ARCHITECTURE REVIEW: Two buildings, one with ideas
In 1963, two new architectural icons opened on Yale’s campus. Both were seen by some as arrogant, bombastic buildings that drew too much attention to themselves.
One, Gordon Bunshaft’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, has grown on the University. The Beinecke no longer seems to shout at those walking on the Hewitt Quadrangle; rather, it whispers.
The other, Paul Rudolph’s Art & Architecture Building, has never whispered to anyone. It is a masterpiece of Brutalism, yet it has had a completely brutal reputation among students and faculty for more than 40...
well if there's one building that no one will come to love, it's certainly loria...
at least they painted the walls orange!
isn't the point that beinecke and rudolph are now considered great because they have ideas, while loria will never be considered great because it's just random?
Loria actually has really great ideas, as explained last night in Peter Eisenman's evening lecture. The ideas aren't the problem. The problem is the execution: poor material selection, boring placement of windows, and uninspiringly composed interior spaces. Gwathmey is a really bright, intelligent guy. I guess he just needs to hire some better people in his office to carry things out a little more successfully.
Has anyone else notice the amount of Buildings in New Haven from the Brutal period have been redone or at least had windows installed over the past few years in New Haven. I also found it odd that the last nice thing that was ever said about the late New Haven Colisium came from the Dean of the Archicture School housed in a slab of granite.
We live in a strange time where buildings have value because of their history and not because they are innately good. This mindset, called "historicism," was artfully proven fallacious in Bill Westfall's book published by Yale University Press, "Architectural Principles in the Age of Historicism" way back in 1991. Goodness rests in the object, not in the mind of the viewer. Though sometimes the viewer is not ready to appreciate its goodness, what was once bad cannot become good and vice versa. We can only come to understand it better. And if overwrought, architecterium tremens in raw concrete is the best we can do, it is a damning commentary on the civilization of Paul Rudolph. And if the best we can do today is say "it is good because it is of its time" or bow down in its presence with bland chaotic additions, then our era is philosophically bankrupt as well.
How can there be ideas in architecture without execution? Isn't that what Eisenman has based his whole career on?
Loria Hall is intentionally and, in my opinion, correctly, designed to defer to and service Rudolf Hall while quietly completing and providing all kinds of support and amenities for Rudolf Hall that it lacks and could not itself include. Loria and Rudolf Halls are like one kind of successful marriage: One hugely aggressive, creative spouse who is dangerously incomplete and a little bit crazy paired with a quiet, apparently prosaically competent spouse who gets the creative one to wear the right clothes for the event, obtains the directions to the event venue and remembers to send the thank you note the very next day. Some people say that such a quiet spouse lacks "ideas," but an awful lot of top quality creative work would go unaccomplished without such people (or, in this case, structures) in the partnership.
Such unassuming natures often conceal great creativity that happenstance reveals was funtioning there all along, as the old book "Cheaper By The Dozen" reveals, to choose just one of countless examples. Could it be that the reviewer here is not so familiar with such marriages as one might be? Why might that be?
the loria center is totally abominable. WHAT is with that weird window on the second floor??
never ceases to amaze me when a critic (in any art form) mentions how a work now considered great was initially poorly received, and then in the same breath assures the reader that another work will certainly NEVER be considered anything other than a failure.