Yalemen, like most collegians, have long dwelt in the shadow of the gargoyle. Gothic architecture, with its encrusted spires and ogives, was the accepted way of making scholarship look more scholarly. But no longer. In the past few years more advanced architecture has risen on Yale's 150 acres in New Haven, Conn., than in all of Manhattan with all its forest of new buildings. Some of the Yale structures are ordinary, but the boldest buildings have succeeded in giving modern architecture a host of new directions.
Instead of picking one official architect—such as James Gamble Rogers, who weighted the campus down with his Girder Gothic of the late 1920s and '30s, Yale turned to a number of the most lustrous and far-out contemporary master builders: Eero Saarinen, Gordon Bunshaft, Paul Rudolph, Philip Johnson and Louis Kahn. They adhered to no single style, only to the modern mood, which freely explores how steel, glass and reinforced concrete can most beautifully be bent to shelter man. Their stunning results have made Yale more of a laboratory than a museum.
Yale's 250-year-old urban campus was a particularly cramped site for experiment; over the years, an ever-growing university had to build on top of itself. Cheek-by-jowl existed buildings from the colonial brick of Connecticut Hall where Nathan Hale once lived, to Skidmore, Owings & Merrill's dark glass box containing the university's IBM computer center. At one end of the campus is an electricity-generating powerhouse in, of all things, Gothic; not far away is a student dwelling, Davenport College, so eclectic that its street fac.ade is pseudo-Gothic and its courtyard colonial brick.
Humpbacked Spine. "No common denominator, except quality," proclaimed President A. Whitney Griswold, whose 13-year tenure (1950-63) produced Yale's architectural renascence. Under Griswold, no fewer than 26 new buildings were commissioned. He turned first to his own architecture department for a man whose reputation is greater than the number of buildings he has put up, Louis Kahn. Kahn gave Yale its first real 20th century building—a daring new glass-sheathed art museum, an extension to the existing Lombardic-Romanesque one. Kahn, like Corbusier, let the concrete shapes retain the rough marks of the wood forms in which they were cast. He also made his ceilings support themselves, by means of small concrete tetrahedrons, which replace obtrusive beams.
The next architect to catch Griswold's eye was the late Eero Saarinen, Yale '34. Commissioned to do simply a hockey rink, Saarinen achieved a daring structure whose wooden roof is slung from a single humpbacked reinforced concrete spine, so that inside there are no pillars to block the view. Saarinen spent far more than the money that had been budgeted for the project, but the hockey rink so pleased critics and trustees alike that Saarinen subsequently was put to drawing up a master development plan for Yale. Along the line he won a commission close to his own heart: two brand-new colleges (see color)—Yale's first since 1940.