Paul Rudolph and American University Design: Humanism in the Guise of the Brutalist Style
Completed in 1963, Paul Rudolph’s Art and Architecture Building at Yale, now known as Rudolph Hall, is one of the earliest examples of Brutalist architecture in America and one of the most controversial structures of the postwar period. Many critics had praised Rudolph’s design at the time of its opening, but others highlighted its peculiar layout and the challenges it posed for its users. Its unsuspecting twists, obstacles, and unintuitive circulation were deliberate design decisions by Rudolph, but the intentions behind his brutalist design have often been misinterpreted and misunderstood.
This paper seeks an explanation for the eccentric material and spatial features of Rudolph’s brutalist designs of American university buildings, with a specific focus on the Yale A&A Building, and what it implies on its users. The building is less a monument to brutalism as it is a symbol of humanist intention.
At the time of its conception in 1958, there was very little in American Architecture at the time that departed from the Miesian vocabulary. The Art and Architecture building ushered in a new style that moved past Mies and the International Style. As one of the first architects in America to design in the style of brutalism, Rudolph’s designs reflected his own views on postwar modernist architecture. He often voiced a sharp sense of disappointment with contemporary architecture, claiming that it had become too intellectual, too overbalanced with technology, and thus had lost its sense of artistry. For him, it was no longer sufficient to justify contemporary architecture with its promise of functionalism. In order to be great, he believed that architecture had to go beyond the limited virtues of efficiency and economy, and he felt that American architecture was crying out for a human architecture. But what did it mean to be human? And what kind of architecture could support such a pursuit?
Rudolph believed that space, both interior and exterior exhibited a psychological effect, which was of the utmost importance to consider in architectural design. Rudolph expresses his discontent with Miesian architecture and the International Style in his interview with Heinrich Klotz and John Wesley Cook, saying:
“I happen to be very interested in what things mean to people, and the symbolism involved. In a nutshell, the principles on which the International Style were based were valid up to a certain point, but they didn’t go far enough and didn’t face enough different kinds of problems. Two of those problems have to do with the psychology of space and the art of urban design, the ability to add to a city.”
In the same interview, Paul Rudolph outlines the additional priorities of his design process. He says, “A building can only be thought of in relationship to a changing setting, and at a point in time,” allowing it to suggest both the past and the future. He admits he has an obsession with the idea of an uncompleted building, which allows him to design a system of three-dimensional organizations open to augmentation, diversion, and elaboration. For Rudolph, the only unchanging elements are the site and the human needs to be accommodated—these serve as the focus of his design.
In his 1963 design of the Southeastern Massachusetts Technological Institute (SMTI), Rudolph exemplifies this concept. The central organization of the campus is a dynamic one, loose enough in that it allows for both expansion and contraction, but with a central cohesiveness that allows the center to remain intact.
In a similar fashion, Rudolph designed the A&A to allow for further expansion, while also being sensitive to its site and context. Situated at the intersection of two streets, one being a major commercial thoroughfare, the building needed to address the issue of turning the corner. In addition, the design had to relate to its neighboring structure across the street, Louis Kahn’s Art Gallery. Rudolph’s response is a pinwheel configuration that is open-ended toward the north, anticipating its growth in favor of that direction. This scheme not only allows for logical growth but also creates a centralized space with a higher ceiling on every other floor.
Beyond its response to its immediate context, the A&A is equally receptive of the universal qualities of the buildings across Yale. The campus is comprised of a collection of large, masonry buildings, which are dependent on light and shadow for their architectural effects. Their complexities in plan allow the scale to be broken down and the structure to read as a cluster of buildings, rather than a single mass. Their emphasis on verticality and variety of style create elaborate silhouettes that reflect changing attitudes. In these regards, Rudolph’s A&A is right in line with the traditions established by Yale.
For the A&A Building, Rudolph envisioned a built environment with a sequence of open and closed spaces that were both awe-inspiring and intimate at different moments. This mixture of hectic versus meditative spaces were meant to excite and guide the user as part of the aesthetic experience.
Architecturally, the building is highly complex, exhibiting a multi-dimensional space driven by Rudolph’s social vision that was meant to foster a sense of solidarity among students. The original building was designed for the use of architects, planners, painters, sculptors, and graphic artists. It was Rudolph’s hope that bringing these various disciplines under a single roof would foster a common understanding and an interchange of ideas between both students and faculty.
Although the building consists only of 7 stories, it includes 36 different floor levels, creating complex pathways and unique circulation patterns that are at times unclear to first-time users. The dynamism of the interior is described by Rudolph as “the balancing of thrusting and counter thrusting spaces,” which he admits could very well cause most to feel disoriented and uneasy if the thrusting of spaces is not brought into equilibrium. In the building’s second-floor gallery, for example, one can see a wrapping balcony overlooking the central space, with no real visual connection or direct pathway from the space below. The balcony belongs to the private office spaces of the floor above. Its mysterious lack of connectivity leaves a frustrated viewer wondering how they could possibly get to the inaccessible spaces above. A similar phenomenon occurs in the fourth-floor studio spaces, where the 5th floor mezzanine overlooks the central pit. In this case, there is actually a physical link between the two levels, though the connecting stair is hidden is the back corner behind a myriad of student desks, as though it were a form of secret passage tucked away for the exclusive use of the owners of the space.
The labyrinthine quality of the building’s circulation makes one thing immediately discernable: Paul Rudolph never intended it to be for the public. Today, many students of the architecture school are quick to express their fondness for the building and its eccentricities. It would seem that the students themselves enjoy working in the environment with which they have become so familiar. For those outside of the school, on the other hand, the strong aesthetics of the building often leave them perplexed at the odd character of the style, which, at a glance, glaringly sticks out against the collegiate Gothic landscape of Yale.
Although many critics were quick to label the building as monumental, Rudolph himself remarked that did not regard it as being such. “I think of it as being very human.” He often argued that the building’s rough, textured surfaces offered a more human quality than a surface rendered in smooth, machine-finished concrete. Its purpose was to create a dynamic play of light and shadows across the surface of the building, meant to soften the impact that the concrete mass had on its surroundings. Its heavy texture broke down its scale and allowed the elements to weather the surface to create an effect familiar to the masonry buildings of the Yale campus. Creating the textured surface involved a laborious process, in which concrete was poured into corrugated forms and then carefully, manually broken with a hammer to expose the reflective, polychromatic aggregate.
Timothy Rohan, critic and architectural historian, offers perhaps the most interesting take on the hammered surface of the A&A. He argues that the rough patterns can be attributed to Rudolph’s broader investigation of “methods of architectural drawing, education, and decoration that can be traced back to…Louis Sullivan.” The raised surfaces of the A&A can be compared to Sullivan’s low-relief ornament, or a form of ornament that has been pressed into the concrete. Rohan explains that this design gesture of concealing or repressing ornament may allude to Rudolph’s personal situation as a closeted, homosexual man. The “hypermasculinity” of the façade is interpreted as a response to combat the effeminacy of ornament.
When the A&A building opened in 1963, Nikolaus Pevsner delivered the keynote speech at the dedication ceremony, where he, to everyone’s surprise, impudently tore into the design of the building in the presence of the university president and Paul Rudolph himself. Pevsner was immediately critical of its overbearing aesthetics and monumentality.
“At all costs no symmetry. At all costs no window without some strange and unexpected emphasis. Crescendos from emphasis to over-emphasis, whenever possible. Projections…pretend to be buttresses and turrets but were in fact introduced as geometry for geometry’s sake.”
Symmetry had never been a commonly utilized strategy for Rudolph, who had no interest in complying with stylistic trends, but instead focused on what was most appropriate, both for the site and for the function of the building. In the case of the A&A, the building is asymmetrical because the site is asymmetrical. From the viewpoint of urban design, its location on the corner of two streets precludes a symmetrical organization. As for the projecting buttresses, Rudolph utilized them for a functional purpose—to house the mechanical systems of the building. Without knowledge of Rudolph’s design intentions, it is nearly impossible to understand or justify the aesthetic gestures of the building, which appear so visually dramatic that they become subject to immediate criticism and judgment.
Within 2 years of the building’s opening, the many of the interiors of the school were altered, compromising Rudolph’s original design. And in 1969, a large fire, which seemed to have been intentional, gutted what remained of the interior. By then, Rudolph’s reputation was in shambles. Despite the thoughtful explanations behind almost every design gesture of the A&A, there remains a clear, grave disconnect between Rudolph’s original design intentions and the viewer’s reaction upon encountering the spaces within the building.
Rudolph’s brutalist buildings, with their irregular silhouettes and highly varied interior spaces, represented a deliberate break from the sparing, machine aesthetic of the International style. But for Rudolph, Brutalism was not merely an aesthetic movement; it represented a shift in attitude towards an architecture meant for humanism. Unfortunately, his vision was lost in translation upon its delivery to the public masses, even though they did not represent the intended audience of his designs. Rudolph’s buildings are intimate environments uniquely tailored to their users—purposely labyrinthine in character, so as to suggest that only those most familiar with the space were truly meant to understand its nature. His university buildings were never meant to be structures for the public. They were environments in which he intended to foster educational engagement, collaboration, and interaction among the users of the building.