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Comment on this article Love It? Hate It? Or
Both? “Just one thing i want you to know up front,” I replied when the editors of this magazine asked if I’d come back to New Haven to review Yale’s restored Art & Architecture Building. “As a student, I hated it.” In the early 1980s, some two decades after the building’s opening, it was easy to hate the Art & Architecture Building (or the A&A, as everyone called it). Those years represented a high-water mark for postmodernism and its nostalgia for historic architecture; as a result, in the cruel way that the tides of architectural taste are wont to turn, the reputation of the building’s daring modern architect, Paul Rudolph, was at low ebb. Many of us nonetheless appreciated Rudolph’s poured-in-place concrete castle and how it magnificently culminated the march of Yale’s arts buildings up Chapel Street. Living with it—and, especially, inside of it, as a graduate student struggling to wrap my arms around a vast body of architectural knowledge—was another matter. The jagged edges of Rudolph’s signature concrete walls, which threatened to cut clothes and skin, were only the beginning. At any given time, a third of the lights were burned out. The original bright orange carpets had turned a sickly green. Everywhere, partitions sliced up Rudolph’s flowing, vertiginous interior spaces. Raw concrete was ubiquitous—on the walls, the ceilings, the floors. The place, in short, was parking-garage tough. My dehumanizing experience there was hardly unique. Rarely have soaring architectural ambition and the simple quotidian needs of users clashed as violently as they have at the corner of York and Chapel streets. There is a famous story about a client of Frank Lloyd Wright’s furiously telephoning the master from the middle of a dinner party as water from a leaking roof drip-dropped down on his bald head. Wright’s cavalier reply: “Move your chair.” The trouble was, we art and architecture students couldn’t move our chairs, our models, or our canvases, at least not out of the A&A. We were trapped in this unforgiving structure. An architecture school building is supposed to be a model, inspiring students and perhaps offering them something to emulate. For me, at least, the reverse was true. I would emerge from Yale seeing the A&A as a tyrannical object lesson in what architecture shouldn’t be—an exercise in willful, self-indulgent form-making that elevated the ego of the architect above the spirits of a building’s users. So, this September, as I stood across York Street from the A&A at 10 p.m., I couldn’t believe my eyes. Light poured outward from the building’s vast windows and illuminated its grand interior spaces and the plaster casts of architectural decoration that hang on their walls. I had made a point of visiting the building late at night because that was when its gloom had weighed most heavily on me as a student. But what I found was a light box, perfectly revealing Rudolph’s desire to create a captivating spatial drama. I had never seen this before. Now called Paul Rudolph Hall and due to be rededicated on November 8, the freshly restored A&A is no longer a freestanding building but part of a single interconnected structure with two other main parts, a new history of art building and a new library that joins the lower levels of the two structures. It is an enormously complicated, $126 million undertaking, energetically directed by New York City architect Charles Gwathmey '62BArch, and it has achieved mixed results. Gwathmey’s masterful restoration of the A&A, skillfully and lovingly done, fully recaptures the lost glory of this modernist icon. His banal addition, the Jeffrey Loria Center for the History of Art, is nowhere near the icon it sets out to be. But it is at least commodious and, in truth, the triumph of the restored A&A would have been impossible without it. Gwathmey cleverly shifted elevators, mechanical systems, a reception area, and some faculty offices out of the A&A and into the new building, where they serve both structures. He thus freed the A&A to be what I suspect Rudolph always wanted it to be—a dazzling piece of architectural sculpture, unfettered by niggling everyday concerns. The brilliant son of a Kentucky minister, Rudolph was a charismatic wunderkind who was appointed chair of Yale’s architecture department in 1958, before he'd reached his 40th birthday. Under his direction, Yale led a revolt against the very less-is-more modernism that the Bauhaus master Walter Gropius had taught Rudolph at Harvard. The A&A, dedicated on November 9, 1963, exemplified the shift from sober functionalism to bold expressionism. Instead of a simple, steel-and-glass box with flexible modules of “universal space,” Rudolph designed a powerfully sculpted structure, in which a dazzling variety of interior spaces pinwheeled around four principal interior columns. Their centrifugal energy carried through to the exterior, where towers at the building’s corners seemed to explode onto the street. Inside, Rudolph packed 37 levels into the A&A’s ten floors (two below ground). Steps, balconies, and bridges helped create an ever-shifting internal topography that sensible Bauhaus buildings, with their endlessly repeating floors, conspicuously lacked. His spatial theatricality reached its climax in the building’s heart, the two-story drafting room, presided over by a marble Roman statue of the goddess Minerva. Further thumbing his nose at the ahistorical inclinations of the Bauhaus, Rudolph playfully decorated the A&A with bits and pieces of history—Assyrian reliefs in the stairwells, Ionic capitals perched on metal poles in the lecture hall. The whole amounted to an extraordinary synthesis that reflected the influence of the atrium-like “great workroom” of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Larkin Building, as well as the heavy concrete Brutalism of the Swiss-born modern master Le Corbusier. Hordes of people visited. The building won awards, and architectural magazines around the world splashed its images on their pages. “It was the Bilbao of its time,” says the current architecture dean, Robert A. M. Stern '65MArch, referring to Frank Gehry’s wildly popular Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain. But the glory proved short-lived. The dazzling forms often did not function. On the seventh floor, where Rudolph followed the cues of an art department slow to adapt to shifting styles, painters were outraged that the ceilings were too low for their large canvases. Sculptors and graphic designers were consigned to the grim sub-basement, where the ceilings were just seven feet high. Acoustical problems were pervasive. Music played upstairs would travel down the building’s four main columns, which served as ventilation shafts, upsetting readers in the library. The jagged concrete walls proved difficult to clean. There was no air-conditioning, so the air did not move. If Rudolph had successfully asserted that architecture can be a stirring art, rather than a bloodless collection of spaces assembled by technocrats, he had failed miserably in coming to terms with the field’s more prosaic demands. Architecture is above all a social art, the art with which we live. His building was, in crucial respects, unlivable. Over time, the once-revolutionary building became the target of a counter-revolt, which deemed its spatial gymnastics and hard-edged materials oppressive—even a symbol of the national hubris associated with the war in Vietnam. By June 14, 1969, when a fire of suspicious origin severely damaged the A&A, it was widely interpreted as a violent form of architectural critique. “I just said that the building was so guilty that it burst into flames all by itself,” adjunct professor Turner Brooks '65, '70MArch, told me. A year later, during New Haven’s infamous Black Panther trial, Brooks watched as the National Guard cordoned off the streets in front of the building: “Looming behind them was the great charred hulk of the A&A, which represented everything that was wrong about everything.” The chair who followed Rudolph, postmodernist Charles Moore, was no fan of his predecessor’s heroic vision—and he was even less inclined to preserve it. In the years after the fire, partitions carved up the once-open studio spaces. The growing art and architecture schools condoned other unsympathetic changes in order to squeeze usable space out of the building. The Yale Art Gallery took back the statue of Minerva after the fire (and after students painted her toenails). By the time I arrived in 1982, the A&A was a ruin before its time, but with none of the romantic aura of a decaying monument on some English gentleman’s country estate. But during the deanship of Chicago architect Thomas Beeby '65MArch, who headed the school of architecture from 1985 to 1992, a reaction set in against postmodernism and its superficial decorative effects. “When I got there, the students actually loved the building,” Beeby told me, although, he was quick to add: “One time they tore a ceiling out because it was so hot in there.” With money flowing freely after the boom years of the late 1990s, and with the School of Art moving to a home of its own across Chapel Street in 2000, the stage was set to remake the A&A. It had managed to last long enough for people to appreciate it again. In restoring the A&A, Gwathmey was performing a far more complicated task than remaking a single building. He and his New York firm, Gwathmey Siegel & Associates, were wrestling with an extremely difficult design issue: how do you preserve a singular landmark and add on to it at the same time? The question had a special master-student tension, because Gwathmey worked for Rudolph when he was a student. Rudolph, who died in 1997, had always envisioned expanding the A&A, Gwathmey and Stern told me. Though he left no precise instructions, they said, his idea was to break through the stair tower on the building’s north side and form a courtyard linked by the A&A on one side and the new building on the other. That is essentially what Gwathmey has done, though his “courtyard” is not an outdoor space but a portion of the new Robert B. Haas Family Arts Library, which brings together Yale’s collections in art, architecture, and drama. The library's “Great Hall” is topped by domed skylights that draw natural light into the multilevel atrium, where students curl up in bright orange Womb chairs designed by Eero Saarinen '34BFA. For all its fidelity to Rudolph’s plan, however, the seven-story history of art building, which houses lecture halls and classrooms, faculty offices, outdoor terraces, and a street-level café, is hardly self-effacing. Instead of quietly taking its place alongside the A&A, it seeks to strike up a sophisticated conversation with Rudolph’s building, echoing it in some ways while departing from it in others. From York Street, the height and mass of the new building appear to match the old one. But its diagonal and curving geometry departs from Rudolph’s right angles, as do its exterior materials, which are panels of zinc and limestone instead of corrugated concrete. Responding to the history of art department's request for an architectural identity, Gwathmey aimed for the building to have its own iconic presence. For the A&A, at least, the project has yielded superb results. It was no accident that I found the building’s exterior so wonderfully transparent. Gwathmey specified large new windows to restore Rudolph’s original see-through look, which had been compromised by previous renovation. (The windows are insulated; the project is expected to qualify for a Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design silver rating.) He also attended to critical details, bringing back a new version of the concrete spandrels below the windows. Their sleek forms recreate a vivid counterpoint with Rudolph’s rough-edged concrete. The concrete itself, cleaned with water and bleach, even looks a tad less menacing. Inside, you get the sense that Rudolph would have made his atrium cut through the entire building—if only the fire marshal had let him. In the fourth- and fifth-floor drafting area, the partitions that chopped up Rudolph’s grand expanses have been removed, and two U-shaped concrete bridges span the drafting area, restoring a key element of the original design and providing a bracing look-out point from which to admire a replica of the long-gone Minerva. Here, space flows in completely unexpected ways—up, down, in, out, sideways. Light entering through skylights bathes the muscular concrete columns, making this cathedral of work the perfect distillation of the modernist trinity of space, light, and structure. This time around, though, God is in both the big picture and the details. Bright lights and orange carpets are everywhere. New ventilation equipment makes the air move instead of being deadly still. “It definitely feels different,” said Steve Ybarra '05, a second-year Master of Architecture student. The building seems sure to remain in good order as long as Stern is in charge. He’s a detail fanatic. Even though he was dressed in a custom-tailored English suit on the day he took me around the building, he was pulling weeds out of planter boxes on the A&A’s roof. “I take care of this joint,” he cracked. While the history of art building has some memorable moments, particularly a dramatically raked main lecture hall, it simply can’t match the punch of the restored A&A. Taking a break from his drafting table, junior Russell LeStourgeon described the A&A’s new success well. “Before it was like a cave, like ruins,” he said. “Now it’s preserved ruins. We pulled our first all-nighter and at sunrise we went out on the roof. We felt very in touch with Rudolph.” I felt the same as I left the A&A. It seemed tragic that Rudolph’s masterwork had led to his fall from grace. He deserved better than to be marginalized at the end of his career. It is fitting that the restoration at once celebrates him and sends the broader signal that, no matter how disheveled they appear, masterpieces of mid-twentieth-century modernism can and should be preserved. Before, I hated this building. Now I love/hate it. Surely its exemplary restoration will inspire new generations of students—and serve as a cautionary tale against the brilliant but arrogant form-making that got the A&A into such hot water in the first place. As a person who was a part of the A&A community from 1964 to 1969, I have vivid memories of the exterior and interior of the building. And more importantly, I have memories of the creative energy that the building seemed to both inspire and support. Many of us during those years loved working in A&A. And it was always a joy to see it anchoring the corner of Chapel and York, announcing to all that Yale, like the country, was changing and evolving. The genius of Rudolph’s spatial vision resulted in a place that encouraged the constant interaction and mixing of everyone who used the building. Architects, artists, planners, and graphic designers could all see and hear others going about their work. And for privacy there were quiet places of all sizes and shapes. Perhaps there is a clue to his use of concrete in large-scale buildings in his early life. Rudolph grew up in rural Kentucky near the small town of Fairview. Towering over that rolling farmland is the largest unreinforced concrete obelisk in the nation, completed in 1924 (when Rudolph was six) as a monument to Jefferson Davis, the president of the Confederacy who was also raised in Fairview. The Davis monument stands 351 feet high and comes into view at least two miles before you arrive by auto at the site. Obviously it evokes mixed emotions in those who see it, but it still attracts thousands of visitors each year and has also just been restored. Could Rudolph, by watching it being built and living in its presence, have had a dream of creating his own concrete monuments? Those of us who inhabited and loved Rudolph’s monumental A&A are very grateful that this complete restoration assures that it will inspire and support those who see and use it for many more years.
At home in A&A God, how I loved that building. A freshman in 1964, I pretty much lived there, sleeping on the Eames chairs in Stiles and studying on the orange carpet of the A&A library. (You can’t do much better.) It’s the reason I applied to architecture school. We silkscreened posters for the May Day demonstrations in the basement. It was an aggressive honeycomb, and you had to know exactly where you were going—if you didn’t, you had no business being there. When it burned down and the architecture class of '72 was scattered all over New Haven, I lost my bearings and almost dropped out. Coming back into the partitioned cell blocks of the rebuilt A&A, I was heartbroken. I am encouraged by the A&A’s rebirth, and I can’t wait to visit.
Bittersweet memories Certainly no building other than A&A beams as brightly in my memory with both love and hate. Making deliveries for what was called at the time “Yale Audio-visual,” I saw nearly every square inch of that building, especially in the lower levels. No route through A&A could be called anything but “circuitous,” and from our perspective, it seemed that “intestinal” was a better descriptor than “architectural.” And I must say that I found its post-renovation photos quite unlike my memories of the place. I remember a building with every cubic inch absolutely packed with “works in progress,” shall we say charitably: every square inch of floor strewn with, and walls caked with, the detritus of the creative process; a riot of odors, the byproducts of painting, photography, ceramics, and God knows what else; and its own special brand of damp dust, absolutely everywhere. Who knew it could clean up so nicely? But sadly, my most lasting memory of A&A is that it was from its roof that poor Maya Hanway [’83] leapt to her death in our senior year. “Maya’s Room” in Silliman memorializes her more tenderly than the building that for me will always be her tombstone; but for those of us who knew and loved Maya, and her sweet, beautiful, and gentle heart, memories of the A&A building are very, very bittersweet.
Present at the creation I worked in Rudolph’s office, had some involvement in the A&A project, and spent time in the building before I left New Haven in 1965. As the project unfolded there was an undercurrent of discussion in the office around the detailing and design process, all of which continued on into construction phase. I had assumed that my exposure to the design before the work was completed, including having watched as it was under construction, would have prepared me for what to expect on my first visit. Instead I was surprised at my visceral reaction. My experience was one of disorientation, confusion, and mild panic as I moved up, down, and around through a series of contrasting extremes of changes in levels, spatial dimensions, scale, proportions, textures, and light—as Mr. Kamin writes, “a dazzling variety of interior spaces pinwheeled around four principal interior columns.” Mr. Kamin’s experience of the building leads him to comment that “I would emerge from Yale seeing the A&A as a tyrannical object lesson in what architecture shouldn’t be—an exercise in willful, self-indulgent form-making that elevated the ego of the architect above the spirits of a building’s users.” This comment is consistent with the discussions which took place regarding the “form-making” during the design and construction phases, where study models were used for the purpose of performing what was referred to in our discussions as “design by mat knife.” I would agree with Ada Louise Huxtable’s opinion from the 1963 New York Times, quoted in Mr. Kamin’s article: “It is willful, capricious, and arbitrary.”
A building manager remembers A&A As manager of physical plant for the central Yale campus in the early seventies, the A&A building was one of the buildings for which I was responsible. The morning of the fire I wore out a pair of perfectly fine new shoes escorting the firefighters around the building. As there were no well-defined floors, but only seven-plus ill-defined levels, it was necessary to bring them to wherever they wanted to go, as it was impossible to describe how to get anyplace in the building. So we went slogging through the flooded sunken floors, some with live floor-mounted electrical outlets sparking under the water. The building was known for being rather messy under the best of circumstances, and the students tended to work around the clock, so we were very worried about casualties. Fortunately there were none, but we did have an anxious moment when we came across a very realistic life-size vinyl torso in one artist’s studio, nearly hidden by a mountain of crumpled paper. On a scorched drafting table, we found a melted glass bottle, its paper label intact: a unique unintended sculpture. Not related to the fire, but worthy of mention: a student once loaded up the elevator with 2x4s for some project, and as they were too long to fit standing up, he opened the access panel in the roof of the cab to accommodate them. When the elevator reached the top of its travel, the 2x4s hit the top of the shaft and literally exploded inside the cab. The student, who rode the elevator up, was covered in splinters, terrified, but unhurt. The challenge of properly abating the asbestos in the building in the month between the end of the last Christmas party and the beginning of the spring term was another challenge. The sheetrock ceilings in the building constituted the air plenums, so after they were removed and disposed of, prefabricated galvanized ductwork to take their place had to be installed. The project was a success, and when the occupants returned in January, they found the building clean and ready for use, down to ashtrays being in place on the desks where they had been left. However, any Christmas party debris had been removed. As for the nature of the building, I come down on the side of it being an intricate and enormous sculpture, rather than a building, but that is of course a personal opinion.
Not a fan As a grad student in English studies, I felt privileged to explore the much admired A&A in 1963. What I found brought Milton’s line to mind: “In Stygian Cave forlorn.” How, I thought, could an artist (or an English major for that matter) survive that dank, cramped, ill-lit, troglodytic confinement. I later learned of more indifference to the owners: no A/C, windows that couldn’t be washed without scaffolding. The article on the restoration/renovation leaves me with the question of whether the new building indeed completes Rudolph’s vision or is a successful apology that should be named after someone less perverse.
Eyewitness to the fire Your cover stirred memories of the night they burned the building down. The A&A had been a major presence in our lives—from the weeks-long light show installations to the ad hoc city planning seminars that it hosted. In 1969, my room on the end of JE looked out directly on the sculpture garden and the A&A. In the quiet time before moving to Morse/Stiles for the summer, I was awakened one night by sirens blaring and auroras flickering on my walls. Running to the window, I watched as flames sprang up the entire front of the building; dancing and spiraling behind three stories of windows. I watched until the windows seemed to bulge out, then crack and explode, spewing glass and fire into the street. The following year brought many dramatic and unexpected events, but none with this surreal immediacy.
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Related Gallery of photos of the A&A Building. |
Full Vircle: Opinions of the A&A Building, 1963–2008 The new building is a genuine creative achievement and a spectacular tour de force. It is willful, capricious, arbitrary, bold, brilliant, and beautiful, and it may very possibly be great.
While the hostility toward a monumental statement such as A&A has ebbed, the feeling remains that it is a building of an earlier era.
It’s a very painful subject for me. I talk quite freely about many of my buildings when asked, but I never talk about this building.
I’ve taught in this building for 18 years, and it’s an awful place to be. … Who cares if it’s got 36 levels?
The building is a guilty pleasure. It’s dank and it’s mean and it doesn’t work very well—but oh, what wonderful gloom.
Now seen in its full glory, [Rudolph's] building turns out to be a masterpiece of late Modernism, one that will force many to reappraise an entire period of Modernist history and put Rudolph back on the pedestal where he belongs. |
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