Art and Architecture Building, Yale University, Paul Rudolph, 1963 /Image: COURTESY YALE
On Tuesday I finally got a look inside one of the most contested buildings of the last half century. I’ve written a few times about the threat of demolition faced by Paul Rudolph houses, schools and offices around the country. At Yale, where Rudolph chaired the architecture department from 1958 to 1964, they’re taking things in the opposite direction. They’re in the midst of a complete restoration and updating of his 1963 Art & Architecture building, which once housed both of those departments at the school.
The restored building opens in November. Yesterday I made it up to New Haven for a press preview with tours of the construction site led by Robert Stern, dean of Yale’s architecture school, and Charles Gwathmey, who supervised the restoration and designed two additions, one as a home for Yale’s art history department and the other an arts library.
Rendering of Yale Arts Complex. Rudolph building at left; addition by Gwathmey Siegel & Associates Architects at right/ Image: JOCK POTTLE
Rudolph was part of that generation of architects in the 1950s and ’60s who were looking for ways out of the dead end of glass box Modernism, preferably one that didn’t lead back to historical pastiche. At one time or another in their careers, this is a journey a lot of architects were on — Eero Saarinen, Edward Durrell Stone, Philip Johnson, the list goes on. Most spectacularly there was Louis Kahn. And of course Frank Lloyd Wright, but he’s in a category all his own. Actually, so is Kahn. At any rate, Kahn’s great Yale University Art Gallery, his early attempt to grapple with the International Style, sits across from the Rudolph building, and the British Art Center, Kahn’s last major building, is just across from that.
By the time he did the Art and Architecture Building — soon to be officially renamed Paul Rudolph Hall — Rudolph, who was then in his forties, was deeply interested in finding new ways to combine monumentality with the separate articulation of spaces. He brought weight into the Modernist equation and made it play with emptiness. Because he often worked with big expanses of concrete, frequently ribbed to give it surface texture, much of his work is usually classified as Brutalism, which misses the point. His buildings can have a heavy footfall — the Yale building might as well be Egyptian; it’s like some temple at Thebes — but also spell out loud each syllable of themselves in complicated ways.
It’s that tension between solid and void, volume and plane— the Big Box declaring itself and then unfolding itself right before your eyes — that makes the Art and Architecture Building so fascinating. All that architectural thrust and parry — you could see Rudolph working with ideas about space and mass that he found in Frank Lloyd Wright, Mies and Le Corbusier and then extended.
If you know anything about this building you know that as soon as it was completed people a lot of loved it and a lot of people hated it, including quite a few students and faculty. It had notorious operational problems. It was too cold in winter, too warm in summer, the drawing studios were too small and too exposed to the sun. It suffered a devastating and mysterious fire in 1969, which may have been arson. And over the years Yale subjected it to so many mediocre renovations that by the time of his death in 1997 Rudolph had more or less disowned it. I used to think of it as the Addams Family mansion of modern architecture. On trips to New Haven I would stand across the street and wonder what it was like inside. No doubt I could have found out just by calling the Yale press office and asking for a tour, but I didn’t really want to see it in a badly compromised state.
The current renovation aims to correct the building’s various dysfunctions while also restoring it to something close to its original lines. The exterior ribbed concrete — corduroy concrete is what it’s often called because of its narrow ridge-and-channel formations— is being refurbished. (To create another level of surface texture — and to bring old fashioned craftsmanship into a modern building — Rudolph had workmen laboriously chip away away at the ridges with hammers, so that every inch of the surface is unique.) Partitions and ceilings that Rudolph never intended have been removed, re-opening sight lines and restoring big interior spaces. They’re even putting back the very ’60s tangerine carpets in the public areas.
It’s still a work in progress but the progress is really encouraging. If it’s completed to anything like the standard that Yale set a few years ago with its beautiful restoration of Louis Kahn’s Art Gallery, there will be at least one great Rudolph building passed on to the future.
And then all we have to do is pay attention to a few others. (With an update here.)