The legacy of a modern genius: Paul Rudolph, architect of the A&A building, was seen as both hero and villain

Reaction. The Yale Art and Architecture Building evokes one from everyone who experiences it. While architectural students and professors rave about its sculptural qualities and the interpenetration of space, the art students trapped in its concrete core loathe its inflexible plan--and mere passersby flinch at the sight of its brutal form. Regardless of the response, the sheer power of the stimulus is indisputable. With the building, the late architect Paul Rudolph (1918-1997) forever made his mark on Yale and the field of architecture.

This man, whom some considered a genius and all recognized as one of America's foremost modern architects, passed away at the end of the summer. But his legacy lives on in the stellar class of architects that he nurtured and the buildings that he designed. However, society's acceptance of Rudolph was never consistent, and the high points of his career contrast sharply with the times when he was on the brink of ruin, harangued as an architectural version of Nixon--the stubborn representative of the establishment who believed that he alone owned the blueprint for the world.

Paul Rudolph's meteoric rise was almost as rapid as his later downfall. Born in Elkton, Kentucky, he attended Alabama Poytechnic Institute as an undergraduate. After graduating with a Masters of Architecture degree from Harvard in 1947, he started a private practice in Florida. Only a decade later he was a respected leader in his field, and was asked to be the chairman of Yale's architecture program. Professor Vincent Scully, JE '40, GRD '49, was on the committee that brought him to Yale in 1958 and recalled that Rudolph, "found a school which had been almost ruined by irrational mismanagement, and he turned it almost overnight into what I think was at least for a while one of the two best schools in the country. He did this by being himself: open, clear, decisive, dedicated."

As chairman, Rudolph brought not only cohesion to a troubled department, but also brilliant insights and connections to other respected architects. In the early 1960s, Alec Purves, PC '58, ARCH '65, now a professor in the School of Architecture, was a student under Paul Rudolph. He recalls the way Rudolph could instantly "read" a student's drawings and point out inconsistent designs. Rudolph also invited leaders in the field of architecture to the school. Their ideas challenged those of students, faculty, and chairman alike. Purves remembers these dialogues as a crucial portion of his class's architectural education, and praises Rudolph's "pluralist approach to teaching."

Fellow architect George Ranalli credits Rudolph with producing "one of the most significant bodies of architects in the 20th century in the U.S." Yet his impact on New Haven was not limited to Yale students. During the 1950s and 1960s, Rudolph designed several buildings for Yale and the Elm City. Some, like the Temple Street Parking Garage and Crawford Manor, are strong pieces of modern sculpture melded into the urban fabric of the city. They emphasize the interplay between form and void; without one of these elements in the composition, the other becomes meaningless. Other buildings, like Greeley Forestry Laboratory with its columns shaped into trees, or the Mansfield Street Apartments terraced onto the side of Science Hill, reveal a more organic style. While they still employ abstraction, these buildings seem to spring naturally from their sites.

These structures and others around the country brought Rudolph critical acclaim, but his design for the Art and Architecture Building made him a legend. In 1963, the concrete-clad A&A Building, which stands at the corner of Chapel and York Streets, opened with great fanfare. Critics immediately declared it a masterpiece and praised it for its deliberate balance of interior and exterior, horizontal and vertical, and rough and smooth. With its corduroy panels (each chiseled by hand to obtain that rough texture), the building proudly marked not only the southern boundary of the Yale campus, but a high point for modern architecture in America. Paul Rudolph was at the top of the architectural world.

Unfortunately, Rudolph did not rise high enough to escape the heat of a country in upheaval. By the end of the 1960s, people were complaining about the A&A's overbearing demeanor and idiosyncracies. This new way of looking at the building coincided with a period of social agitation in New Haven and the country as a whole. At Yale, friction developed between the students and the administration, and between the school and the city. The unrest reached its climax in 1969. Among other incidents, a fire in the A&A Building damaged most of the interior before it could be contained. Student work, faculty files, and most of Rudolph's interior touches were lost. No one has ever discovered how the conflagration began. It might just have sprung from one of the piles of flammable material in the poorly ventilated artists' studios, or it might have been set by a rebellious student or angry New Haven resident. The acrimonious spirit of the time led the country to believe it was one of the latter, attacking a symbol of American egoism.

As might be expected, the renovations that followed were unsympathetic to Ru-dolph's vision. "The changes after the fire were substantial," says Purves. "Rooms were added where there were none, masses were inserted into voids. They destroyed much of its architectural and sculptural qualities." In addition, architects began attacking the building as the epitome of inhumane architecture, and it became an icon for the anti-modern movement. Critics noted how students constantly fought the building, abandoning Rudolph's neat rows of drafting tables for a shantytown of plywood partitions, hanging paper on the windows to block the sun, and adding graffiti to the stairwells. Post-modernists attacked Rudolph for attempting to impose abstract ideas onto the rest of humanity. Rudolph, who cried when he saw how his building was altered after the fire, was virtually ruined as an architect in the United States. The man who as chairman at Yale encouraged the expression of views rivaling his own was not given a chance to respond to the attacks leveled against his masterpiece.

During the late 1970s and 1980s Rudolph worked overseas, completing several skyscrapers in Southeast Asia. His work has been continually appreciated on that side of the globe, but here it is still hard to judge what the long-term response to Rudolph will be. George Ranalli believes that Rudolph will be historically curated, stating that "he will be seen as the end of an age that included Kahn, Le Corbusier, and Wright." These architects also outgrew their times, but the backlash against them was not as violent as the one against Rudolph. Regardless of how history perceives him, anyone who walks by the A&A Building must acknowledge his presence on campus, and react to his shaping of the built environment. Perhaps this reaction, be it positive or negative, is the ultimate testimony to Rudolph's creative power.

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