The Brooklyn Rail

Last fall, the Met made waves for staging the first major museum retrospective dedicated to enigmatic late-modernist architect Paul Rudolph. Although the Met’s show closed in March, those hungering for more Rudolph need only take a Metro-North ride up to New Haven. On display until July 5, 2025 at the Yale School of Architecture, The Tuskegee Chapel: Paul Rudolph X Fry & Welch offers a deep dive into one of Rudolph’s most interesting, and most overlooked, buildings. 

When Tuskegee University, one of the nation’s most renowned Historically Black Colleges and Universities, deemed that they needed a new, modern chapel building to replace their original historic one around 1960, they contacted the foremost American architect of the time to provide them with their new campus gem. Rudolph, who was born in Kentucky and raised in Alabama, was known for a Southern charm that made him a great candidate for the project. And as the Yale exhibition makes clear, Rudolph’s personable nature was on display throughout the entirety of the design process, which was a close back-and-forth collaboration between his office in New York and the office of Louis Fry, Sr., and John Welch, architectural partners and faculty members in the architecture department at Tuskegee. 

The resulting building, at once humble and grandiose, is a wound-up pinwheel with a sweeping curved roof and selective apertures that allow light to flood the nave during worship hours. Although the form of the building might have been the product of Rudolph’s office, its materiality—a locally-made brick synonymous with the rest of Tuskegee’s campus—was the decision of Fry and Welch, who successfully convinced Rudolph to temporarily set aside his love of bush-hammered concrete.

To Fry and Welch, the building simply had to be brick. In the early days of the university, students were given both a liberal arts education and trades-based training, and many Tuskegee alums were taught how to design, mold, and lay brick, contributing to the physical expansion of the campus. Even Rudolph eventually admitted that the chapel was more beautiful in brick.

Despite being shown inside a Rudolph-designed building, the exhibition decenters Rudolph’s involvement in the chapel’s design, instead highlighting a broad cast of contributors. A video interview with Major L. Holland, the Project Representative from Fry and Welch’s office, presents a unique on-site account of the building’s design and construction. Recordings of Tuskegee’s Golden Voices Concert Choir singing inside the chapel showcase its impressive acoustics. And a full-scale reproduction of the mural by Tuskegee artist Edward L. Pryce, designed for the chapel’s lower level, shows how the chapel’s art was as deliberate as its architecture.

Some of the most striking physical artifacts in The Tuskegee Chapel were produced specifically for the show. Take, for example, the one-to-one-scale mockups of masonry details, showcasing the ingenuity of Fry and Welch’s office when it came to beautifully resolving Rudolph’s complex geometries in brick. Other highlights include intricate sectional wooden models of both the new chapel and the one it replaced, built by students from the MIT School of Architecture and Planning. Photographs of the chapel shot during commencement in 2024 by Tuskegee alumnus Chester Higgins serve to reinforce the building’s long-held position at the nexus of a vibrant local community. In commissioning these new artifacts, the show’s curators embodied the collaborative spirit of the Tuskegee Chapel project—a spirit that, in the pre-Civil Rights Act South, was far too rare within the architectural profession.

One can’t help but wonder how the Met’s retrospective could have benefitted from similar newly commissioned material. For example, sectional renderings of Rudolph’s Art and Architecture Building at Yale could have been accompanied by photographs of the building taken in the present day, showing how the old drafting floor is now being used as a part-time badminton court, or how the outdoor balconies on each floor are perpetually littered with cigarette butts left there by anxious students calming their nerves pre-review.

Architecture exhibitions have traditionally approached their subjects via two routes. Either they champion the creative genius of individuals—defining their singular upbringing, influences, and impact—or they group a collection of disparate practices together under a broad label to make sense of a stylistic movement or era. But architecture is not an individual pursuit, nor is it consciously produced under the auspices of a particular style or label. In truth, architecture is produced through dialogue and debate—a fact that The Tuskegee Chapel highlights in force. In presenting the chapel as the result of a collaboration between artists, architects, brick masons, Tuskegee community leaders, and the student body, The Tuskegee Chapel: Paul Rudolph X Fry & Welch makes a strong case for a new kind of architecture exhibition—one that recognizes architecture as a profession with community at its core.