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Encore, Beaux-Arts. Also planted in the walls are teaching tools that turn his floating lofts into a vast textbook. Yards and feet are marked off around the drafting room to provide architecture students with a quickly visible ruler. Students in each of the five years of architecture classes work on separate levels, but they overlook one another so that, says the architect, "you can literally eavesdrop to learn."
What Rudolph has built in essence is one lofty garret atop another, until one bursts onto the roof terrace where, he says "all hell breaks loose." At Yale, as in other urban universities, there is a student passion for roof-going and Rudolph intends to appeal to the eye of even the passing roof climber. Gesturing at a flat space against the horizon of East Rock, he says: "I think I'll put a Grecian nude reclining statue there."
One architecture critic calls Rudolph's building a "headon collision between Le Corbusier and Frank Lloyd Wright." But, after all, everything going up at Yale these days is a collision with the past. Yale's new campus, set amidst the old, is proof that experimental design can yield functional, if often farfetched and fantastic buildings. Above all, it is proof that the mock gargoyle now belongs to history.