The renovation and expansion of one of Yale University’s least-loved structures has reunited two prominent architects who studied with the building’s designer and watched it go up. But whether they can make it any less reviled remains to be seen.
The structure, the Art & Architecture Building, opened in 1963 and immediately became a concrete-and-glass icon of architecture’s Brutalist era. It is the best-known work of Paul Rudolph, who was chairman of Yale’s architecture department from 1958 to 1965.
The renovation and expansion, due to be completed next summer at a cost of somewhere between $125- and $130-million, is being overseen by Charles Gwathmey, who was a student of Mr. Rudolph’s and became a close friend — and who contributed to the building’s original design. Mr. Gwathmey, a founder of Gwathmey Siegel & Associates Architects, has as his client on the project a classmate from Yale’s architecture school, Robert A.M. Stern, who is now the school’s dean.
Mr. Stern’s firm, Robert A.M. Stern Architects, has been much in the news since he was chosen to design President Bush’s library, expected to be built at Southern Methodist University.
At a recent event in New York celebrating the Art & Architecture Building, Mr. Stern praised Mr. Rudolph, who died in 1997, as “the most talented architect in America of his generation.” Likening the Art & Architecture Building to Frank Gehry’s famous museum in Spain, Mr. Stern said the Rudolph structure was “the Bilbao of its day,” pictured on the cover of every important design publication and visited by architects from around the world. (Mr. Stern should know. While he was a student, his job at the university was giving tours, he said.)
But he also said that the building “was not beloved by anyone who was not an architecture student or faculty member,” and that it was “a hard sell” to persuade the university to restore it. “Frankly, it’s only standing because it would be too expensive to tear down,” he said.
Mr. Gwathmey said the renovation would restore many of the building’s interior spaces, which had been cut up and otherwise altered over the years, and would replace the existing 14-year-old windows with fenestration closer to Mr. Rudolph’s original design. It will also bring all-new mechanical systems. The 87,000-square-foot addition, north of the original structure, will house the university’s art-history department. The addition will fulfill Mr. Rudolph’s expectation that his building would someday be expanded, and will take advantage of connections he designed into it for that purpose.
Like Mr. Rudolph’s building, Mr. Gwathmey’s will have a strong vertical emphasis, but unlike the concrete original, the addition will be largely clad in zinc. The addition will consist of a three-story base above two basement levels, plus two towers rising to the same height as the Rudolph building. A skylight above the third story will provide a focal point for an expanded art-and-architecture library, while other parts of the base will be covered by a green roof and by a terrace intended for rooftop parties. A large limestone rectangle the same color as Rudolph’s concrete will project from the front of the addition and serve as a counterpoint to a similarly sized recess in the Rudolph structure.
“Our building represents a work in its own right when you’re in it,” said Mr. Gwathmey. But it is also “in a dialogue” with Mr. Rudolph’s work, he said, and it will include “peekaboo windows” that will offer views of the original building that were never possible before. In keeping with the university’s sustainability goals, the project is designed to achieve a silver rating in the U.S. Green Building Council’s Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design, or LEED, program, said Barbara A. Shailor, Yale’s deputy provost for the arts.
At the request of the investor Sid R. Bass, a Yale alumnus who has donated $20-million toward the renovation, the Art & Architecture Building will be renamed the Rudolph Building. Mr. Bass, who became a lifelong architecture fan after taking Vincent Scully’s famous architecture-history class, commissioned a house from Mr. Rudolph in Fort Worth in 1970.
Trouble From the Start
The Art & Architecture Building has had a checkered history, to say the least. Mr. Rudolph — who had himself been a student of the great Modernist Walter Gropius — was given the commission soon after arriving at Yale, Mr. Stern said. The new structure was to house galleries, studios, and offices for both the art and architecture programs. Architecture students at the time occupied the fourth floor of Louis Kahn’s 1953 Yale University Art Gallery — a landmark of Modernism that is directly across York Street from the site selected for the Art & Architecture Building.
The proximity of such a masterpiece proved daunting to Mr. Rudolph, whose design for the new building went through innumerable iterations. “He drove everybody pretty much to the end of madness,” Mr. Stern said.
Not even the beginning of construction brought a halt to Mr. Rudolph’s changes, Mr. Gwathmey said. While working on the renovation, he said, “we discovered something almost every day” that had clearly been changed at the last minute. Mr. Stern added that the university had signed an open-ended contract with the original builder, who was paid for time and materials, rather than for following agreed-upon plans.
“This was a pure manifestation of his desire to make the great Modernist, Brutalist building,” Mr. Gwathmey said — and the more complex the building became, the better Mr. Rudolph liked it, he added. In the end, the structure had 10 floors — two of them below grade — but a total of 37 levels, plus more than 40 flights of stairs. (Making the building completely accessible for wheelchairs has proved impossible, Mr. Stern said, so the school has had to settle for making sure that there are accessible alternatives to spaces that cannot be reached.)
And however warm the building’s initial welcome, it did not last. Critics of Brutalism’s blocky aesthetic so vilified the structure that an embittered Mr. Rudolph eventually stopped discussing it. A 1969 fire, the cause of which is still unknown, closed the building for more than a year. Equally serious was Mr. Rudolph’s choice of sprayed asbestos for the building’s ceilings, which later had to be later torn out and replaced. Mr. Rudolph himself eventually died of asbestosis, Mr. Stern said.
When the time came to decide between renovation and demolition, though, the building’s unpopularity was outweighed by concerns about sustainability — tearing down a usable building is a LEED no-no — and by preservation advocates’ newfound interest in well-known Modern structures. The renovation of the Art & Architecture Building comes on the heels of the Kahn gallery’s $44-million renovation by Polshek Partnership Architects. Plans are also in the works for renovations of Eero Saarinen’s two Yale residential colleges, Morse and Ezra Stiles, as well as of the 1963 Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, by Gordon Bunshaft of Skidmore, Owings and Merrill.
“Yale was a leader in the 1950s in building Modernist buildings,” Mr. Stern said, “and now it’s a leader in restoring them.” But each, he said, “presents gargantuan problems to its owners.”
So far, though, the problems almost all appear to have been resolvable. Mr. Stern pointed out with glee that the Art & Architecture Building’s notorious orange carpet is being replaced with new carpet woven especially for the project. “It’s coming back,” he grinned, “in its full orangeneity.”
http://chronicle.com Section: Money & Management Volume 54, Issue 14, Page A21
