From the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. ^M00:00:19 Mary Lou Reker: My name is Mary Lou Reker, and on behalf of the Library of Congress and the Office of Scholarly Programs at the Kluge Center, I'd like to welcome you to a lecture by Dr. Timothy Rohan entitled "Model City: Buildings and Projects by Paul Rudolph for Yale and New Haven." Now I just want to remind you before we start that this is being recorded, so if you should ask a question afterwards you are essentially giving permission to be recorded and of course all cell phones off, okay? Dr. Timothy Rohan received his PhD in 2001 from Harvard University. Recently tenured, he is now an associate professor in the Art History program at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst. He's also been a visiting lecturer at Vassar College and a lecturer at the Whitney Museum of American Art, and when the PhD was only a twinkle in his eye, he worked for a time at New York's Museum of Modern Art, where he helped prepare an important MOMA exhibit on Frank Lloyd Wright. As an applicant for Kluge Fellowship, Tim proposed to us a two prong project. The first part was to curate an exhibition largely based on materials held here at the Library concerning Paul Rudolph, one of the leading American architects of the 20th century. And secondly to begin development of a monograph based on his dissertation concerning Rudolph's work. The results are truly notable. The exhibition opened in November this year in conjunction with the opening of Yale's new arts complex and the rededication of a Rudolph building titled the Art and Architecture Building at Yale, which is now known as Paul Rudolph Hall. Tim gave the keynote address for that rededication, and in conjunction with that whole event, he's organized for this upcoming January an international symposium entitled Reconsidering Rudolph. His book, which will be titled "Enriching Modernism: The Architecture of Paul Rudolph" is expected to be published by Yale in 2011. For over a decade, Tim Rohan has worked with the Paul Rudolph archive. First when Rudolph was still alive, and then afterwards when it came to be housed here at the Library of Congress under the curatorial care of Ford Petross, who is director of the Library Center for Architecture, Design, and Engineering. They worked closely together during Tim's stay here at the Library, and I want you to now help me to welcome Tim, who's going to speak to you today. ^M00:03:11 [ Applause ] ^M00:03:19 Tim Rohan: Thank you for that gracious introduction. I'd like to thank Mary Lou, Carolyn Brown, my fellow scholars, and everyone at the Kluge center for making my stay here such an enjoyable, productive, and enlightening experience. I also would like to take this opportunity to thank Ford Patris, Hellen Azeekum, and especially Gregory Mark Angelo, who's right here, of the Prints and Photographs division of the Library of Congress, who've given me such remarkable access to the Paul Rudolph archive. I cannot thank them enough for the patience and fortitude they maintained while this exhibition was being prepared and for continuing to assist me with my research on Paul Rudolph, and I'd especially like to thank, as well, the people from conservation who I see here as well who helped prepare these drawings for the exhibition. My talk today concerns Paul Rudolph, his archive at the Library of Congress, and an exhibition I have created for the Yale School of Architecture entitled "Model City: Buildings and Projects for Yale and New Haven by Paul Rudolph," on view until February 15th, the most important pieces in the exhibition are from the Rudolph archive at the Library of Congress. Paul Rudolph was one of the foremost architectures of the late 20th century. With a sure hand Rudolph seemed to indicate the future direction of modern architecture in the early 1960s. As he seems to be doing in this photo of him with a model of the Yale Canvas from 1960, this is the introductory image for the exhibition. One critic in 1960 even called Rudolph the successor to Frank Lloyd Wright. He is best known for this building, the Yale Art & Architecture Building, often referred to as A&A, and recently rededicated as Rudolph Hall. It is considered one of the most controversial buildings of the last 45 years. When the structure was completed in 1963, it was widely celebrated in the architectural and popular press as the embodiment of modern architecture as a heroic enterprise. With its outward projecting towers and marvelously complex and colorful interiors, it represented a moment when modern architecture seemed about to burst out of the rectangular glass boxes so typical of the 1950s with a new forcefulness and energy reflected of the vitality of the United States in the early 1960s. However, the building's glory days were short lived. By the late 1960s, a new generation of architects and students at the school saw the building's monumentality, its monumental qualities, as emblematic of the authoritarian qualities of the establishment. They viewed Rudolph as the producer of singular, virtuoso works which had little social relevance. Poorly maintained, the interior of the structure burnt in a mysterious fire in 1969 and was unsympathetically renovated afterwards. Rudolph's reputation began a long decline as well, though he continued to produce innovative works until his death in 1997. A new appreciation for post World War II modernist architecture during the 1990s rekindled interest in Rudolph's work, which brings me to recent events. In 2006, Yale University began a multimillion dollar restoration and expansion of Rudolph's Art & Architecture building. At that time I was asked by Dean Robert M. Stern of the Yale School of Architecture to curate an exhibition whose opening on November 7th 2008 would coincide with the rededication of the building as Paul Rudolph Hall. Rather than focusing solely on the history of the building, I decided to organize an exhibition about all of Rudolph's projects for Yale and the city of New Haven. It would be the first exhibition on Rudolph's work organized by an academic. In doing so I intended to question the widely held notion that Rudolph was the creator of singular works of architecture which solely reflected his own genius, by examining the patronage that supported Rudolph's work. Focusing the exhibition upon a group of structures would explain the relationship between Rudolph's work and architectural thinking in post-war years and urban renewal. A topic with such negative associations that few scholars had dare touch it. The exhibition is called "Model City." Here is the introduction to the exhibition here in New Haven. It's called "Model City" because New Haven was popularly known in the national press during the 1960s as the model city for urban renewal. For Rudolph it was also a gigantic architectural model where he can experiment with his ideas about urbanism. The exhibition is organized into thematic sections -- you see their titles right here -- that reflect Rudolph's ideas, and the historical events that shaped them. It has been installed in the main gallery of the A&A Building, Rudolph's A&A building that you see right here. And here is the installation, I just got these installation shots. The panels suspended from the ceilings are intended to evoke Rudolph's design for an exhibition of his work in the nearby Yale University Art Gallery that accompanied the original dedication of the building in 1963. So it recalls an earlier exhibition. The remarkably vibrant orange or paprika hue of the installation was the color Rudolph used in his 1963 exhibition. It is also the color of the original carpet found throughout the building, which has been restored as well. So the exhibition becomes part of the restoration of the building and the two are seamlessly integrated through color. I was also asked to organize, as Mary Lou told you, the first scholarly symposium on Rudolph where participants have been asked to reconsider Rudolph's architecture reputation. It will be held on January 23rd and 24th of 2009, close to the time when the exhibition will conclude its run. My research on Paul Rudolph began in 1997 with a dissertation on his academic buildings such as the A&A building, completed at Harvard -- which I completed at Harvard in 2001. I first became interested in Rudolph's work as an undergraduate at Yale in the early 1990s when Rudolph's reputation and the A&A Building were both at their low point, yet the A&A building was still a remarkably powerful work of architecture. In 1997 I also began a long period of mutually cooperation with the division of prints and photographs at the Library of Congress, working principally with curator Ford Petris and cataloguer Gregory Mark Angelo. Upon his death in 1997, Paul Rudolph had left his entire archive to the Library of Congress, consisted of over 2000 tubes of rolled architectural drawings as well as over 900 boxes of slides, photographs, and extensive office files. It encompasses Rudolph's entire career from the late 1940s to the mid 1990s, making the collection one of the most intact archives in existence for a post-war architect. This grey, unorganized mass of material from Rudolph's Manhattan office had been deposited after his death at the Library's Landover warehouse in the suburbs of the cities which we see right here, and we here we see all these tubes which I've been talking about. During the summer of 2006, myself and a group of staffers from Prints & Photographs made several weekly trips to Landover where we organized the archive and began the process of cataloging by sorting the tubes by project. And I think that I'm one of my -- one of the few contemporaries who has literally carried the archive upon which he has worked and helped to sort it in fashion, a burden which I was happy to uphold. And you see a close up of some of these tubes. When they came from Rudolph's Manhattan warehouse and his penthouse apartment, they were in that setting, they were all scrambled. So you see tubes for all different types of projects, the way [unintelligible] housing, his World's Fair project for the 1964 World's Fair, the Wallace House. But we knew that they contained tantalizing riches. Here, this one is labeled ink drawings 1963. In 2006 I also began reviewing materials for the model city exhibition. With funding from the Kluge Fellowship, I was able to return in Summer 2007, viewing drawings from the Rudolph archive is a labor-intensive, physically demanding form of research, which must be done with assistance because many hands are needed. At least four, and an octopus would be an ideal companion to hold down all the different pieces of paper because they tend to curl. There are some great discoveries of previously unpublished projects and surprises such as this 17 foot long drawing of Rudolph's temple street parking garage, which became one of the highlights of the exhibition. Here I am unrolling it. I remember saying to Greg, "Will it ever end?" [laughter] And literally up against the wall we're running out of room. In itself the drawing demonstrates Rudolph's skill at creating potent architectural imagery that had a tremendous impact upon architecture in the 1960s, and that's what he's also known for. In summer 2008 I returned to the Kluge Center where I completed checklists and texts for the exhibition and continued research for monograph on Rudolph's entire architectural uvra. In order to give you an idea of the scope of the exhibition, to explain the importance some of these newly rediscovered projects, I'd like to read from the catalogue essay for "Model City." This exhibition, "Model City: Buildings and Projects by Paul Rudolph for Yale and New Haven" situates 13 works by Paul Rudolph in the milieu of post-war modernism urban renewal, and their aftermath. Though often seen in the past as self indulgent, singular demonstrations of the architects of virtuosity, works such as the Yale Art & Architecture building are discussed here as belonging to a series of carefully considered and situated experiments in urbanism made possible by committed patronage. During the 1950s and 1960s, Mayor Richard Ciely of New Haven enlisted important modern architects such as Rudolph to remake the city into a nationally recognized laboratory for urban renewal that came to be known as the model city. New Haven secured more federal funding on a per capita basis for urban redevelopment than any other city in America. At the same time, Yale president A. Whitney Griswald transformed the University's campus into a, "museum of modern architecture." With buildings designed by leading architects of the time, including Rudolph. As chairmen of Yale's department of Architecture, Rudolph found many opportunities to test his ideas of structural expression, monumentality, urbanism, and prefabrication in projects for the campus and city. At a time when demolition was the preferred tool for redevelopment, Rudolph's regard for existing structures and the traditional forms of the city distinguished his urbanism from the efforts of most of his contemporaries. And many other projects seen here, such as the Church Street redevelopment, Rudolph created expressive alternatives, often in the form of gateways or towers with distinctive silhouettes to proposed international style schemes. After leaving Yale in 1965, Rudolph continued to design important structures for New Haven, such as the New Haven government center, which went on until 1981. Rather than typical illustrations of modernist urban renewal, Rudolph's work for Yale and New Haven was sympathetic yet not sentimental towards the existing fabric, and designed to be open ended in recognition of the continuous evolution of both the university and the city. Paul Rudolph was already known as an outspoken opponent of the status quo, of post-war modernist architecture when he became the chairman of Yale's department of architecture in 1958. Trained as an architect at Auburn University in Alabama, Rudolph then studies with Walter Gropius [spelled phonetically], the founder of the Bow House [spelled phonetically] at Harvard's graduate school of design in the 1940s. Early experiences shaped his thinking. During World War II he was a navy lieutenant supervising ship repairs at the Brooklyn Navy Yards where he learned about new materials such as plywood and plastic that he would later employ in his architecture. By 1952, Rudolph had established an independent practice in Sarasota, FL, building a series of spatially inventive, small houses with new materials such as cocoon. And here we see a photograph of one of these houses being built and these workers are spraying on a plastic material known as cocoon to form the ceiling of this house. It had been invented at the end of the World War II to moth ball ships that were no longer going to be used in the War effort, and Rudolph discovered it -- or found it and decided to use it for architectural use when he was working in the Brooklyn navy yards. He would use it to create expressive forms that would bring him international acclaim. Rudolph challenged the vocabulary of modernism: The existing vocabulary of modernism such as the flat roof with new forms that literally stretched the boundaries of a building's volume. He topped the hook house of 1952 in Sarasota with three plywood vaults, which were reportedly the first use of this wartime material to create vaults for a domestic structure. We take plywood for granted today, but it was considered a new material at the time and the plywood actually used in this house, Rudolph said it was the same plywood used to construct the holes of the PT boats. So it was charged with this kind of heroic wartime energy that was now going to be re-channeled into domestic use. Like his contemporary Arrow Seranin, Rudolph believed that the post-war international style, and I'll explain that term, had distorted the pioneering concepts of the 1920s and 30s of modern architecture that had become cliched He challenged large corporate and urban development projects, stating, "Modern architecture range of expression is today from A to B. We build isolated buildings with no regard to the spaces between them, monotonous and endless streets, too many gold fish bowls, too few caves." This is a very famous building, this is Skidmore [unintelligible] house from the early 1950s in Manhattan. It's a great building. It represents the international style, what is called the international style. The glass-walled, curtain-walled architecture of the 1950s that became very prevalent in 1950s America that is identified with the American corporation and the rise of the American corporation and its identification with modernist architecture at this time. Rudolph admired this building. What he objected to was that when it was copied by lesser -- by less inspired hands, it created a drab and monotonous environment, and that, in fact, is what did happen along park avenue. It was copied endlessly, creating a kind of dull, monotonous corridor. Rudolph thought that there had to be variety in architecture. Having become internationally recognized for his innovative houses and outspoken opinions, Rudolph now began to receive large scale commissions in the late 1950s. He used each one to test his ideas, and in a challenge to the flatness and transparency of the international styles glass curtain wall, Rudolph's blue cross and blue shield insurance building in 1958 bristled with extruded peers or columns faced in pre-cast concrete. He's moved all the internal columns to the exterior, forming a kind of an exoskeleton, and this exoskeleton contains the heating and cooling devises and air conditioning is just being introduced to cool the new, gigantic IBM computers. And this helps to further express the structural system as well. And so you see everything, nothing is hidden within. Everything is expressed on the interior -- on the exterior. Rudolph thought greatly about issues of context, that is the way buildings relate to one another in a way that was considered remarkable for its time. Rudolph related his juit art center at Wellesley College of 1958 to its adjacent neighbor, a collegiate gothic quadrennial whose bell tower is just visible in this photo. Most modern architects of the day would have ignored such existing structures because they were too traditional, to link new and old together, Rudolph choreographed an elaborate -- whoops, bring it back. Here's my pointer -- Rudolph choreographed an elaborate pathway through his building. Here's the opening, this is a great gateway, his building is like a giant gateway, this is all by him out here. Through his building, leading up a grand staircase like one you might find in a historic Italian city, into the collegic gothic quadrangle, which he envisioned as a piazza, and this is going to be re-landscaped and paved creating an urban center for the suburban campus, and it would bring students and faculty and people together in a kind of village or town setting. Rudolph was greatly inspired by the open piazzas, narrow passage ways and landmarked towers of Italian cities like Sienna that he encountered during a year round trip to Europe in 1948 funded by a Wheelwright traveling fellowship from Harvard. Rudolph was considered the wunderkind of his generation of architects. While still a visiting critic at Yale, an untenured faculty member, he was asked to design a new building for the university. The Galium Memorial laboratory, which we see here on this hillside featured a spectacular ceiling inside of curvilinear poured concrete beams supported by columns with y shaped capitals evocative of the art-neuvo, that turn of the century architecture style. For Rudolph, revisiting the style long disparaged as decorative was a way of expanding modernism's concerns of a capillary. Rudolph said, "monumentality, symbolism, decoration and so on, age old [unintelligible] are among the architectural challenges that modern theory has brushed aside." This exercise in really what was the expression of structure was a prelude to the dramatic buildings [unintelligible] for the city and university -- for the city and campus. In 1958, 39 year old Rudolph became chairman of Yale's department of Architecture, during his eight years as chairman, Rudolph brought international renowned to the department by introducing important practitioners from abroad as guest critics and faculty, such as the Smithson and James Sterling from the United Kingdom, and he attracted students who would go on to become some of the foremost architects of the present day, such as Norman Foster, architect of the Gurkin in London, and Richard Rodgers, the Pompadue Center in Paris, and Charles Wafney, the architect of the current expansion of the Art & Architecture building. His students are a very diverse group, some of them are very modernist, but some of them are very traditional. I would like to mention Allen Greenberg who designed the classically inspired diplomatic reception rooms here in Washington, which are really quite dazzling. You would never suspect he had modernist training with Paul Rudolph, but Rudolph is able to appreciate such diverse viewpoints that he could teach anybody no matter what viewpoint they came from. In his first speech at Yale, Rudolph proclaimed that urbanism was at the top of his agenda when he said, "we must find ways of rendering our cities fit for humans and develop the aesthetics of change." In the speech he elaborated on his ideas about urbanism in contrast to the tabula rasa, or complete clearance of the site, as was typical of the time. Rudolph favored -- Rudolph believed in interventions that wove together new and existing buildings. Expressive, new, monumental buildings would acknowledge but not copy existing structures through variations and scale material structuring and decoration. Sequences composed of all the new buildings, squares, gateways, arcades, and staircases, would stimulate the user and counter the monotony and conformity of the international style. Counter the architecture of the man in the gray flannel suit, that book of the 1950s that is so well known that the conformity, today we have "Revolutionary Road." I think the new film that's just coming out, that's what Rudolph was trying to come back with his architecture. Rudolph drew upon many of the same concepts of urbanism as his European, American, and Japanese contemporaries, but his emphasis upon stimulating emotion, preference for density, and respect for historical architecture distinguished his efforts. And here Rudolph is at the school of architecture around 1960 surrounded by students presiding over a desk [unintelligible] and he was known for his very forward suggestions about how to improve a project when it was considered a wonderful critic who could really help you. Rudolph's residence at 31 High Street, and here Rudolph is in front of it around 1962, exemplifies these concepts. Rather than demolishing or altering this 1850s Italianate house near the Yale campus, that's the style of Italianate, he added an unobtrusive wing to the rear with a double-height living room. You can't even see the extension from the street, it fits in rather smoothly. In fall 1962, the photographer, Elliot Burwett photographed a cocktail party through the glass window-wall of the house for a story celebrating Rudolph and his architecture that appeared in Vogue magazine shortly afterwards. Yale university art director, art gallery director Andre Richie and Yale president A. Whitney Griswald are seated in the foreground. The photograph records an evanescent moment when Rudolph was at his most popular as both the architectural profession and the larger world of established media, culture, academia, and government, looked to him for the architectural forms that it would express -- that would express the prosperity, the elegance, the optimism of the early 1960s, the Kennedy years. And for the exhibition we blew this up into a giant scrim that was suspended from the ceiling, so it was really, truly kind of magical and potent and powerful image. Rudolph ran his growing practice from the houses at a studio with the help of an enthusiastic group of young architects who, with Rudolph in the center of them, many of them had been his students and you actually see another version of that large scale drawing for the parking garage which I showed you earlier, and many other well-known works by Rudolph. These are the drawings for his Art & Architecture building, and it isn't finished yet, but those are the drawings for it. And something else you might wonder about or be interested in is that -- the way they're sitting, they're actually sitting in a conversation pit. And Rudolph popularized the conversation pit and he thought it was ideal for having office meetings. Two powerful patrons made Rudolph's experiments in urbanism possible. Mayor Richard Cielly believed that urban renewal was the key to revitalizing New Haven's depressed post World War II economy, and it largely relied upon manufacturing. During Lee's long mayoralty, which stretched from 1954 to 1970, New Haven attracted more federal funds for redevelopment per capita than any other American city as I mentioned, it became known as the model city for Urban renewal. A master at publicity, whose career began in the Yale news bureau, Lee formed strong alliances with Yale and the Kennedy and Johnson administrations. Lee began as a renewal program in 1955 with the Church Street redevelopment. And here is an illustration, an image of the plan of New Haven from some of the extensive publicity materials generated by Lee's office, and what you see here is the traditional plan of New Haven that dates back to the 17th century, it's one of the first planned cities in America. It consists of nine large squares and the central square is the New Haven green, covering many acres and criss-crossed by these diagonals walkways. In the early 1950s, or the middle 1950s as part of the federal highway project, interstate 91 began to creep up eastern seaboard and it was headed straight through the middle of New Haven. Lee convinced the federal government to deflect the project so that it would bypass New Haven just to the east. However, in doing so, they directed traffic away from the city towards the suburbs. To reinvigorate the city, Lee and the federal government, and state government posed the construction of this roadway, known as the Oak street connector which would channel suburbanites back into the city into what was called Church Street development, which was a large scale shopping mall, hotel, series of department stores, and a great parking garage by Rudolph, and they can come smoothly off the highway exchange and exit right into the building into the shopping mall, and this is how they would compete with the suburbs. And I really like this image because it just shows this kind of spaghetti of high ways wrapping itself tentacle-like around the city. Lee and Lug believed that -- Lee believed that highways could help transform the city. However, to make way for this complex, hundreds of people were displaced when their businesses and homes were demolished as slums, and this has been questioned greatly. Were these really slums? Certainly these buildings often were not in great condition. They often didn't have plumbing on this location, but many, many businesses -- many, many viable businesses and people were displaced from their homes, and so for many it was a great disaster. For Lee, however, modern architecture and urban renewal were the visible manifestations of progress. A keyword in his rhetoric, and this is one of his reelection posters, and he has a photograph of the model of Church Street redevelopment, and here is Lee showing you a model of Church street redevelopment with one of his assistants, and it has Rudolph's parking garage and also a hotel design by Rudolph. There's such methods of clearance and displacement were at odds with his urban design concepts, Rudolph supported New Haven new development because it gave him opportunities to build. And several examples unknown until now, Rudolph worked as a consultant to improve other architect schemes. For architect Douglass Orr's design of the first New Haven's national bank, which was adjacent to the Church Street redevelopment, and facing the new Haven grain, which we see out here, Rudolph added a pronounced external piers or columns and Y shaped capitals, you can just make them out down here, similar to those at the [unintelligible] laboratory which we saw already, and to its adjacent turn-of-the-century neighborhood, a department store on the site, thus creating a relationship between new and old. And the original scheme of this other architect, this would have been a completely blank, transparent facade. And Rudolph is trying to build relationships between these two structures between the old and the new. Rudolph modified the design for Church Street redevelopment, the firm of John Graham and Sons, had created an international style scheme for this many block long project which I just explained, by 1958 it already seemed a little bit old fashioned. Rudolph was brought in as a design consultant to tweak it, to inflect it. He can't completely redesign it, but he can alter it and improve it as a design consultant. He adds street level arcades down here, which he believes are similar street-level passage ways which he believes are similar to those he saw in New Orleans and in Paris. He emphasizes the entrances so shoppers can easily find them and have access to the green out here. He built in his design for the bank into the project, closely aligned the two. He adds a secret sort of piazza, or square, behind the bank and in-between the shopping mall, also flanked by his parking garage, and it's the type of kind of square or piazza that you might stumble upon in an Italian city, and that's what he's hoping to do for New Haven. In a grand if overbearing gesture, Rudolph places the hotel, which had previously run parallel to the street, over Church Street to form a gateway to the city, and he thought the gateway as seen in traditional European cities was an archetype that was particularly resonant. And here I just want to add a kind of narrative caution in criticism. I don't want to simply celebrate Rudolph's architecture. I think that Rudolph -- this is for Rudolph in one way, this is also just experimental. It was just a proposal. He really wasn't sure that any of this was going to happen, but I think if this had been built, it would have been dark and overbearing and very unwelcoming. Rudolph could certainly go too far as many architects of his generation did. Here he is proposing something quite novel and this building really had other -- really interesting properties, which I can't go into now, but it would have been quite remarkable. Only one of Rudolph's projects for the Church Street site was built. The Temple Street parking garage, which we see up here at the top of the drawing extends the whole length of the block almost. It publicized the symbol of New Haven's architecture renaissance. The dramatic structure was considered a demonstration of the architect's virtuoso skills. It was compared to a roman aqueduct. Rudolph originally had hoped to extend the garage even farther down the block so it crossed the Oak Street connector to form another gateway to the city, so you would have driven up through the highway right into the parking garage without ever coming into contact with the surface streets at all. Rudolph intended its many concrete arches to convey emotion, expressive of 20th century urbanism; it would be all about the notion of the 20th century. He said, "I wanted it to make it look -- I want to make it look like it belonged to the automobile and its movement." Rudolph's un-built project for the nearby Manager's office for the parking authority was a turreted miniature folly in concrete which demonstrated how even a building with the most mundane function could be as memorable as the traditional European gate houses and bell towers Rudolph so admired. A Church street redevelopment and this project, these were projects that were never published at the time. And so they were rediscovered in the Rudolph archive when I was undertaking research for this expedition, and they've been one of the highlights of the exhibition. It was possible to exhibit these works, especially this one, which was in rather torn and tattered condition, it required a great deal of work because it's actually not simply a drawing, it's actually an overlay of several different layers of paper that's been collaged together, and the conservationists here at the Library did terrific work making this project on conversing this project, making it possible for us to see it in New Haven, it's also available on the Library's Web site, you can go and see it there. And it would have elevated the manager of the parking garage above the city so they could look out over the incoming cars and measure the traffic as it streamed into the city. Yale president, A. Whitney Griswold, was Rudolph's second great patron in New Haven. Like President John F. Kennedy and Mayor Lee, Griswold, we see them here at Yale commencement in 1962, also professed the optimistic outlook of the early 1960s that saw modern architecture as a manifestation of progress. The three men in the car supported one another's efforts, especially regarding urban renewal. Griswold thought that the very best architects of the day should design buildings for Yale to demonstrate the University's engagement with the 20th century. He commissioned a series of structures by well-known architects including Arrow Sern and Philip Johnson and Gordon Bunshaft, which made the museum into a museum of modern architecture, concluding with Rudolph's Art & Architecture building. Rudolph's A&A building, his best known work, has often been seen as a tour de force demonstration of the architect's skill and egos. For Rudolph, however, it was also an experiment in urbanism. It was another gateway, but did not literally cross the street, but which was positioned at a juncture between the city out here and the campus over here. It was the culmination of a sequence of spaces of structures, beginning at the New Haven green, and this drawing illustrates part of it, beginning way down here at the New Haven green, leading up the street passed the collegiate Goth buildings at the Yale campus, almost a processional, each of them representing a kind of evolution in time. Preceding past one of the most recent buildings, Louie Kahn's Yale University Art Gallery, a modern building, and culminating with Rudolph's structure right here, the Art and Architecture Building, which if you can make out the plan, is a giant pinwheel form positioned at the point where the old colonial grid ends and a new 19th century street begins on diagonal, and Rudolph pulls the building out to the corner -- we can see it in this photograph, this processional of buildings, the collegic gothic, the modern, and then Rudolph's building. We see the tower of Rudolph's building pulled up to the corner so it is visible as a new landmark all the way down the street, several hundred feet, almost a mile, from the New Haven green. Like a great tower in a city like something you would find in Sienna or someplace like that. Rudolph anticipated that the A&A building would grow and expand with courtyards, riches maybe across the street, and new wings as has been accomplished with the new extension of the building. It has grown to the north. Just peek this out -- has grown northwards with this new addition. Rudolph intended the building's famous textured, bush-hammered, concrete surface to be the modern equivalent of the weathered masonry of Yale's traditional buildings, like many architects of the time, Rudolph hoped that concrete would bring the monumentality and permanence of traditional buildings to modern architecture. They felt that the glass and steel-wall buildings were too ephemeral in feeling. Something more permanent and solid was needed with this material, Rudolph and his contemporaries in the early 1960s believed that they were on the verge of solving a dilemma that had long puzzled them. How to create a monumental modernism comparable to that of the past? Rudolph is really noted for this technique, of creating this marvelous quarteroy concrete. The concrete was poured into wooden, ribbed forms. You see the form work up there in the corner. The form work is pulled away and then Masons with hammers bash the recta-linear forms, the corduroy like forms creating a kind of sculpted surface that will cast marvelous shifting shadows and the concrete itself is made up of a Mica, glittery stones, and even seashells, so that on a sunny day it glitters. This -- Rudolph did not invent the technique of bush hammer but he popularized it. I've seen it in buildings from the 1960s from Vancouver in Canada to Charlestown, South Carolina. You can find it in Japan; you can find it all over the world. Rudolph's perspective section, that's what this type of drawing is called, perspective sectionability is a masterful explanation of the building's complicated interior of 37 different levels. Rudolph's unique style of architectural branding was another side to his virtuosity; drawings such as this one were widely emulated. As this drawing demonstrates, Rudolph attempted to create diverse spaces that would stimulate a variety of different emotional responses from the user such as curiosity and anticipation. The drafting room at the very center, which is right here, this is the exhibition gallery and above it is the drafting room, was the physical and symbolic center of the structure. In this photo, Rudolph leans on a fragment of the building's bushhammered concrete surface, which became practically a symbol of the structure, and his work. While students wearing jackets and ties work behind him in this well-ordered environment of the early 1960s, and I point this out because you're going to see a dramatic contrast quite soon. Rudolph's sensitivity to context manifested itself in his other Yale projects in surprising ways. In his project of 1959, for an addition to John Russell Pope's collegic, gothic, Payne Whitney gymnasium, and this is a sketch that we unearthed in the archive, this project was never known -- was unknown, even at Yale. Rudolph adorned what could have been a box-like series of basketball courts with protruding sculptural piers, they may have been intended, we're not sure to channel rain water down the textured concrete facade like modernist gargoyles. This attempt to emulate the collegic gothic and concrete is comparable to Arrow Serranin, this is a project by Arrow Serranin on the other side of the gym, Arrow Serranin's efforts as his nearby morsen-style [spelled phonetically] residential colleges completed in 1962. So what I wanted to do in the exhibition is point out the lengths between Rudolph's work and other architects of the period, especially those working on the campus. The addition also responded to New Haven's redevelopment plan, and Rudolph's attempts to take the automobile into account. This sculpted facade would have been a memorable landmark intended to have been seen by drivers on a proposed but never built ring road encircling the city's core. It would have swept right by and occasionally you would have seen this series of waterfalls gushing down the facade, but you would have seen it from the moving automobile. Surely a 20th century experience. Rudolph's Yale projects also attested to his awareness of new tendencies in architecture and urbanism. His first scheme for Yale married another marvelous drawing. Yale married student housing was a complicated series of terraced housing units for graduate students' families modeled on Italian hill towns rather than the modernist tower of block. In order to foster a village-like community for graduate students and their families. Yet its brick cladding and concrete details also resemble the work of British architectures such as James Sterling, whom Rudolph had recently hired to teach at Yale, like Rudolph these architects also envisioned a new kind of urbanism, characterized by growth, movement, and flexibility. Though completed in a much reduced form, the complex is interlocking, cubic units suggested a pattern that could generate new units endlessly, indicating Rudolph's developing interest in prefabrication. By the early 1960s Rudolph and his contemporaries believed that prefabrication was the key to solving urban problems, such as enormous scale and affordable housing. Rudolph experimented with a molded concrete block, produced by the New Haven company plastercreed for Crawford Manor, a 14 story tower with 109 apartments for the elderly. And they manufactured 22 types of concrete block to be fit together in different combinations to build this tower, unlike when you build in bricks there are seems between the bricks, when you build with this block there are no seems between the blocks, and so the entire structure seems like this enormous sculpture with no seems to it. And, of course, Rudolph would never build a tower that was purely rectilinear, every element has to be expressed and he thinks he's doing a great thing, he's giving each one of the elderly occupants a little Romeo and Juliet balcony. [laughter] Which they can call out to one another from. Working at a larger scale, Rudolph employed factory-produced mobile homes for oriental Masonic gardens, a cooperative housing complex on New Haven's outskirts, realized with Mayor Lee's help in overcoming the barriers, housing codes, hosed for its construction. Calling it the 20th century brick, this is a giant brick for Rudolph, Rudolph predicted that prefabricated mobile homes would become the basic unit for gigantic mega structures, of the future, and this is the completed oriental Masonic gardens. This also represented a shift in federal policy for urban renewal. There were cooperatives that could be found by the occupants. They would be situated on the outskirts rather than the inner city so the residents could have access to fresh air, sunshine, and trees, like suburban residence. This project was suggested Rudolph's visionary project for Manhattan, the lower Manhattan expressway, so I want to just explain how this fed into other projects in the Rudolph archive. The proposed lower Manhattan expressway in New York City of 1972, this project, many would look at it and say, "Oh, Rudolph is demolishing large swaths of New York." In fact what's happening here is there is a highway, you see it at the bottom of the drawing, this is a highway proposed by the formidable Robert Moses, the Czar of urban infrastructure and redevelopment in New York to -- it would have gone across lower Manhattan, across SoHo to salvage the situation, Rudolph proposes covering the highway with buildings, healing the net wound, made out of prefabricated units in a futuristic way that would also contain monorails, a central garden. They will control skyscraper growth by positioning all sky scrapers in groups at the intersection. It was a visionary scheme, just a suggestion. He probably never really intended it to be built, but it was certainly influential at the time. Rudolph was at his most successful and popular in the mid 1960s. Here he is seen striding confidently into the future as he gives Jaclyn Kennedy a tour of the Yale campus's modernist buildings in 1965. Major commissions were being offered to him, frequently he was on the short list of architects -- this is after the assassination -- for the John F. Kennedy presidential Library, a project that was, instead, awarded to I. M. Pei [spelled phonetically]. In 1965, Rudolph left Yale to pursue a thriving private practice in New York. He spent the rest of the 1960s designing some of his most striking projects, such as the colorful and expressive interior of the Chapwa Tuskegee University in Alabama. The impressive baroque urban spaces of his Boston government services center, these are some of the benches and paving of the plauses [spelled phonetically]. And the entire Dartmouth campus of the University of Massachusetts, which his virtuously unknown, situated near Cape Cod. These three are just a selection form Rudolph's enormous body of work contained in the Rudolph archive here at the Library of Congress. In the 1950s, Mayor Lee and Rudolph had been heralded as mavericks dedicated to reform, but by the late 1960s, they and their projects were seen as symbols of the establishment. Urban renewal and modernist architecture fell from favor as social forces such as deindustrialization, and contention of a race, gender, and war, the Vietnam War, transformed the Unites States as a whole. In 1969, Lee decided not to run for reelection after the 1967 race riots destroyed the idealized image of the model city. Rudolph's reputation seemed to decline as well. Once celebrated, his art and architecture building was derided as a socially irrelevant, formalist tour de force. By 1968, Rudolph was no longer seen as a critic of the status quo and modern architecture but as an upholder of it. To his surprise, he was now identified with the establishment. Once celebrated, his Art & Architecture Building was excoriated, a new generation of students transformed the interior, the jackets and ties are off, excoriated Rudolph, and transformed the interior, dividing the drafting room into their own, personal spaces, adorned with bright graphics. Rudolph was no longer chair of the architecture department. Graffiti on the walls taunted him. And there's also, you can see deliberate misspellings of Rudolph. It's with a p-h, it's spelled with an f. A 1969 fire, followed by the removal of its exposed asbestos ceiling, deeply compromised the building's integrity. Another of Rudolph's New Haven building experienced a reversal of fortune as well. Poor construction, maintenance, and management lets the demolition of his visionary oriental Masonic gardens in 1981, the prefabricated project. Despite such setbacks, Rudolph continued to work on the New Haven Government Center, the last project in the show, here's a model for it. Even as support for such mega projects waned in a prolonging denouement to the events of the late 1960s. Once again, Rudolph was called in because a scheme by another architect was found unsatisfactory. In 1965, ^* I. M. Pei had proposed saving the historic city hall's facade, which we see at the center, right there, but replacing -- if I can just get my pointer to work -- but replacing the adjacent Bozart's [spelled phonetically] post office and court house with an immense plaza and tower. After New Haven presentation trust protested against Pei's scheme, the commission was turned over to Rudolph in 1968 because of his record of working with existing buildings and Mayor Lee. The [unintelligible] historic preservation movement shaped the project. During a decade of contention over what to preserve, Rudolph produced increasingly complex schemes, using everything as repertoire, including changes in scale, materials, and fenestration, as well as courtyards and stairs that nit together old and new together. He even restored the existing City Hall's bell tower in time for the bicentennial celebrations. Mayor Frank Loge began construction on the government Center in 1980, unfortunately a new city administration canceled the project soon after because of inflation and an inadequate city budget, and cuts in federal funding. Fulfilling a new typology that favored private over public development and office tower dominated the complex, constructed around the restored city hall in 1997. The Rudolph's reputation declined sharply in the U.S. He continued to work on some remarkable projects such as his own penthouse apartment on Beekmen [spelled phonetically] place in New York, whose shimmering double-height interiors recall those of his earlier art and architecture buildings. He ended his career with a series of dramatic tall buildings in Hong Kong, Singapore, Singapore and Jacarta, such as this one, which literally breaks out of the rectangular form, typical for skyscrapers. The Visment Armor Building [spelled phonetically] from 1983 invokes the traditional post [unintelligible] vernacular of the region, and [unintelligible] form. It's projecting overhangs an interior slides, if you see the slide on the far right, and interior gardens help reduce cooling costs in a way that anticipates our newfound regard for sustaining buildings. Clearly Rudolph's expressive structures were not simply isolated works by a particularly skillful shaper of forms, as was often thought, but sophisticated expressions of urbanism that embodied the concerns of their time. Rudolph's projects for Yale and New Haven were indeed different from the typical American architecture and urbanism of the post World War II era, which has been described as cataclysmic in its rejection of the past and local identity. Well before post-modernism called its context, Rudolph's regard for what he spoke of as, "the relationship between buildings" enabled him to relay old and new without copying or mimicking the past. He's thinking about how buildings could grow and evolve over time seems increasingly relevant, thank you. ^M00:57:04 [ Applause ] ^M00:57:10 Female Speaker: This has been a presentation of the Library of Congress. Visit us at LOC.gov.