He’s now the subject of a modest but riveting retrospective at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in Manhattan, organized by Abraham Thomas, called 'Materialized Space: The Architecture of Paul Rudolph,' whose first order of business is obviously to answer a question people outside architecture circles will ask, namely: Who was he? — The New York Times
The exhibition, the Met’s first major show on modern architecture in almost fifty years, opened on September 30th and includes over 80 artifacts from the Kentucky-born Rudolph’s five-decade career. The last day to see this is March 16th, 2025.
Kimmelman says it offers an interesting recount of how the "shining light of the Kennedy era" morphed into league with the originator of his failed Lower Manhattan Expressway plan, Robert Moses, bemoaning "his grand plans and recklessness, his truculence and tragic arc."
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The LoMex design was a lot of things but not really a "highway" -- a speculative proposal for housing on top of below grade car traffic.
Kimmelman always comes with a precooked faux-populist narrative that caters to the anti-design bureaucrat class that thinks design is too expensive for the plebes. But its cool when Yale gets it. But in reality it's inept bureaucracy that fails over and over.
Look at how Paul Rudolph defined much of modern Singapore, that embraced design in all walks of life. Similar to how the best Holl work gets built in China while he gets sued by vampiric New York lawyers in NYC.
Makes me wish that New York and the U.S. had a real design authority that proposed alternative visions away from the unaccountable DC technocratic corruption that delivers $10 billion garbage. Yet even that would end up co-opted by the NYT class in order to build soviet style 'social housing' and tear down anything that reeks of design.
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