The following is a guest post by Helena Zinkham, Chief, Prints & Photographs Division.
The Paul M. Rudolph Archive has become our most heavily used collection for the work of a single architect. Enthusiasts of modernism, building preservationists, and students and scholars from all over the world are among the many researchers who study this collection. They want to show how much Paul Rudolph (1918-1997) accomplished throughout his life, including the brutalist concrete style for which he became famous. Over the past 5 years, we’ve served drawings, photographs, and textual records in more than 2,000 large and small boxes to help these researchers explore Rudolph’s creative ideas firsthand. We’ve also posted images online for about 300 drawings and 20,000 slides.
Our most recent venture was preparing loans for a major exhibition now on view at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City through March 16, 2025. Mari Nakahara, our curator for architecture, design, and engineering, attended the opening on September 30th and shared her reaction: “Wow! Seeing the beauty of Rudolph’s visionary designs presented in a museum has further increased my appreciation for his work. At the same time, the recent hurricanes in Florida have me preparing to serve even more drawings to help people who love the houses Rudolph created in Sarasota.”
A phenomenal amount of work went into preparing more than 40 original drawings, fragile models, drawing tools, and vintage advertisements for the exhibition loan. The conservation treatment alone of the two large models took 496 hours. The conservators described their meticulous work in a detailed webinar and a blog post to share the techniques. You’ll also enjoy the story of the spider—a temporary resident in one model.
The Prints & Photographs Division is deeply grateful to the many Library colleagues in the Conservation Division and the Exhibits Office who made this major collaboration between two cultural heritage institutions possible.
http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.pnp/ppmsca.88756
Learn More:
- Visit the “Materialized Space” exhibition at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, either online or in person
- Note: The Prints & Photographs Online Catalog describes each item loaned by the Library of Congress with option to download the images that have no known publication restrictions.
- Check out the book Materialized Space: The Architecture of Paul Rudolph, by Abraham Thomas, the exhibition curator.
- Dive deeper into the intensive conservation work: the Itsy-Bitsy Spider and (re) Building Rudolph: What Goes Into a Monumental Loan—a blog post and a webcast.
- Browse digitized drawings from the Paul Marvin Rudolph Archive.
- Explore the Rudolph Archive section of this research guide: Architecture, Design and Engineering Collections in the Library of Congress Prints & Photographs Division.
- Watch presentations from the day-long celebration of the centenary of Paul Rudolph’s birth.
- Read other Picture This blog posts about the Paul M. Rudolph Archive: Celebrating the Centenary of American Architect Paul M. Rudolph; What’s So Brutal about Brutalism?; and Building Access to the Paul Marvin Rudolph Archive