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Between Saloon & Gym. At a time when many college architects around the U.S. were building contemporary campus structures as neat, clean and impersonal as factories, Saarinen decided to come to modern terms with the gargoyle. Given a site over which loomed the 197-ft.-high Gothic gymnasium, he designed his buildings to be "good neighbors." To capture the masonry spirit of nearby older pseudo-Gothic buildings, Saarinen pumped wet concrete into frames that were filled with stones, simulating inexpensively their handcrafted finish.
Drawing from his recollections of the Italian hill town of San Gimignano, Saarinen plotted a multilevel alleyway between the two new colleges. Lying between Mory's famed saloon and the gym, this walkway separates the colleges in a cavernous passage while louvered windows peep through sandy slabs. The atmosphere is similar to Yale's Gothic buildings of the 1920s—though one modern-for-modern's-sake critic likens it to a set for Ivanhoe. Determined to avoid the typical cookie-cut module, Saarinen decided that as far as possible no two rooms should be alike. Result: though at first scorned, his Stiles and Morse colleges are the most sought-after digs at Yale.
"The Waffle." To build the new Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale turned to Gordon Bunshaft, who won fame for designing Park Avenue's green glass Lever House. Given a site facing the classically colonnaded Freshman Commons, and money from the S & H Green Stamp magnates, Edwin ('07), Frederick ('09) and the late Walter ('10) Beinecke, Bunshaft resolved to create a "treasure box." He erected a 58-ft.-high cube of granite-covered steel trusses and translucent marble set on four steel bearings atop its own Woodbury White granite plaza. Headlined the irreverent Yale Daily News: TOMB CONCEALS DECAYED BOOKS. Students instantly dubbed it "The Waffle," but it is the most frankly dramatic of the new buildings at Yale. In his new library, Bunshaft has made books the monument. First editions are arrayed in a glass tower for all to see—and to use. To keep out damaging direct rays of the sun, Bunshaft has provided outer walls of translucent Vermont marble that luminously filters the outside light.
A new library should have space to breathe, so there is room beneath the sun-splashed plaza for triple the 250,000 rare volumes the library now contains. The librarians' offices and the 45-person reading room look out onto a sunken sculpture court by Isamu Noguchi.