Charles Gwathmey faced a daunting challenge in designing an addition (at right) to Paul Rudolph’s Art & Architecture Building.

One other thing about the renovation of Yale University’s Art & Architecture Building: That addition is going to start fights, in print if not in person.

Although the project won’t be finished until the middle of the summer, people are already offering opinions about the 87,000-square-foot addition, which rises on York Street between Paul Rudolph’s 1963 Brutalist structure and the much smaller Collegiate Gothic home of The Yale Daily News. The renovation and the addition are both the work of Gwathmey Siegel and Associates Architects.

Some of those who have chimed in have seen the addition in person, from the far side of the construction fence (although the facade was still incomplete as of two weeks ago). Others have made up their minds based on drawings, cellphone snapshots, reports from friends, or blog posts. One architect volunteered that the design doesn’t “respect the original architecture,” and another said he thought it was “too heavy-handed.” Meanwhile, Yale’s architecture school is wooing the media with tours and tote bags. It’s a high-profile project, to say the least, and you’re likely to hear a lot about it from fans as well as from faultfinders.

But before the harsh words start flying in earnest, ask yourself what you would have done in Charles Gwathmey’s position. Your alma mater asks you to put an addition on an internationally famous building that was designed by one of your architecture professors while you were not just one of his students but one of his assistants as well. And the building is in a style that’s not just dated but also widely disliked. You know the addition is essential to the university’s decision to preserve the original, because only the addition can solve the circulation problems your professor created in his design. But then what?

Do you imitate your professor’s building, if you can, and subject yourself to criticism for not doing something original? Do you come up with a design that’s completely different and then take the heat for being unsympathetic? Do you ask yourself what your professor would have wanted you to do? He certainly didn’t put up copycat buildings himself—in 1963 he was celebrated for his originality. Would he have failed you for doing something imitative?

And here’s the clincher: If your building’s a success, it succeeds by not overpowering Rudolph’s—so he still gets the lion’s share of the credit. But if your building is deemed a failure, you get blamed for messing up Rudolph’s masterpiece. At best, your assignment is thankless.

If you’re a high-profile architect, as Mr. Gwathmey is, you probably have enough experience with critics that you figure that you’ll get a mix of good and bad reviews in any case, and that history will settle the question sometime long after you’re dead. Even so, Mr. Gwathmey said at a lunch following media tours of the project that the project had been singularly stressful.

And while his interiors appear to provide everything the university asked for, it’s the design for the facade that many people will judge him on. There he steered a middle course. Rather than imitate Rudolph’s masses or rough-ribbed concrete, he responded to them by creating the yang to Rudolph’s yin. Rudolph’s original building has a dark, glass-filled recess between towers; Mr. Gwathmey designed a limestone element in the same shape and size, and set it up on the front of a zinc-clad mass so that the limestone almost seems to float in front of the rest of the building.

Once the cranes are out of the way and the fences come down early this summer, you can decide for yourself whether you think he chose the right course. The drawings don’t really do it justice, by the way—you’ll want to see it in person. In any case, Mr. Gwathmey deserves a lot credit for taking on so daunting an assignment. Rudolph should be proud. —Lawrence Biemiller

Gwathmey Siegel’s rendering of the facade shows the Rudolph building on the left and Mr. Gwathmey’s addition on the right. (Gwathmey Siegel image)

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.

The original Art & Architecture building. (Chronicle photographs by Lawrence Biemiller)