The US architect designed brutalist buildings vast and small across Asia and America – including his own 27-floor Manhattan apartment. A new exhibition highlights a queer sensibility beneath the crewcut

Paul Rudolph, the US’s greatest brutalist, had a career in four overlapping acts. First, starting in the 1950s, he designed private houses, delightful Florida getaways where modernist glassiness was tempered by screens and shutters. In the next decade he designed monumental concrete fortresses, majestic and sometimes monstrous, for universities, corporations and gigantic urban renewal programmes. Then came inward and intricate homes in Manhattan such as the Hirsch house, eventually owned by the fashion designer Halston, where the likes of Andy Warhol, Liza Minnelli and Bianca Jagger would go to Studio 54 afterparties, later again bought by Tom Ford for $18m (£13.55m). In the 80s he returned to building at scale, with big-budget commissions for skyscrapers and malls in Singapore, Hong Kong and Jakarta.

His creative journey was quite a switchback, running gamuts of delicacy and force, of interior intimacy and exterior bravura, and of celebrity and condemnation. If you don’t directly know his work, you’ll have experienced his influence. If you see a building of a certain age with roughed-up ribs of concrete, or compositions of exaggerated horizontals and verticals and top-heavy oversailing volumes, a bit of Rudolph likely lies behind them. As chair of the Department of Architecture at Yale, he guided a generation of leading architects, including Norman Foster and Richard Rogers. The expressive projections and recessions of the latter’s Lloyd’s building owe much to his former teacher.