Recalling a modernist's gifts

Paul Rudolph, who died in 1997, was the most admired and the most exciting American architect of his generation.

We now live in a celebrity culture, in which famous architects are sometimes referred to as ''starchitects" and are said to produce ''signature" buildings, like those of Frank Gehry or Norman Foster. In Rudolph's heyday, architects were more anonymous. Today he's a largely forgotten figure.

Thus it's a delight to see a fine small exhibition of his early work, ''Paul Rudolph: The Florida Houses," now on view in one of Rudolph's own buildings, the Jewett Art Center at Wellesley.

The houses were designed in the 1940s and '50s when Rudolph was in his 30s. Most of them were vacation homes on Gulf Coast beaches, done for clients from the North. Anyone interested in architecture can profit from this exhibit. It reminds you how fresh and uncluttered, how taut and alive, the modern movement was in its American beginnings.

Before Rudolph went to architecture school at Harvard (where he studied with Walter Gropius), he worked during World War II in a naval shipyard. You can see in these houses some of the crisp, airy efficiency of a racing PT boat. They're mostly made of wood, they're often built on sunken posts like docks, and they sometimes look as light as box kites.

What makes this show so strong is the way the houses are represented. We see them in Rudolph's own brilliant drawings, done with tensile ink lines that give them a hallucinatory sharpness. We see, them, too, in the photographs of the great architectural photographer Ezra Stoller, with that master's typical deep, deep focus and long tonal range. It's not only the houses that are works of art: so are the drawings and photographs. Three of the houses also are shown in basswood models.

Rudolph chose to work in Florida after getting his degree at Harvard because, he said, ''There is, for me, something about modern architecture which makes it more sympathetic to warm climates than cool climates." His influence in Florida was lasting. Architects in Sarasota, where his office was, even today sometimes refer to themselves as the Sarasota School and say their work is influenced by that of Rudolph. (A book, ''The Sarasota School of Architecture," by John Howey, came out in 1995.)

But Rudolph moved north in 1958, to New Haven, where he'd been named dean of the Yale School of Architecture. His later work is radically different from the light Florida houses. Buildings became rough, and heavy. Rudolph liked to build them out of solid concrete, concrete that was bush-hammered during construction to make it as rough as possible.

Much of the northern work is in or near Boston, including the early Jewett Art Center (1959), and the Blue Cross-Blue Shield building downtown at 133 Federal St. (1960). Later works include the original campus of the University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth, probably the best of the later buildings; the vast State Service Center in Boston on Cambridge Street at New Chardon, never finished; the Yale Art and Architecture building, Rudolph's most famous; and the First and Second Church at Berkeley and Marlborough, a small gem tucked into a burned-out ruin.

Rudolph could be dazzlingly inventive. He designed a penthouse for himself that perched atop an older townhouse on Beekman Place in New York. The triple-story penthouse was made almost entirely of glass, including even the floors. Everything was transparent, and the views out over the East River were spectacular. I never inspected it, but I've been told that even the bathtub is glass and you can look up into it from the floor below. Not everyone's idea of heaven, but typical of Rudolph's wit and brio.

Life is strange: after Rudolph's death, his home was purchased by a survivor of the famed Mt. Everest disaster chronicled in Jon Krakauer's bestseller ''Into Thin Air." Rudolph's magical glass wonderland is as near as you can get to living in thin air in New York.

Today, modernist architecture is under assault. Demolition threatens a group of 20-some beach houses, some designed in a modest manner like Rudolph's by notable architects such as Marcel Breuer and Serge Chermayeff, on the National Seashore in Cape Cod. It continues to threaten the West Coast work of other early modernists such as Rudolf Schindler and Richard Neutra. In New York State, a county commissioner has expressed his hope of demolishing Rudolph's Orange County Government Center. Rudolph's Riverview High School in Sarasota is slated for demolition. Preservationists, more used to fighting for older architecture, are awakening to the threat against modernism.

By the time of Rudolph's death, he had long fallen out of fashion and was building mostly in East Asia. Whatever one thinks of his aesthetic choices, he was surely the most naturally gifted American architect of his day. It's great to see his fine early work on display at Wellesley. It's well mounted in a place called the Sculpture Court, a space with typically Rudolphian changes of level and interesting ways of letting in light.

The exhibit was curated by Christopher Domin, an architect and professor in Arizona, and Joseph King, a Florida architect. It's been on the road since 2002; it's about time it made it to Boston. Domin and King also have written a book of the same title. The exhibit will run through May 3.

Globe architecture critic Robert Campbell can be reached at camglobe@aol.com.