For a young architect, its a pretty sweet gig to design a school of architecture, especially if you happen to be the head of that school. But its not so great if, just a few years later, the students attempt to burn the school down. That architect was Paul Rudolph, quintessential man of the south, born in rural Kentucky, raised in Alabama. He took his architecture BA at Alabama Polytechnic Institute before venturing north to Harvard to study at Walter Gropiuss Graduate School of Design.Yale University appointed Rudolph as head of school and he subsequently designed its Arts and Architecture Building, 1958-1963. The 1969 blaze may have been the result of arson by students protesting against the Vietnam war; it may have been to do with departmental politics; it was possibly an outcry against Brutalism itself. Nevertheless, the tough concrete building survived the conflagration and, in 2007, it was named Rudolph Hall to honour its architect.Exhibition installation (credit: Eileen Travell, courtesy of The Met)The Metropolitan Museum of Art does not often exhibit modern architecture the last time was in 1974 so this timely show is something of a milestone, riding a wave of renewed interest in Brutalism. Curated by Abraham Thomas, the excellent exhibition charts key points in Rudolphs long career featuring many loans from the Library of Congress, to which Rudolph consigned his archive of more than 100,000 items just before his death.AdvertisementExhibits range from the humble Rudolphs coloured pencils, Rotring pens, drawing instruments, a fragment of rough wooden formwork for the ribbed concrete of the Yale Arts and Architecture building to the sublime, in the form of many examples of his stupendous draughtsmanship and several models. The exhibition also includes work from Rudolphs early career beach houses in Florida which even outdo Mies in their airy minimalism, space-age Perspex furniture, and a collection of objects, camshafts, insulators, etc, the sensuous form of which pleased Rudolph.Interior perspective of Tuskegee Institute Chapel (now Tuskeegee University), Tuskeegee Alabama, circa 1960 (credit: Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress)When Brutalism was all the fashion, Rudolph was the crew-cut darling of the media; he and his work featured in magazines like Vogue and even the Daily Telegraph. Its tempting to speculate that such close attention might have caused him a mental breakdown; he hinted at depression in remarks about his Beekman Place penthouse. Perhaps he wasnt helped by the use of his buildings in Venturi and Scott Browns Learning from Las Vegas as illustrations of what not to do; or by Rudolphs Harvard contemporary, Philip Johnson, bringing Postmodernism to the attention of the world by designing the Chippendale skyscraper, the AT&T building. It is more likely that Brutalisms moment in the sun passed by and Rudolph began to be bypassed for commissions.Lower Manhattan Expressway Project, New York, New York (Perspective to the East), 1972 (credit: Gift of The Howard Gilman Foundation)His most audacious scheme, initially devised in the 1940s by infamous New York planner Robert Moses, was the Lower Manhattan Expressway or LOMEX (see top image). The gigantic Y-shaped structure was intended to squat on southern Manhattan.Like so many of Rudolphs plans, it was too overwhelming ever to succeed, requiring the elimination of acres of vibrant but untidy districts. A loose coalition of artists, conservationists and residents quickly organised to oppose LOMEX, which was eventually dropped. The key drawing Rudolph prepared for LOMEX is well known to generations of architecture students as the cover image for Reyner Banhams Megastructure: Urban Futures of the Recent Past, 1976. Thomas has selected some clips from films that used Rudolphs buildings as locations, hinting at the actual experience of using Rudolphs multilevel buildings.Architectural model for the proposed Sino Tower (unbuilt), Hong Kong, 1989 (photo: Eileen Travell)Late in his career, Rudolph designed a number of projects in south-east Asia, which he hoped would boost his profile, but these were often completed by other architects. One example is the Bond Centre (1988) in Hong Kong, now called the Lippo Centre, which, as intended by Rudolph, was a pair of towers connected at several levels by aerial walkways. The initial scheme delighted the Japanese Metabolists but, as built, all the walkways are missing and the whole outline is simplified and softened.AdvertisementExhibition installation (credit: Eileen Travell, courtesy of The Met)Rudolphs own penthouse on top of 22 Beekman Place, overlooking the East River and much altered since the architects death in 1997, is presently for sale for $18 million. If you make a trip to see the exhibition, try to also arrange a visit to Rudolphs Modulightor showroom on East 58th Street, which is open just twice a month, allowing a real experience of a surviving Paul Rudolph interior.Materialized Space: The Architecture of Paul Rudolph is at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, until 16 March 2025David Brady is a freelance writer on art, architecture, design and graphics