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May 20, 2008, 10:10 AM ET
At Yale, Stern Offers Architecture Writers a Hard-Hat Tour
Paul Rudolph’s Art & Architecture Building is due to reopen this summer. (Chronicle photographs by Lawrence Biemiller)
New Haven, Conn. — What Robert A.M. Stern says about Yale University’s Brutalist masterpiece, the 1963 Art & Architecture Building, is that persuading the university to renovate it was a “hard sell“—and that he only succeeded in doing so because the building would have cost too much to demolish. Mr. Stern, dean of Yale’s architecture school, is the first to admit that the architecture building “was not beloved by anyone who was not an architecture student or faculty member.”
Nonetheless, he got his way, and the renovation is due to be complete later this year, along with a big addition by Gwathmey Siegel & Associates Architects. This morning Mr. Stern and Charles Gwathmey, who were architecture-school classmates at Yale when the building was built, lead a hard-hat tour of the project for architecture writers.
The Art & Architecture Building was designed by Paul Rudolph, one of Mr. Stern’s predecessors as architecture dean, and it’s one of the best-known examples of the Brutalist style. For good measure, it’s right across the street from Louis Kahn’s first famous building, the Yale Art Gallery. The tour promises to be interesting.
The addition, at right, has taken shape north of Rudolph’s building. Among other things, it will provide handicap access to the older building’s main levels.
A large, limestone-clad element is the addition’s most prominent exterior feature. That’s the Yale Daily News building tucked in just beneath it.
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