norman Foster, Richard Rogers, James Stirling and Sandy Wilson. Not, apparently, apart from being a visiting critic, Louis Kahn, with whom he did not get on.

Famously Rudolph designed Yale’s Art and Architecture building, now known as Rudolph Hall. Yale had undergone something of a revival in its efforts to challenge the hegemony of Harvard’s GSD under Walter Gropius and Marcel Breuer in the early 1950s, when led by the ‘courtly and well-connected’ [Stern’s words] George Howe, a Groton and Harvard classmate of F D Roosevelt, when Kahn, Moore, Venturi and Scully drove it forward. After a brief interregnum Rudolph took it to another level.

Perspective section drawing of the Arts and Architecture building, Yale University, New Haven, 1958

If Yale were his only legacy, making something of Rudolph would be relatively straightforward, if rich and rewarding. Born in 1919, the son of an itinerant Methodist preacher from the impoverished and racially scarred southern states, his early education was at ordinary institutions. He graduated from the Alabama Technical Institute (now Auburn University) in 1940, before two stints at Harvard, split by wartime service in the Brooklyn Naval Yard. He eschewed educational and other theories for a practical and intuitive approach, both to design and teaching; his success in the latter needs little elaboration beyond the names already mentioned and their recollections of him – especially from Foster and Stern; his legacy as a designer is more problematic.

On leaving Harvard in 1947 he moved to Sarasota at the invitation of Ralph Twitchell, who had been practising between New England and Florida for 30 years. With what seems to have been a typical burst of energy, Rudolph galvanised the practice and the local architectural scene, more or less single-handedly creating the Sarasota school of modernist houses that could hold its head up with the contemporary Case Study houses compared by John Entenza in Los Angeles.

Aerial perspective of Healy Guest house, Sarasota 1949-50

In a 1965 essay, ‘Secrets of Paul Rudolph His First 25 Years’, Stern writes that the late 1940s were in retrospect a rather fallow period in American architecture ‘when the single family house …. was the only important building type pursued in this country’. Designs brought the lightweight frame, timber or steel, to the fore, as shown in the Revere Quality House of 1948, the Leavengood Residence in St Petersburg (Florida, not Russia) of 1950-1 or the Walker Guest House on Sanibel Island of 1952-3. The Sarasota High School offers a qualification to this, at least showing that the same language might work for other building types.

As the exhibition’s segue from Modern Houses to Civic Renewal implies, Rudolph may already have been tiring of the tweedy, Beaux-Arts educated Twitchell, who was his senior by more than a generation, and seeking wider horizons. Exhibition curator Abraham Thomas also points to a possible influence on Rudolph from his work at the Navy Yard, exposing him to materials, techniques and challenges not often found in Alabama in the early 1940s, or indeed a few years later in Cambridge, Mass.

In the exhibition catalogue, Thomas attributes this shift in part to the US Housing Act of 1949, which set the scene for large scale redevelopment, often of blighted areas. On its coat tails, a brutalist aesthetic based on raw concrete entered the US. Rudolph would turn out to be one of its more sophisticated adherents, but little if any reason for its applicability to large urban development is offered. Another impetus, suggests Thomas, came from Rudolph’s own growing interest in establishing civic monumentality, recognising the car as a factor in urban design, and prefabrication, with some mutation of modernism as the frame for uniting these factors. All are mainline modernist concerns and each had preoccupied his master, Gropius, though perhaps not all at the same time.

Aerial perspective of Buffalo waterfront project, 1969

One of the most notable projects was a lakefront development in Buffalo, northern New York State. Backed by the legendary Governor Nelson Rockefeller, who was no stranger to thinking large (he made multiple runs for the US presidency and eventually became Vice President to Gerald Ford), it featured in a full-page Wall Street Journal advertisement taken out by a concrete company, which declared the ‘rebuilding of cities has become a major national priority’, as well as in a MoMA exhibition Work in Progress alongside projects by Philip Johnson and Kevin Roche (of Roche Dinkeloo, successors to Eero Saarinen’s practice). That would be evidence enough that Rudolph had joined the privileged elite of architecture, even without MoMA’s director of architecture and design, Arthur Drexler, praising his buildings for ‘their complexity, their sculptural details, their effects of scale and their texture.’ Similar-scale projects were proposed for Stafford Harbor, Virginia and the Bronx, New York, and perhaps most heroic of all the unbuilt Lower Manhattan Expressway of 1967-72.

Perspective section drawing of the Lower Manhattan Expressway, 1967-72

Between these mega-projects and the small-scale Florida work came the six-year Yale interlude from 1959-65. Rudolph had already begun to branch out from Florida with the Jewett Arts Center for Wellesley College (1955) and the Greeley Laboratories at Yale (1957). But it was his commission for the Arts and Architecture building, more or less simultaneous with his appointment to the architecture department at Yale, that started to realize the exhibition title of ‘materialized space’. This was developed and represented through a series of exquisitely drafted drawings where space, form, light and texture really do seem to work together. They bear out Drexler’s comments, as well as Joseph Esherick’s perception that ‘you couldn’t go to the men’s room without having a spatial experience’. It all led on to greater things, buildings on and off the campus at Yale, including the vast Temple Street Parking Garage in New Haven (which, showing weaknesses in terms of scale and insensitivity, drew the ire of Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown), as well as other university campuses and buildings that looked like campuses but were not universities. Among the latter were the unbuilt Boston Government Center of 1963 and an extraordinary, triangular-in-section-shaped, research and administration building for the Burroughs-Wellcome Company in North Carolina (1970-2), now demolished. Best of all, in my opinion, is work for the Tuskegee Institute (historically a black institution, now a university) in Alabama (1960-69), culminating in its magnificent chapel (1969). Rudolph’s own drawings seem to outshine Ezra Stoller’s photographs, showing a roof of modernist composition but Gothic complexity, with shafts of light illuminating the spaces below. It may well possess ‘the power of Le Corbusier’s Ronchamp’, as one contemporary suggested.

Interior perspective of Tuskegee Institute Chapel

As the 1970s progressed, Rudolph’s reputation became defined by banalities and arrogance such as that shown in the Temple Street Garage, rather than the qualities of his work in more remote locations like Alabama and North Carolina. As mentioned above, Rudolph lacked the intellectual formation of his contemporaries who studied at Ivy League colleges before completing MArches and PhDs, including several in his circle like Venturi, Stern, Charles Moore and above all Philip Johnson. When post-modernism swung into the spotlight he lacked the means to refute it, though his few comments quoted in the catalogue show wit and perception. But his large scale commissions dried up, perhaps as much for economic as cultural reasons. The next section of the exhibition shows how he retreated into ‘experimental interiors’, often using materials like plexiglass and tried out new effects in light and space. Increasingly, his own house at 23 Beeckman Place, New York, became the focus for these endeavours, with its triple- and quadruple-height spaces, code-defying cantilevers and shiny, reflective surfaces.

The long economic boom in South East Asia, precipitated by Deng Xiao Ping’s reforms from the late 1970s, gave him an opportunity to work again on large-scale urban projects in an area where the indigenous architectural profession was unused to the demands of size. Even in the mid-1980s Hong Kong, though a thriving commercial centre, had no building taller than Rudolph student Norman Foster’s Hong Kong & Shanghai Bank. Singapore was simultaneously trying to develop an architecture to suit its commercial ambitions, importing the talents of Philip Johnson, Rudolph and others. Many of Rudolph’s buildings in these locations are formally expressive compositions of similar forms, elegant at best, but lacking the enclosed slickness of buildings like IM Pei’s Bank of China in Hong Kong. Still, they perhaps show more potential for creating variety and especially a public realm at and around ground level that so many others, including Pei, lack. Rudolph was still working on many when he died in 1997: whether they would have changed the trajectory of East Asian commercial architecture had he lived as long as Pei is anyone’s guess. They are perhaps best described as interesting footnotes to that phenomenon.

Perspective drawing of the Concourse Singapore

Perspective drawing of the lobby interior of the Concourse, Singapore

The exhibition does a welcome service in focusing attention on an architect of many parts. His best work, certainly, stands up well against that of his more fashionable American contemporaries. The lasting influence of the Yale school and building is a significant achievement. Where the exhibition falls short is in conveying the sense of even one building – and the arts and architecture one would have been the obvious candidate – in its entirety. Much has to be deduced from the drawings, the rather scarce photographs, a few models and the catalogue. In the day of digital technologies, including av and fabrication, this is a lacuna. But if the exhibition opens up a dialogue about Rudolph, it will have been valuable.

The exhibition runs until March 16th.