With arches evoking the look of a Roman aqueduct, the 700-foot long Temple Street parking garage was supposed to be three times as long as it is, including a fantastic hubristic leap across Route 34.
Drawings and models of this and 12 other Paul Rudolph designs, currently in an exhibition at the Rudolph-designed Art and Architecture Building at Yale, seek to resurrect the architect’s reputation as the master builder of town and gown during the heyday of Mayor Richard C. Lee’s “Model City” mania.
However, both in the nicely wrought exhibition and, particularly in the recollections of colleagues in a video accompanying the exhibition, Rudolph comes across as an almost Icarus-like figure in an era when architecture and urbanism themselves seemed to possess tragic flaws.
The exhibition’s argument is that Rudolph, who was sponsored by both Mayor Lee and Yale President A. Whitney Griswold to transform the campus and the city, was, well, not as brutal as other “New Brutalists” who transformed the city’s archtectural landscape in the 1950s and ’60s. New Haven underwent the country’s most intensive experiment in trying to end poverty by bulldozing poorer neighborhoods and replacing them with massive modern edifices.
Still, Rudolph went along with the vision of the transformation to make New Haven maximally hospitable to the automobile, the emblem of 20th century “progress.”
Its heart, the Church Street Redevelopment project, mandated the destruction of the ethnic neighborhoods along the Oak Street Corridor. Rudolph’s Temple Street garage was a centerpiece of the new landscape.
There are several not-seen-before structures on display in the new Yale show, called Model City: Buildings & Projects by Paul Rudolph for Yale and New Haven. One is this never-built manager’s office for the parking authority, which was to have sat out in front of the Temple Street Garage, as, quite literally, the gateway to the city. The exhibition pamphlet calls it a kind of charming “folly in concrete,” then argues that Rudolph should at least be given credit for taking a mundane function and building a structure for it with curve and charm.
The point is, apparently, that instead of knocking everything down, as did some of his more draconian contemporaries, whom he decried, Rudolph was more humanistic. He tried to weave the new modernism with older structures, not just abstract shapes and volumes, and, in the case of the almost childlike gatehouse, echoing turreted portcullises and bell towers of Europe.
But there’s something missing here: A tragic flaw. Architecture’s practitioners forget, only at their, and our, peril, that human beings must inhabit the built space, no matter how grand or symbolic.
A visitor from France, Alain Bourdon, scanned the exhibition’s review of Rudolph’s Oriental Masonic Gardens. Rudolph called these prefabricated mobile homes or trailers “the twentieth century brick,” which were built in New Haven between 1968 and 1971. By that he meant it was to be the basic unit for gigantic megastructures that would dominate future cities.
“Mistake,” said Bourdon, a retired physicist.
Indeed the buildings, made with prefabricated molded concrete blocks, with which Rudolph was fascinated, were poorly done, fell apart, and were torn down some dozen years later.
“There’s something about Rudolph’s face,” said Bourdon, “that’s both hard and visionary. A dangerous combination.”
The video accompanying the exhibition seems to advance this thesis through fascinating footage and speeches of Mayor Lee (“What’s good architecture? Well, I suppose it’s like a beautiful woman; it’s a matter of taste”) as well as a chorus of Yale’s architectural eminences, many Rudolph colleagues. Vincent Scully quotes Norman Mailer on modernist architecture: “Modern architecture creates the empty landscapes of our psychoses.”
And architect Herb Newman defends Rudolph, saying, in reference to the Temple Street project: “You really can’t criticize it. It was meant to be larger, with space around it, and instead, it’s dark, gray, depressing. Look, Rudolph was doing things not done before. He was a great experimenter.”
Another commentator speaks of Rudolph’s single-mindedness. It made for his success running Yale’s architecture department, and even after he left the campus, the furthering of a successful private practice. But single-mindedness also precluded other serious humanistic pursuits.
Colleague Stanley Tigerman perhaps put it best: Rudolph’s career, he says in the video, “is like the myth of Icarus. One of his wings fell off and plummeted to the ground. In many ways, it was tragic.”
At a time when the city is launched on another historic effort to infill the Route 34 corridor, reconnect and expand downtown, and otherwise rectify errors of the Rudolph era, maybe we should be heartened that we appear not to be 100 percent sure of our vision.
The exhibition, at the Art and Architecture Building, which is perhaps Rudolph’s controversial piece de resistance, is open weekdays 9 a.m. to 5 p.m.; Saturday, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.; and Sunday noon to 5 p.m. Model City was curated by Timothy M. Rohan. The exhibition’s video, titled Rudolph and Renewal, was created by Elihu Rubin and Stephen Taylor. The exhibition is on view through Feb. 15.