IN THE EARLY 1970S, the Brutalist architect Paul Rudolph designed a dining table for a house in Westport, Connecticut, that sums up that complicated decade. Its top, a pristine oval of white plastic laminate, looms like a jumbo jet over three Plexiglas legs in the shape of oil drums. When the piece came up for auction about 10 years ago, the interior designer Rafael de Cárdenas knew it would be his. “You have to understand the history of it to love it,” says de Cárdenas, who was born in 1974 and came across Rudolph’s work as a student at the Rhode Island School of Design. “I was obsessed with it.”
After...