Demolition by Design
How to destroy a great building without tearing it down.
Comments (3)Thursday, August 21, 2008
Stephen Vincent Kobasa PhotoLoria Center for the History of Art
York and Chapel Sts., New Haven.
Not since the house fell on the Wicked Witch of the East has a work of architecture proven so damaging as the new art history center at Yale. It reduces the neighboring exterior of the Art & Architecture building designed by Paul Rudolph to something nearly as dreary.
Constructed immediately adjacent to Rudolph's 1963 work at the intersection of York and Chapel streets in New Haven, what will now be known as the Loria Center for the History of Art is a design by Charles Gwathmey. Educated as an architect at Yale, Gwathmey graduated a year before the Rudolph building opened, but worked on the drawings made for it.
How to explain, then, the decisions that were made in constructing the new spaces now adjacent to Rudolph's building? For all its scale, the Loria Center appears to contain little by way of usable volume. It is inflated in the fashion of a grounded Macy's parade balloon: empty, but not spacious.
Even the neo-Gothic silliness of the Yale Daily News' building immediately north of it has an integrity that the looming structure lacks. Paradoxically, the Daily News' building is not overwhelmed; as a matter of fact, it seems to be a buttress holding a fragile, top-heavy mass upright.
The free standing verticals of Rudolph's imagination are leveled to a continuous roof line by the new construction. Rudolph treated the rear wall of his building as an exercise in alternating space and solids; the back of Gwathmey's structure is a metal slab with a loading dock.
Gwathmey confirmed for me a published report that said Vincent Scully, Yale's doyen of architectural history, had urged him to "do the whole thing in glass, make it all glass." That was not casual advice.
Ironically, Richard Meier's rejected design proposal for the site possessed a transparency that Scully may have had in mind. University politics and donors' tastes apparently intervened.
When asked to comment, Meier demurred, describing the outcome as painful.
What would Rudolph have made of all this? Yale released a statement that he had planned to expand his original building into the space now occupied by the Loria Center. Timothy Rohan, an expert on Rudolph's work who has done extensive research using the architect's papers at the Library of Congress, explained in an e-mail that he has never seen any sketch of such a proposal, though it has elsewhere been reported otherwise.
In any case, it would be difficult to imagine Rudolph having even a fantasy which resembled what Gwathmey has realized. When I toured the new building in late May, it was still actively under construction, so the sense of its interiors being "cabin'd, cribb'd, confined" may have been a least partly due to that fact. What I did come away with was a clear sense that the Gwathmey building's several terraces give unique and unobstructed views of the city that would make them useful lecture platforms.
If only the building had been outrageous, or grotesque. Then it would have confronted the Rudolph design without draining it. Instead, we have this self-satisfied prudence that has infected all of Yale's architectural exercises of late. Even the small above-ground entrance to the Cross Campus (now the Bass) Library near Wall Street is a too-precious academic exercise where a little mad folly would have been a wonderful surprise. But there has been a singular lack of visible laughter on the Yale campus since Claes Oldenberg's "Lipstick (Ascending) on Caterpillar Tracks" was trundled away from Beinecke Plaza to its private cage in the Morse College Courtyard.
Still, it must be acknowledged that Gwathmey's restoration of the interiors of the Rudolph building is moving and redemptive in equal measure, with the restored bridges and atrium spaces turned to glorious uses. Much—if not everything—can be forgiven, standing within. And perhaps some apprentice architect at study there will discover rage and comedy enough to build with.
editor@newhavenadvocate.com
I am very saddened by the addition. If the new building were by itself, up on Science Hill or somewhere, it would just be another boring academic building and no one would think twice about it. But where it is - in such a prominent location, and growing like a tumor off of the A&A - the building is an offensive insult to our city and a desecration of the A&A.
This new addition is demonstrative of the Yale administration's current lack of vision, lack of foresight, and lack to interest in bringing New Haven (and their own university!) a built environment of cultural or aesthetic value - a huge and sad departure from the 1960s when Yale hired and financed the world's best architects, leaving us with a treasure trove of memorable pieces from that era. Yale wanted something quick and inexpensive - because they don't understand that good architecture (priceless additions to the quality of our city) takes time and money. They just wanted an easy solution out of their facilities crisis (which they could have avoided with appropriate foresight).
I really miss seeing the A&A in its unadulterated state. Now we are left with this shameful testament to the flaws of the current Yale administration. I only hope that this new addition doesn't damage the reputation of Yale's otherwise stellar architecture school.
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After they tore down the coliseum they should have started work on the ugly building on the corner of York and Chapel diagonally across from the Yale Theater.
The Yale architecture building is an example of how not to design.
Aluminum siding would have improved its exterior.
I hope the renovations address it's shortcomings.
It had lots of unusable odd shaped rooms and the air flow throughout the building make it difficult to heat and air condition.
Putting up another large building may help it fit in with the neighbor hood by changing the neighborhood.
The size and construction are out of place next to the existing buildings nearby.
It serves more as a monument to an ego instead of something that is both functional and appealing with its neighbors.
Its harder to design good buildings if the one you use as an example is such a piece of crap.
The retail and office space building hiding a parking garage inside at the corner of Whitney and Audubon is overlooked as a better example of building design.
Mentioning the new building has a loading dock in back is interesting because doesn't the A&A building have one facing Chapel?