Stern pick incites debate
Stern pick incites debate
Friday, September 5, 2008
That’s what some critics are arguing one day after University President Richard Levin announced that he had tapped Robert A.M. Stern, the staid architect and dean of the School of Architecture, to design colleges 13 and 14.
In choosing Stern, Levin picked tradition and — he argues — comfort over experimentation and pizazz. But some critics counter that the selection betrays Yale’s legacy of pushing the architectural envelope.
“I’m skeptical that these buildings will be applauded in 30 years,” said Brent Ryan ’91, a professor of architecture at Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design.
To be sure, not all of the architects and architectural critics interviewed after the announcement of Stern’s selection for the job shared the view. Two were understanding of the selection and praised Stern as having the right temperament and aesthetic vision for the job.
Levin said the “difficult” nature of the site on which the colleges will be built — a triangular plot located behind the Grove Street Cemetery off of Prospect Street — might make traditional architectural styles a more practical choice. By choosing bricks and limestome, he said, Yale will be able to maximize the connections between the new colleges and the heart of the campus. Placing cutting-edge architecture in an isolated location could make the spot less desirable to students, he said.
“Departing radically from the tradition of the original Yale colleges, as was done with Morse and Stiles, was in many ways less successful,” as the resulting living spaces did not comfortably accommodate students, Levin said.
Still, some view the choice of a traditional design — paradoxically — as a rejection of Yale’s traditions. Joseph Giovannini ’67, a prominent New York architect and critic, said Stern’s postmodern style is anything but in line with the innovation of many of Yale’s past architects.
“The last two colleges … both invigorated the architecture of the campus and the spirit of the students,” he said. “With some disappointment I learned that we’re not taking up these traditions.”
But for Levin, it was comfort and community that took precedence. Acknowledging his choice of Stern was in some ways counter to the architectural innovation that defined Yale at Modernism’s zenith in the middle of the last century, Levin said the radical architecture of Morse and Ezra Stiles colleges, built by Eero Saarinen ARC ’34 in the 1960s, backfired.
“We understand Yale has an important architectural tradition,” Levin told the News on Wednesday. “But we also … weighted heavily someone who could appreciate residential life here over someone who could create an exterior of a building that would look radical and innovative.”
Considerations of comfort and location differentiate this project from many others in which Yale’s designs made ripples in the architectural world, Goldberger said. After all, he argued, Louis Kahn’s designs for the Yale University Art Gallery and Yale Center for British Art, Paul Rudolph’s for the Art & Architecture building and Eero Saarinen for the Ingalls Rink did not have to unify far flung corners of Yale’s campus.
Blair Kamin ARC ’84 of the Chicago Tribune, who was sympathetic to Levin’s choice, was also apprehensive that Stern could do little more than recreate spaces that harken back to a much different Yale — a Yale that predates the radical change of the mid-twentieth century.
“It’s a good choice, provided Stern doesn’t do a nostalgic, Ralph Lauren version of Yale’s Collegiate Gothic quads,” he said. “It isn’t a matter of reproducing what Yale looked like in the 1930s when it was a bunch of rich, white guys.”
Ryan also worried that Yale’s choice could threaten its image as a progressive, modern institution.
“It is an interesting conservative decision in light of the fact that Yale purports to be at the forefront of liberal thought,” Ryan said.
None of those interviewed explicitly named an architect he might have preferred, although Giovannini said he wished that Yale had chosen one of the architects Stern brought to teach at the Architecture School.
“Mr. Stern has been far more adventuresome in his appointments than he has ever been in his architecture,” he said. “I am disappointed for God, for country and for Yale.”
Perhaps Giovannini and the other critics can find solace in the fact that the new School of Management will be designed by acclaimed architect Lord Norman Foster ARC ’62 —out of glass and steel.
Contact NORA WESSEL at nora.wessel@yale.edu
Comments
None 3 years, 5 months ago
Morse and Stiles can almost certainly be made very nice, convenient, comfortable, amenity-laden, cheerful and reasonably comparable in such respects to the other colleges. My understanding is that the University is planning to do just that at a very large expense that Yale is very lucky to be able to afford. Whether Morse and Stiles represent as satisfying an architectural and emotional experience as some of the others: Well, that's largely a question of taste, isn't it?
All that being said, Morse and Stiles do seem to demonstrate (at least in part) the risks that building on the cutting edge de jour entails. Saarinen was a very good architect with a stellar reputation at the time he designed these colleges. But some things clearly went wrong. If things go wrong in a residential structure, the most one can hope for is a very expensive fix rather far in the future, while every resident suffers in the interim. It's not that cutting edge architecture cannot in principle do just fine, and Levin has never suggested anything to the contrary. Rather, the problem is that there is a much higher RISK of things going wrong, and a much larger COST if things do go wrong ... a cost that largely has to be paid by the hapless undergraduates consigned to live in the "error." The better place to take architectural risks is in administrative and office structures, laboratories, clinics, classroom buildings and the like. There the cost of things going wrong is not born by people at every meal they eat, every time they want to lie on the lawn, every time they want to study or relax in their rooms or socialize with their friends, and every time they want to sleep - all night, every night.
I say that Morse and Stiles represent this risk only in part because they also are burdened in another: They didn't cost as much as the other colleges in real terms. It is a fact that more comfort, amenities, space and beauty can be bought with a bigger budget. The new colleges are budgeted at something like $600 Million, so the University seems to have learned from that particular Morse and Stiles mistake.
In my opinion, it is useful to clear one's head of the silly idea that the possible (or likely) architectural and artistic payoff from a traditional style cannot be every bit as grand as that of a cutting edge effort. For the new to succeed it is not necessary for all that exists be discredited. That's fortunate for modernism because it is also not possible for all that exists to be discredited, only unjustly suppressed.
None 3 years, 5 months ago
Who cares if a building reminds someone of the way Yale was in the 1930s? Yale might have been a tool of the patriarchal white elite, but it was beautiful. Morse and Stiles are horrendously ugly.
Most students would rather have a Branford and Saybrook instead of a Morse and Stiles.
None 3 years, 5 months ago
Dear Howard Roark (#6),
Why do you feel qualified to unequivocally denounce something as "horrendously ugly"? That may be your personal opinion, and, at differing magnitudes, the opinion of many others. However, lots of people think Morse and Stiles are really cool looking, and their major problems with living there stem not from the look of the college but from the non-orthogonal corners in their rooms and the poor condition of their unrenovated dorms. Personally, I think Morse and Stiles are rather mediocre, but not ugly. I'm sure that Stern will design something nice and very functional (in a beautiful historicist style), while if they had picked a true forward-thinking contemporary architecture, we could have gotten something much, much better than morse and stiles.
None 3 years, 5 months ago
As a current resident of Morse College, I can say that I am anything but invigorated. Good architectural principles should result in a building that is conducive to the lives and recreations of its residents. A building which feels like a military bunker on the inside and barely allows proper furniture placement due to its bizarre walls hardly qualifies as comfortable, much less functional. Especially compared to the other 10 colleges, Morse and Stiles are dysfunctional, misguided, and shabby. Try taking a walk through Branford's beautiful brick staircases or Silliman's amazing dining complex and then comparing those to the spartan concrete interior of a Morse/Stiles entryway. I would suggest that anyone enamored with the "innovative" and "ground-breaking" styles of Morse and Stiles try to live in one of them for a month.
None 3 years, 5 months ago
If you think carefully about it, Stern is the perfect inheritor to the mantle of John Russell Pope and James Gamble Rogers, two architects who created the Yale campus that we all know and love today.
The colleges at Yale, with all of their vintage 1930's historical revisionism, were built when "fashion" dictated the European modernism of Gropius and Le Corbusier. The question is, do we now think that the Corporation made a mistake back then, building Berkeley, Branford, Saybrook, et. al. instead of, say, the nearly concurrent Graduate Center at Harvard?
As for the new colleges, Levin and the Corporation understood that with a compromised site, too far from the center of campus life, they couldn't gamble on a design that would self-consciously experiment with form and imagery for the sake of the architect's reputation... We should imagine the MIT/Simmons Hall/Steven Holl complex in New Haven... that's the best the Nouveau Rotterdam School has to offer by way of student life.
Now compare that image to what Rogers created. Nostalgic, yes, I guess, but so tailored to what it means to be Yale. Collegial. Intimate. Clever. Academic. Surprising. Memorable.
Hell, do you really think even Rem or Zaha would seek to create "lovely colleges" at all? Or, rather, do you think the reigning darlings of the arch schools would create very publishable, to be sure, very edgy and tres chic IDEAS of Yale colleges? Hopelessly cool, groovy, so 2010 colleges, cryogenic in their hermetically sealed Mid Century Revival (Mannerist Phase) inscrutability? I say they would... and I say, um, no thanks.
None 3 years, 5 months ago
In its choice, Yale is following Princeton's lead:
http://undersideofparadise.blogspot.com/2008/09/yale-follows-princetons-lead-as-sun.html
None 3 years, 5 months ago
Whatever else happens, I hope that Mr. Stern will not be so adventuresome as to offer a position at Yale to Brent Ryan, who says that he's "skeptical that these buildings will be applauded in 30 years" before seeing even a DRAWING of the buildings he is savaging ... even before the buildings have been designed or built. Is Ryan's point that NO building in a traditional style - or by Stern - be will be applauded in 30 years? In either case, these are deeply foolish and reactionary words that we can only hope were taken out of context. Even more amazing: Ryan issued his fatuity from the precincts of Gund Hall, which houses the Harvard Graduate School of Design. Gund was built in 1972 as a self-consciously "cutting edge" structure and at all times since then has been in the running as possibly THE MOST UNCOMFORTABLE academic building on any American campus. Anyone who has spent time in Gund Hall can recount stories of how papers must be weighted down on Gund desks in the winter because icy drafts falling from the gigantic slanted glass roof would otherwise blow them away. (Is it an accident that Gund's architect John Andrews was from balmy Australia?)
But the discomfort and practical stupidities of Gund Hall do not by themselves mean that Harvard should not have built it (there may be other reasons for that). There is a place for precarious architectural experimentation on university campuses. Nevertheless, Levin is correct. Building on the "cutting edge" means taking huge risks - especially with comfort and practicality - and those risks are much more appropriate to non-residential buildings. Yes, individual home owners or condo builders may choose to place themselves or their finances at risk this way. But for every Falling Water there are many more nearly unlivable duds. At a university such risks are best deployed in campus laboratories, classroom building and administrative office - and NOT where people have to sleep, eat and socialize for possibly hundreds of years. Levin is a first rate economist. It's fitting that he got the cost-benefit analysis right.
None 3 years, 5 months ago
While you're at it, why not finish fixing up the Divinity School ?
None 3 years, 5 months ago
Levin's remarks betray an incredible naivity about what architecture is. He's making the assumption that all cutting-edge architecture has to offer is a radical-looking facade? That couldn't be further from the truth - architecture is about much, much more than how the building looks from its exterior. Also, using the failure of Morse and Stiles to claim that modern architecture is not appropriate for Yale is severely misguided - Saarinen was not really that great of an architect and Morse and Stiles are testament to this. There are many contemporary architects practicing today whose work far exceeds Saarinen's in quality and would, and am sure, design lovely colleges.
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