Search for Expression: The Architecture of Paul Rudolph examines the work of Paul Rudolph (1918–1997), one of the most important architects of post-World War II America. Rudolph has often been dismissed as the creator of idiosyncratic buildings, such as his Yale Art & Architecture Building (1958–63). This book provides a historically based interpretation that explains Rudolph's sixty-year career as a sustained effort to develop a bold, expressive architecture whose origins lay in the post-war period's attempts to develop alternatives to the International Style. Much unfamiliar material from the Rudolph Archive at the Library of Congress will be brought to light, such as Rudolph's unbuilt New Haven projects of the 1950s and skyscrapers and villas he designed in Southeast Asia during the 1990s. Rudolph's last project was a striking, A-frame shaped office building in Surabaya completed posthumously in 1999, but never published outside of Indonesia.

Timothy M. Rohan is associate professor of architectural history at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. He completed a dissertation on Paul Rudolph at Harvard University in 2001. With the Graham Foundation's support in 2003–04, he researched Rudolph's relationship to postwar urbanism. From 2006 to 2008, he helped catalog Rudolph's archive at the Library of Congress. Drawing upon this research, Rohan curated an exhibition at Yale in Fall 2008 about Rudolph's New Haven and Yale projects that was the first to situate his work in a cultural and political context. At Yale in January 2009, he also organized a symposium on Rudolph featuring an international group of scholars. He has published articles on Rudolph in the leading journals of architectural history. During 2008–09, fellowships from the Kluge and Whiting foundations and my university funded a year of academic leave, travel to Asia, and allowed Rohan to complete a draft of the manuscript.