Art: Death of the Gargoyle

Yalemen, like most collegians, have long dwelt in the shadow of the gargoyle. Gothic architecture, with its encrusted spires and ogives, was the accepted way of making scholarship look more scholarly. But no longer. In the past few years more advanced architecture has risen on Yale’s 150 acres in New Haven, Conn., than in all of Manhattan with all its forest of new buildings. Some of the Yale structures are ordinary, but the boldest buildings have succeeded in giving modern architecture a host of new directions.

Instead of picking one official architect—such as James Gamble Rogers, who weighted the campus down with his Girder Gothic of the late 1920s and ’30s, Yale turned to a number of the most lustrous and far-out contemporary master builders: Eero Saarinen, Gordon Bunshaft, Paul Rudolph, Philip Johnson and Louis Kahn. They adhered to no single style, only to the modern mood, which freely explores how steel, glass and reinforced concrete can most beautifully be bent to shelter man. Their stunning results have made Yale more of a laboratory than a museum.

Yale’s 250-year-old urban campus was a particularly cramped site for experiment; over the years, an ever-growing university had to build on top of itself. Cheek-by-jowl existed buildings from the colonial brick of Connecticut Hall where Nathan Hale once lived, to Skidmore, Owings & Merrill’s dark glass box containing the university’s IBM computer center. At one end of the campus is an electricity-generating powerhouse in, of all things, Gothic; not far away is a student dwelling, Davenport College, so eclectic that its street fac.ade is pseudo-Gothic and its courtyard colonial brick.

Humpbacked Spine. “No common denominator, except quality,” proclaimed President A. Whitney Griswold, whose 13-year tenure (1950-63) produced Yale’s architectural renascence. Under Griswold, no fewer than 26 new buildings were commissioned. He turned first to his own architecture department for a man whose reputation is greater than the number of buildings he has put up, Louis Kahn. Kahn gave Yale its first real 20th century building—a daring new glass-sheathed art museum, an extension to the existing Lombardic-Romanesque one. Kahn, like Corbusier, let the concrete shapes retain the rough marks of the wood forms in which they were cast. He also made his ceilings support themselves, by means of small concrete tetrahedrons, which replace obtrusive beams.

The next architect to catch Griswold’s eye was the late Eero Saarinen, Yale ’34. Commissioned to do simply a hockey rink, Saarinen achieved a daring structure whose wooden roof is slung from a single humpbacked reinforced concrete spine, so that inside there are no pillars to block the view. Saarinen spent far more than the money that had been budgeted for the project, but the hockey rink so pleased critics and trustees alike that Saarinen subsequently was put to drawing up a master development plan for Yale. Along the line he won a commission close to his own heart: two brand-new colleges (see color)—Yale’s first since 1940.

Between Saloon & Gym. At a time when many college architects around the U.S. were building contemporary campus structures as neat, clean and impersonal as factories, Saarinen decided to come to modern terms with the gargoyle. Given a site over which loomed the 197-ft.-high Gothic gymnasium, he designed his buildings to be “good neighbors.” To capture the masonry spirit of nearby older pseudo-Gothic buildings, Saarinen pumped wet concrete into frames that were filled with stones, simulating inexpensively their handcrafted finish.

Drawing from his recollections of the Italian hill town of San Gimignano, Saarinen plotted a multilevel alleyway between the two new colleges. Lying between Mory’s famed saloon and the gym, this walkway separates the colleges in a cavernous passage while louvered windows peep through sandy slabs. The atmosphere is similar to Yale’s Gothic buildings of the 1920s—though one modern-for-modern’s-sake critic likens it to a set for Ivanhoe. Determined to avoid the typical cookie-cut module, Saarinen decided that as far as possible no two rooms should be alike. Result: though at first scorned, his Stiles and Morse colleges are the most sought-after digs at Yale.

“The Waffle.” To build the new Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale turned to Gordon Bunshaft, who won fame for designing Park Avenue’s green glass Lever House. Given a site facing the classically colonnaded Freshman Commons, and money from the S & H Green Stamp magnates, Edwin (’07), Frederick (’09) and the late Walter (’10) Beinecke, Bunshaft resolved to create a “treasure box.” He erected a 58-ft.-high cube of granite-covered steel trusses and translucent marble set on four steel bearings atop its own Woodbury White granite plaza. Headlined the irreverent Yale Daily News: TOMB CONCEALS DECAYED BOOKS. Students instantly dubbed it “The Waffle,” but it is the most frankly dramatic of the new buildings at Yale. In his new library, Bunshaft has made books the monument. First editions are arrayed in a glass tower for all to see—and to use. To keep out damaging direct rays of the sun, Bunshaft has provided outer walls of translucent Vermont marble that luminously filters the outside light.

A new library should have space to breathe, so there is room beneath the sun-splashed plaza for triple the 250,000 rare volumes the library now contains. The librarians’ offices and the 45-person reading room look out onto a sunken sculpture court by Isamu Noguchi.

By the time Bunshaft was at work, Yale was used to getting buildings from their name architects quite unlike the buildings they were usually known for. Philip Johnson lives in a severe bachelor glass house in Connecticut, the kind of place beloved by House Beautiful. But in designing for Yale a new science complex on Pierson-Sage Square, Johnson surprised everyone by designing a turreted architecture of burnt umber brick and purplish Longmeadow stone that reflects the sullen soil of the area. So far he has finished the $3,500,000 Kline Geology Laboratory, a medieval keep whose slit windows admit daylight willy-nilly—and which one Yale Corporation member dryly describes as “solid as rock and functional as an electric log.” Its fortresslike appearance will be repeated in a 13-story tower for the Kline biology quarters.

No Locked Doors. In the beginning, the inspiration for Yale’s contemporary architectural renascence was Griswold, but since his death last year much of the talk at Yale centers around the bouncy, crew-cut figure in baggy tweeds, Paul Rudolph, Yale’s 45-year-old architectural Wunderkind. Harvard-trained Rudolph is regarded by many as the fastest comer on the U.S. architectural scene. His Wellesley Jewett Arts Center was acclaimed as a dazzling display of design pyrotechnics. For the city of New Haven, which like Yale is astir with architectural activity, he has put up a parking garage that stretches for two entire blocks, and is probably the world’s most esthetic place to stack automobiles. Most recently he has been coordinating architect for Boston’s radical new Massachusetts Government Center.

Rudolph’s whims have become campus parlance at Yale. He apotheosized the conversation pit, thinks cushions should replace furniture, has a phobia against locked doors. There is a streak of the romantic in Yale’s young chairman of the department of architecture. He wishes his buildings to end as “beautiful ruins.”

Last week Rudolph’s latest “ruin” was dedicated—Yale’s new Art and Architecture Building, the most daring contribution in the entire Yale scheme. Rudolph works in the very building that he has designed and, as he says, “it’s a very disconcerting experience.” So is his building. A massive rack of rafters, the Art and Architecture Building staggers out by layers to shut off the vista up New Haven’s Chapel Street. From the street there appear to be nine stories, but the inside is shelved off into 36 different levels, with ceilings ranging from seven feet to 28 feet. Shunning sleek exterior finishes, Rudolph opted for corduroy-like concrete walls. To make them even rougher, he had workmen rough up the edges with claw hammers. The building is both massive and full of surprises. “All sorts of conceits,” says Rudolph, puckishly pointing out fishbones, seashells and coral in the concrete, “are buried in the walls.”

Encore, Beaux-Arts. Also planted in the walls are teaching tools that turn his floating lofts into a vast textbook. Yards and feet are marked off around the drafting room to provide architecture students with a quickly visible ruler. Students in each of the five years of architecture classes work on separate levels, but they overlook one another so that, says the architect, “you can literally eavesdrop to learn.”

What Rudolph has built in essence is one lofty garret atop another, until one bursts onto the roof terrace where, he says “all hell breaks loose.” At Yale, as in other urban universities, there is a student passion for roof-going and Rudolph intends to appeal to the eye of even the passing roof climber. Gesturing at a flat space against the horizon of East Rock, he says: “I think I’ll put a Grecian nude reclining statue there.”

One architecture critic calls Rudolph’s building a “headon collision between Le Corbusier and Frank Lloyd Wright.” But, after all, everything going up at Yale these days is a collision with the past. Yale’s new campus, set amidst the old, is proof that experimental design can yield functional, if often farfetched and fantastic buildings. Above all, it is proof that the mock gargoyle now belongs to history.