Manuscripts and Archives, Yale University Library. right: stephen kobasa photo

The Art + Architecture building after the 1969 fire (left); view east from the main entrance, 2008.

Model City: Buildings and Projects by Paul Rudolph for Yale and New Haven, 1958-1978

Through Feb. 6. Yale Art + Architecture Gallery, Paul Rudolph Hall, 180 York St., New Haven. (203) 432-2233, architecture.yale.edu/sites/gallery.

There are buildings that embrace their ruin. They don't yearn for decay; rather, they incorporate it into themselves from their very construction.

This was my thought as I looked at a photograph taken of the interior of Paul Rudolph's Art + Architecture building at Yale shortly after the 1969 fire that gutted it. The building seems clarified by the heaps of wreckage, the light still burning through the window openings and a piece of Roman statuary intact in a corner, aloof in its survival.

This record of the building's damaged history is one small part of the exhibition of local projects by Rudolph either imagined or constructed for the city and the university, but it underlines the fearlessness of his work. His buildings were meant to carry themselves into the future, dangerous as that might be to their survival.

But their mortality was inspired. There was nothing here of the self mockery of the Nazi architect Albert Speer's ruin theory, or of the sentimental apocalypse in the drawings depicting the remains of Sir John Soane's Bank of England as an archaeological dig.

There is always a presence of something human in the monumental forms Rudolph assembled. The "manmade" walls of the architecture building, hammered by hand into irregularity; the striations left by the molds on the slab walls of the Temple Street Garage; and Crawford Manor, the elderly housing tower on Howe Street, with the exercises of its alternating balconies heaving each apartment's occupants into the open air like the gondolas of a lateral Ferris wheel.

In the architecture building itself, which is both the locus of the exhibit and its dominant subject, Rudolph's unerring sense of scale finds the high places even in confined space. It is as if he had found a way to turn the lights on in Piranesi's prisons. And it may not be unreasonable to imagine that Louis Kahn's atrium surprises at the Yale Center for British Art were in part licensed by Rudolph.

This first scholarly exhibition of Rudolph's work felt like a preface without a text. The building itself, which I had last seen in its final stages of restoration when it was available merely as pure object, was the real document.

Now, in the architecture studios, tables were disordered with scattered models and scrolled designs, while several reviews of student projects were concurrently underway, separated by movable, nondescript dividers. This was now the workshop that Rudolph had meant it to be, the beauty of the design an instrument for use. It evoked the monastic instruction of St. Benedict: orare et laborare. The prayer of the building was the prerequisite for learning to build; ­ students could not contemplate the work that housed them without wanting to make work of their own. This was a school. And it had been saved.

There were losses, too, of course: The modular Oriental Masonic Gardens, doomed by shoddy construction, and Rudolph's own residence on High Street subdivided and erased from the photographs, it was an unmatched exercise in the matching of volume and domesticity. And then there are the renderings of the unbuilt New Haven government center meant to play against the past of the 1861 City Hall and the 1913 Federal Building with a panoply of planes and arcades that would have redefined public space in the city's experience. Instead, we have the dimwitted gigantism that finally claimed the Church Street frontage.

The exhibit, especially in the video essay produced for it, is meant to be read as the record of a tragedy: The architect who triumphs then falls into disfavor, with posthumous honors come too late to save much of his work from the wrecking company. (Icarus is of course mentioned.)

But there is something absolute about the fact that Rudolph built only what he wanted to, and that any one of his projects that does survive will be full of his demanding confidence that architecture is now the only art that matters in a fallen world which needs constant reminders of its still possible glories.

And as I left the now renamed Rudolph Hall to stand just beyond the main entrance, I looked up to an agnostic's nightmare, the splendor of the divided towers that is all height and defiance and the shadows of heaven.

editor@newhavenadvocate.com