"We’ve made an effort to make the mechanical system into something more meaningful than just keeping you hot or keeping you cold or keeping you dehumidified, or whatever it is. For instance, in this building the support of course comes from the bottom. But the mechanical system is like a great octopus, coming from the top, and encircles the whole building. The hot air and the cold air and the returns are outside the columns, and then the horizontal branches are clearly shown. So that this becomes like a great vine encircling the whole building."
Rudolph, Paul Marvin, 1918-1997, and John Peter, 1917-1998. John Peter Interviews Paul Rudolph [Transcript of Sound Recording]. Library of Congress, Washington, DC, 1959.

Check out this review of the exhibition "Aggregate: Art and Architecture — A Brutalist Remix" currently at the Westport, CT Arts Center. The show runs until November 22, 2009.

http://www.fairfieldweekly.com/article.cfm?aid=15223

Image courtesy of Lawrence Maxwell of Spacecoast Architects, P.A., Indialantic, FL. Spacecoast Architects was retained to restore this Paul Rudolph designed building. This image shows the result of that effort.

Check out this web site that poses this question.

"Was Paul Rudolph's Lower Manhattan Expressway project utopian or dystopian? Beauty or beast? Yawn or yell?"

http://urbanomnibus.net/2009/10/museum-of-the-phantom-city-2/