Creator, Destroyer

A retrospective reveals an architect's vision, optimism, and supreme arrogance.

THE ARCHITECT PAUL RUDOLPH was a superstar when he left an academic career and opened a New York studio in 1965, a symbol of all that American inventiveness and might could achieve. Four years later, he had become a middle-aged living memory, the phenomenally talented emblem of his cohort’s arrogance. He rejected his predecessors’ gossamer boxes and redefined modern architecture as an art of texture, shadow, complexity, and weight. Rudolph aspired to leave buildings that would endure for millennia, but within a couple of decades of his death in 1997, they began yielding to the wrecking ball.

Rudolph has never been the subject of a major retrospective, and the Metropolitan Museum hasn’t mounted a modern-architecture show in 50 years. The Met curator Abraham Thomas fills in both those crevasses with “Materialized Space: The Architecture of Paul Rudolph,” a compact but revelatory exhibition that presents the architect in all his irreducible thorniness as virtuoso and ravager. You can come away loathing the guy or awed by him. I did both.