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This image of the building’s meditation chapel was featured in Architectural Record’s November 1969 cover story. Photo © Ezra Stoller/Esto, Yossi Milo Gallery

Last fall, the Metropolitan Museum of Art surprised many by mounting a “major” architecture exhibition—the first in some 50 years, according to the institution. Materialized Space: The Architecture of Paul Rudolph, which closed this week, offered the public a rare chance to pore over, up close, dizzyingly detailed pen and pencil drawings produced by the show’s eponymous master. Despite this, as former deputy editor Suzanne Stephens wrote at the time of the opening, the relatively small exhibition lacked the didactic inklings that would have made it more engaging for knowledgeable architects.

Of course, this trap is an easy one for the Met—which sees upward of 5.5 million visitors per year, many of whom likely know very little about the American architect—to fall into. But Brutalism buffs who may still feel hungry for more can venture to New Haven, where a singular, lesser-known project by Paul Rudolph is the subject of an exhibition that has more to offer adept audiences.

The Tuskegee Chapel: Paul Rudolph × Fry & Welch at the Yale Architecture Gallery explores the design evolution of Rudolph, Louis Fry, Sr., and John Welch’s landmarked Tuskegee Chapel (1960–69) on the campus of Tuskegee University, a historically Black institution in Alabama. Curated by Yale School of Architecture alumna Helen Brown Bechtel, in partnership with Kwesi Daniels and Roderick Fluker at Tuskegee University and Timothy Hyde and Carrie Norman at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the exhibition was planned to overlap, in part, with the Met’s show. “The university is a steward of his legacy in some ways,” says Bechtel. “Yale and New Haven have had no shortage of content about Paul Rudolph, so it was a challenge and an imperative to find something that we hadn’t done before. It felt like a wonderful alignment of timing and topic that seemed relevant on a number of scales.”

Section models of the Paul Rudolph X Fry & Welch Chapel. Contributed by the Department of Architecture at MIT, under the direction of Carrie Norman with assistance from Adriana Giorgis, Namhi Kwun, Jacob Payne, Mara Jovanovic, and Diana Mykhaylychenko, 2024. Photos courtesy Helen B. Bechtel

In contrast to the Met’s show, whose deep charcoal gray walls were enlivened only intermittently by bursts of paprika, The Tuskegee Chapel is set to an eye-catching backdrop of deep cobalt with pastel pink lettering. Framed architectural photographs, taken by the renowned 20th-century documentarian Ezra Stoller, line the gallery’s walls alongside vintage and contemporary ones taken by Tuskegee alumnus Chester Higgins, who captured the chapel in use by students and congregants. Recordings from Tuskegee’s famed Golden Voices Concert Choir help transport visitors to the chapel’s nave, as do 1:1 reproductions of murals and stained-glass elements.

In the middle of the gallery, mockups and models form a conceptual axis that chronologically begins with a basswood miniature of Tuskegee’s first chapel, built in 1898, designed by Robert R. Taylor (the first Black architect to graduate from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology) and which burned down in 1957, instigating Rudolph’s commission. It continues with a model of the chapel’s midcentury replacement and ends with a newly commissioned, future-thinking masonry sculpture, built with a robotic arm, by Tuskegee alumnus Myles Sampson. 

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Myles Sampson with his sculpture Brick Parable, 2024 (1); Helen Brown Bechtel and Dr. Kwesi Daniels introduce visitors to the exhibition (2). Photos by Benjamin Piascik

Straddling this axis are two drafting tables, each displaying drawing sets that gallery-goers are encouraged to leaf through. One table showcases Rudolph’s original concrete scheme for the chapel, from 1960—interestingly enough, in a manner reminiscent of the corduroy concrete walls that encircle the exhibition, set in his own Art & Architecture Building (1958–63), today named for the architect. On the other lies the construction set, developed by architects of record Fry and Welch, who, in 1965, began translating Rudolph’s sculptural form into a steel-framed, brick-clad structure that would more appropriately echo the vernacular of Tuskegee’s campus. (For almost four decades after the school’s founding, the architecture curriculum included training in an on-campus brickworks, where students fabricated bricks from local clay that were both used to construct campus buildings and sold to generate income.)

Despite Rudolph’s well-known reputation for brusqueness and his bristly personality, he supported the change in materiality, according to archival documents and a recorded interview with Major Holland, the last living member of the chapel’s design team, shown as part of the exhibition. “I did not find a single moment of major friction,” Bechtel says. Autobiographical commonalities among the collaborators may have played a part in this. Rudolph, born in Kentucky and raised in Alabama, had gone to school in the South and, like Fry, went on to pursue graduate studies at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, where they both studied under Gropius and Breuer. With Welch, Rudolph shared experiences from serving in the U.S. military. The partnership proved productive. Former RECORD editor in chief Mildred Schmertz hailed the chapel as “one of the most dramatic and powerful religious spaces to be built in this century” in November 1969, when it was featured on the magazine’s cover.

Chapel interior. Photo © Chester Higgins, courtesy Bruce Silverstein Gallery

Tuskegee Chapel under construction, 1969. Courtesy Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division. LC-DIG-PMR05-14432

Mockups of the chapel’s idiosyncratic details—an angled pier, an overlapping corner—help visitors understand Fry and Welch’s brickwork, executed with a pinkish mortar that conferred a monochromatic quality akin to poured-in-place concrete. Although the practice of producing brick on campus had stopped by the time of the chapel’s construction, Bechtel sourced a color-matched kind from Connecticut and worked with local masons who built the mockups, to Fry and Welch’s specifications, pro bono. “That was amazing—not only to have that type of donated labor and craft, but to talk to them about how the exhibition was getting deep into the craft and importance of the brickwork itself,” Bechtel told RECORD. “It just felt like a symbiotic expression of values, not only for what they care about, but for what I was trying to communicate curatorially.”

Exterior perspective drawing of the Tuskegee Chapel, Paul Rudolph, ca. 1960. Courtesy Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division. LC-DIG-ds-14633

The exhibition, however, suffers from an unfortunate flaw—perhaps at fault of Rudolph himself. The Yale Architecture Gallery is not a museum-grade conditioned space, making a loan of original drawings from the Library of Congress—the main repository of Rudolph’s archive—impossible. All the displayed drawings are facsimiles. If gallery-goers missed the sole, original pencil rendering of the chapel that was on display at the Met, they certainly won’t find one here.

By considering the contributions of the architects of record, Bechtel not only illuminates the longstanding tradition of masonry craftsmanship on the school’s campus, she calls attention to the not insignificant yet overlooked careers of Fry and Welch, who were Black, at a turbulent political moment freshly fraught with racial tension. “From a pedagogical standpoint, but quite apart from politics, it is essential to learn about all aspects of our architectural history if we are going to train the next generation of architects to be as educated and effective as they can be,” says Bechtel.

“The current atmosphere around Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion has clouded the accomplishments of many hardworking Americans,” adds Daniels. “Were it not for their ethnicity or racial classification, their efforts would be more well known and celebrated. The significance of this exhibit is it demonstrates the power of collaboration and acknowledges the impact that people from diverse environments can have on society, when they work together.” 

Installation view of the exhibition. Photo courtesy Helen B. Bechtel

The Tuskegee Chapel: Paul Rudolph × Fry & Welch is open to the public from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. on weekdays and will close on July 5, 2025. The show will then travel to Tuskegee University and MIT.