New Haven, Connecticut, 1963. One autumn morning the architecture students of Yale enter their new building for the first time, which bears the name of a school, Art & Architecture Building, and the face of a fortress. The concrete walls are not smooth: they are grooved vertically, like corduroy, and the surface, hammered by hand after casting, gleams with fragments of pink and grey aggregate. Inside, the floors are divided into some thirty staggered levels, without real corridors, without a readable plan. It was designed by the head of the school, Paul Rudolph, who is forty-five and has the reputation of being the most brilliant American architect of his generation.
From Sarasota to Yale
Rudolph is born in 1918 in Elkton, Kentucky, and studies at Harvard under Walter Gropius, whose rationalist rigour he does not share. He returns to work in Florida, in Sarasota, where with other young architects he builds light and airy houses in the subtropical climate: the Sarasota School. The Umbrella House (1953) has a large brise-soleil of wooden slats that shades its flat roof; Riverview High School (1958) has classrooms with adjustable louvred walls to let the air through. They are projects that respond to the climate with technical intelligence, and they lead to his being called in 1958 as chair of the architecture school at Yale, at forty.
The corduroy concrete
The design of the Yale building is the synthesis of what Rudolph has learned. The volume is a set of concrete towers and blocks connected at staggered levels: there are no true floors, but a succession of half floors overlapping like a vertical city. The concrete surfaces have a particular texture. The walls are cast in formwork with vertical grooves, and then, once hardened, each rib is hammered by hand to bring out the aggregate. The result is a rough and luminous skin that changes appearance with the light, and that makes concrete, a poor material, look like something precious.
The building is celebrated at once, but also criticised. For students it is a labyrinth: there are too many levels, the rooms do not always serve their purpose, and in summer it is unbearably hot. For the public the concrete wall looks hostile. In 1969, during a period of strong tensions at the university, a fire seriously damages the building: the cause has never been established with certainty, but many suspect arson. In the following years the building is heavily altered, with partitions and coverings that change its spaces, and Rudolph left Yale already in 1965, after a few years.
Rebirth of a hated building
For decades the building is regarded as the symbol of what went wrong with Brutalist architecture: heavy, hostile, out of scale. Then, from the 2000s, the view changes. In 2008 a long restoration, designed by the firm Gwathmey Siegel, brings it back to a version close to the original, and the building is named after Paul Rudolph. Today its spaces, with the zenithal light falling on the concrete shelves, are considered among the most remarkable of American architecture in the second half of the twentieth century. Rudolph, who died in 1997, had already seen other works of his demolished or distorted: their fate helped give rise to a movement for the protection of Brutalism.